elephant eat elephant

This article, from Monday’s Washington Post, details how the conservative movement in America is turning on itself over Iraq; David Frum is accusing Robert Novak and Pat Buchanan of hating America, and Buchanan talks of “collusion” with Israel by the pro-war segment.


It reminds me of a scene from one of Jack Chalker‘s Well World books. The Well World is a planet divided up into 1560 hexagonal biospheres (biohexes?), each of which contains a unique sapient life form that had been used to seed the universe by a now-vanished race. Anyone who comes to the Well World passes through a portal that turns them into one of the races therein, depositing them in the appropriate hexagon, often according to some feature in their personality that the computer worldbrain measures. One really nasty guy is turned into a female –a nascent queen– in an insectoid society, and others wonder why he was treated so well given all the pain and destruction he’d caused. Later we discover that he is a breeding queen, and that the young of this species eat their way out of their mother-host, from within.