By Rachel Sauer
The Palm Beach Post
Brothers and sisters, there’s a battle raging. It’s not a battle fought with weapons of mass destruction, Lord save us, and it’s not a battle fought in armored personnel carriers.
It is a battle, children, for the hearts – yea, verily, for the everlasting souls – of America’s trunks and bumpers. It is a battle of words and wills, and fish. Lots and lots of fish.
Hallelujah! Can I get a witness?
“I had a graduate student mention a couple days ago that he’d seen a new one,” said Dr. Tom Lessl, a professor of rhetoric at the University of Georgia. “He saw one with a Darwin fish committing a sexual act on a Jesus fish.”
Have mercy! The battle, nay, the veritable Fish Wars, have escalated, have detonated, have conflagrated like a shiny metallic supernova. Now, friends, like exiles from the Garden, we long for those innocent days when it was just Jesus fish and Darwin fish.
But life moves not backward, the poet wrote, nor tarries with yesterday, and so it is that we must learn to swim in an ocean of fish.
Let us turn now to the good book, which reads: “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” To that we might add Lutefisk fish, Gone Fishin’ fish, ‘N Chips fish, Satan fish, Alien fish, Evolve fish, Pagan fish. The mind swims, children, the mind swims.
It used to be just Jesus fish. Remember? More than 20 years ago the first left-facing, shiny metallic outlines of fish made their virgin appearance on vehicle trunks and bumpers around America.
“It tells a story that you are a Christian,” said Sherman Casebolt, manager of Family Christian Store in West Palm Beach. “It says you believe in Christ and want other people to be aware of that.”
That fish, you see, is a longtime symbol of Christianity. Roman Empire-era believers scratched it in the dirt when they met someone on the road and wanted to discover whether the other person was Christian – one person drew the top half and the other drew the bottom.
So we had the Jesus fish, friends, and we got used to seeing it on cars and trucks around town. Sometimes it was just an outline. Sometimes it contained a cross or the word “IXOYE” or “Jesus.” It is impossible to track sales of the Jesus fish, said Nancy Guthrie, spokeswoman for the Christian Booksellers Association, but the fish has been perennially popular for at least 20 years. Casebolt said he sells one a day, generally the simple gold outline model.
Then one day in the late ’80s, maybe at a stoplight, maybe in the Publix parking lot, we took a closer look at one of these little fish and said, “Hey, that fish has legs.”
Yea, hosanna, the Jesus fish begat the Darwin fish.
It was a play on symbols, brothers and sisters, a nod to evolutionist Charles Darwin. Several years ago Lessl conducted a study of Darwin fish by leaving a survey on cars on which he spotted the symbol.
He said some survey respondents simply thought the Darwin fish was funny, while others wanted to make a statement about peaceful coexistence between religion and Darwinism.
“Then there’s a militant side to it, too, the desacrilization of a Christian symbol,” he said. “Scientific culture sees itself as an alternative to religious culture, and one of the ways it can celebrate that sense of triumph over religion is to take its symbol and desecrate it.”
Aside from matters of belief, fish-bedecked cars seem to issue forth this singular, simple statement: “Oh, yeah?”
Verily the Darwin fish begat the Fish Wars. Soon, on bumpers and trunks around the country, there was the Truth fish, and the Truth Fish Eating the Darwin Fish fish, and the Dead Darwin Fish fish, lying on its back with an X over its eye like a dead cartoon.
Heaven help us all, soon we saw Scuba fish, wearing an oxygen tank and flippers; Evolve fish, holding a wrench; Angel fish, wearing a halo; Satan fish, carrying a pitchfork; UFO fish, similar to a flying saucer.
Now we see Jesus fish families – two big fish followed by several smaller fish, corresponding to the number of children in the family.
There is a back-and-forth to it all, children, in the tradition of I’m-right-you’re-wrong. Like many matters of strong, vigorous belief, giving in even one, single scale could lose the battle or even the war.
Lead us in understanding, Rod Farmer of Ashland, Ore.
Farmer and his family started a new business called Live the Words (www.livethewords.com), in which they created the traditional fish outline containing words such as Hope, Love, Compassion, Forgive, Peace and Family. The only word that booksellers in his area wouldn’t carry, he said, was Tolerance.
Some fish, friends, are just too hard to swallow.
rachel_sauer@pbpost.com