The Tyranny of Tradition

A Fear Factory Mouse Attack Captured On Film In Hudson, Wisconsin

Chances are you’ve seen them rampaging through the streets.  They range in size from 6 foot 1 to 6 foot 4 and usually weigh between 245 and 270 pounds.  They have excessively large foreheads, surprisingly short arms and enormous kneecaps.  They are usually relatively intelligent, slightly clumsy, and uncommonly strong.  They are Fear Factory Mice and they are the greatest threat to the American Way of Life since the creation of Social Security.

They pour forth from the faces and body cavities of the lower animals and consume all that is in their path.  These mice replicate at incredible speeds, often breeding with donkeys and fish.  They are capable of incredible kindness and unspeakable acts of cruelty.  The wilderness is full of them.  They stalk campers and hikers, toying with them by bellowing the lyrics to Fear Factory’s Top 40 single “Martyr” before ripping them apart.  Yet, in some cases, they have struck up remarkable friendships with their human prey, occasionally exchanging Tupperware products with their victims before devouring their bodies.

This is why we must, under no circumstances, EVER, leave the house again.

Sometimes, they make their way into cities and battle local Mice Control Workers (MCWs) for control of poultry-themed fast food restaurants.  These MCWs are often equipped with the latest in taxpayer funded, anti-mouse laser death rays.  However, a swarm of them can quickly overpower a team of MCWs.  At that point, the government’s options become limited.  In some instances, like in the case of the former city of Phoenix, Arizona in 1998, the full-scale use of nuclear weaponry is the only conceivable way of preserving what is left of the American Dream.

In 1991, when The Great Mousehunts began, scientists were baffled the ability of the Fear Factory Mice to regenerate their wounded bodies and learn from previous defeats.  While regular mice would lie in their cages and allow the doctors to poke, prod and dissect them in the name of building a better world for Americans, these Fear Factory Mice would rise up, reassemble their body parts and fight against the scientists, sometimes taking whole laboratories hostage.  The mice took to the hills after being decimated in early battles with the Army, but quickly regrouped and, after signing a mutual defense treaty with Fidel Castro and the Cubans, have become a constant threat to commerce and the safety of average citizens.

Besides the significant difference in height and common “sleeve” tattoos worn on the arms of the Fear Factory Mice, it is almost impossible for the average observer to tell the difference between the two breeds until it is too late. Reactions have varied from city-to-city, but the most common response has been to move to high ground and wait for inevitable death.  Conservatives have taken to storing up thousands of rounds of ammunition, stockpiling anti-mouse weaponry, praying and watching Bruce Willis movies until it is safe to enter the cities again.  Liberals have started community based Mice Awareness Groups (MAGs) and eco-friendly, cruelty-free Mice Education Programs (MEPs) in the hopes of tolerating the animals to death.  Until Friday, it seemed as if no one had an answer to the single greatest issue of our time.

However, thanks to the expenditure of billions of taxpayer dollars and the generosity of several of our top corporate leaders, science has, once again, saved us from the abyss of mass extinction.  Years of research has led to a breakthrough of fantastic proportions.  Without going into all of the science-y type details, it is clear that some mice possess a gene that causes them, upon hearing a Fear Factory song, to become enormous, flesh-thirsty beasts.  By simply destroying all remaining copies of Fear Factory’s music, bathing regularly in fresh chicken blood and sacrificing one infant human on a bi-weekly basis, the threat of these killer mice will be eliminated by the year 2039.

Surprisingly, the answer to the great mystery lay in the journals of former President Calvin Coolidge.  In his last days, Coolidge claimed to have been visited by men from the future that foresaw the mouse epidemic and gave him a specific set of plans to isolate the Fear Factory Gene and destroy the hordes of ravenous rodents.  Coolidge tried to warn several people of the terror that awaited humankind, but no one believed him because his habit of drinking iodine had caused a rapid deterioration in his mental condition.  He was killed on the night he planned to talk to a sympathetic reporter from the New York Times when a hummingbird flew up his nose and caused a brain aneurysm.

We were saved because we believed hard enough in the menacing green light, the orgiastic past that explodes from our mouths every time we scratch the surface of reality.  The forest advances year-by-year, no matter how hard or how fast we strike our axes against the trees.  Sure, the mice didn’t get us this time, but that’s no matter.  Tomorrow, we will run away faster, flail our arms harder and eventually slip on the ever-looming banana peel, falling to our collective deaths….

So we beat on, building a better mousetrap, born to ceaselessly regurgitate the past.

Fear Factory….Before They Caused The End Of Life As We Know It