Polybanderous at Bushwick Book Club Seattle: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Bushwick Book Club Seattle · This Saturday
Mrs. Frisby & the Rats of NIMH
Sat · October 17, 2026Polybanderous is one of the performers at this Saturday's Bushwick Book Club Seattle show, playing a new original song written for Robert C. O'Brien's Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Phinney Neighborhood Center, 7:30 PM, all ages, co-presented with the Seattle Folklore Society.
What the song is about
My angle on the book is the one lesson science keeps refusing to learn. In the rush to improve life, we assume everything will be better once we hit the goal, and we ignore the thing history keeps proving, which is that what we build gets out of the box.
These things tend to surface on a delay. The CIA's drug and mind-control programs took decades to come to light, and only did so partially, in the 70s, because the players had destroyed the records ahead of the hearings. Currently, we're in a race with AI, and somewhere there are people with the most advanced versions experimenting on us. It's fair to ask whether COVID and Wuhan belong on this list too. Maybe evidence is hard to come by because the groups involved are good at operating in the dark, and harder now that we are so easily distracted by devices that program us. Technology changes but the desire to benefit from the power generated by advancement doesn't. Human behavior stays the same.
All of this ties back to one place. O'Brien's rats came out of NIMH, and NIMH is where John B. Calhoun ran his rat overpopulation experiments in the 50s and 60s. Food and water never ran out, but space and social roles did, and once there were too many animals for too few real positions to fill, courtship and parenting broke down and the colonies collapsed. Calhoun called that collapse the behavioral sink. That's the research the book grew out of, and it's what the album this song will be on is named after.
Lyrics
Cup your ear to capture sound listening for the shuffling of leaves
They quietly escaped hours ago through as of yet unplowed fields
Three rungs of the evolutionary ladder have been skipped in your pursuit of a better yield
And while the ultimate consequence can't be known at least you got accolades of your peers
You show no apprehension cutting the strands of tension that hold together the fragility of life
Improve your social status to build an apparatus of power taking you to everlasting heights
It happened again, forget the lesson
Why should we learn from history
When there's a spot for confession
We can cry our sins away on bended knees
We can wipe our sins away on bended knees
No regrets as your story ends
Got the gold but did we really win
On it goes
I suppose
So it goes
I suppose
