Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Of Mice-Men

The Senate Bill sponsored by Senators Brownback and Landrieu regarding the genetic engineering of hybrid species who are part animal and part people is a living demonstration of the problem with American education versus the "big lie."

 

One must first be alerted to the desire among scientists to carry out such preposterous research, and then move to stop it.  As far as I know, no such research is extant, which begs the question of why such a Bill would be necessary.  If we were presented with evidence that such experimentation is happening in labs around the country, practically every American would rise up against it… me included.  But where is that evidence?  Where are those facts?  Where are people getting the information that would lead to such a Bill in the Senate?

 

The more insidious "master race" issue is not even mentioned in the same context, but that would seem the far more likely result of genetic research.  "Better" people is a much more fraught ethical issue that creating a person whose hair could be shorn, rather than cut, to provide raw material for overcoats. What would you name that person?  Perhaps Al Paca?

 

How would a cow be improved by making it a biped?  How would a person be improved by providing a smaller brain and a tail?  The imagination runs amok with possibilities, but all of them have already been seen on the silver screen, culminating with the Harry Potter series. 

 

It seems that these particular senators are afraid that, since they have failed on Roe v. Wade and stem cell research, they need a new boogeyman to scare the nation's scientific illiterates into believing that American values are even further under assault.  Hey, we're losing on every front so let's make something out of nothing!  A whole bunch of people will believe anything if we spin it the right way, and those people wouldn't trust science if it cruised up in a bass boat!

 

Twenty percent of the U.S. Senate has signed on to this absolute malarkey. That begs the question of whether we need to create an intelligence test that senators-elect must pass before being sworn in.  I'm pretty sure that Al Franken would pass.  I'm not so sure about Mary Landrieu, and since she's my cousin (her grandfather and my grandmother were brother and sister, respectively), I must see myself as suspect—unless, of course, she's a hybrid herself!

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