The Curious Case of a Wombat on the Internet

Hello, everyone! Now comes the time when I explain why there is a political poem about a wombat just below this post.

Yesterday, while discussing politics on Twitter, as seemingly everyone does all the time at the moment, I ended up in a pretty heated conversation with someone from Texas named Craig, who didn't much care for me saying I'd rather my tax dollars fund free school lunches for low-income kids than the putative First Lady's refusal to live in the White House. My dear friend Ursula Vernon chimed in to help explain how taxes work, and it all sort of downspiralled from there, as internet fights will.

But then, our Craig started going after Ursula because of her display name, for some inexplicable reason, which is "The Wombat Resists." I decided that if we had descended into making fun of names, I would just focus hardcore on the wombat part and abandon the rest of the conversation.

This led to our charming Twitter troll declaring, in all seriousness, that wombats are just like illegal immigrants and should stay out of the USA. 

Wombats. Should stay out. 

What followed was two hours of Ursula and I, with later additions by other users (particular hat-tip to Eric Mills), inundating our troll with political wombat-themed flash fic, a kind of real-world Care Bear Stare of love and whimsy and absurdity that really did seem to throw cold water on his hateful words and send him back to his burrow. For the first time in a couple of months, a political act was fun, and light-hearted, and gentle, without animosity, but with wombats. I ended by composing a little Wombat Fight Rally Song and felt good about the world for once.

You can read the whole thread here.  

So I decided to do what the Lab does--smush unlikely things together, add electricity, and let them take on a mutated life of their own. I took some of the tweets and my song and fleshed them out into a classic protest poem that, now it's done, sort of feels more like a children's picture book without pictures. We also took some candid shots of our local marsupial population doing their part for the resistance. The poem is locked to patrons in the next post. I hope you like it!