Hedgehog Used to Inflict Column

I'm going to waste this entire column talking about foxes and hedgehogs. This is not as perverse as it sounds. Last week my topic of discussion (unpopular political endorsers) left me scant few options when it came to illustrating my on-line "bloggerized" version of the column. This week I will have recourse to many public domain photos of adorable fox kits and hedge-piglets.

An ancient Greek poet (Archilochus) once said, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." I first heard this expression decades ago when it was used by a math professor of mine to classify famous dead mathematicians. Lately I have found it useful to recall the saying to answer the question I sometimes get: "What sort of mathematician were you?" In the past I would describe my actual work, launching into a set one hour introductory lecture on 2-dimensional cell complexes with finite fundamental group, and so cause the questioner to turn into glass and smash herself against a wall. Now I just say, "I was the fox sort." I knew a little bit about a lot of stuff, and relied on swiftly pouncing on opportunities.

I admit to having always held a certain contempt for hedgehogs. A hedgehog probability theorist, catching me reading out of a book on organic chemistry, told me, "Why do you bother with that? Since all chemistry reduces to elementary particle physics, and all elementary particle physics reduces to quantum probabilities, you should devote your life to studying only probability theory, as I have." I told him he was a fool. Thanks to me, he saw the error of his ways, quit math, and is now a highly successful proctologist. Hedgehogs, you may notice, have tiny, tiny, eyes. They have no need for the big eyes of a fox, since they already know everything they think matters.

The biggest trouble with being a hedgehog is that if you rely for guidance on the One Great Truth that you have determined through your One Great Prior Revelation, you can find yourself down a nasty Darwinian dead end when the One Great Truth turns out to be either insufficiently eternal or universal.

I actually was brought to the subject by a news story out of New Zealand (the same country that was terrorized by the fake suicide-bomber chicken a few years back) entitled, "Hedgehog used in non-lethal assault." By the way, I have a lot of respect for copy editors. That, in my opinion, is some damn fine titling. Not, "Hedgehog used in assault." That doesn't cut it. "Hedgehog used in non-lethal assault." By all means, we should be told at once, before any further reading, that the victim survived having had a hedgehog flung at him at high velocity.

Interestingly, it turns out that some hedgehogs, if approached by a predator, will even throw themselves at it, back first, in self defense. That plus running away and curling up into a ball form is, loosely speaking, the one big thing. Have quills, will prick. Or, run away. It's really 2 things, but Archilochus was writing poetry.

I think the hedgehog wielded by the assailant of the story served not only as a weapon, but also as a metaphor for the assailant himself. The assailant knows one big thing, namely if someone is annoying you, you can throw something at him.

I thought of hedgehogs again, especially hedgehogs curling up into balls, when I read this in the Seattle Times about the opposition of some Magnolia residents to plans to house homeless people there:

"At one community meeting, some residents... rolled their eyes when city officials asserted that such housing increases property values."

Hedgehogs in the worst way. They've never had formerly homeless people living in secure housing in their neighborhood before (or anyway, not since their ancestors drove the Indians off that used to live and fish there), but they already "know" all they need to know about them.

Quills up, stomach in.