Author Information
Cloning Dolly
HORACE FORTHRIGHT
Senatorial Candidate
General Delivery
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Prospective Constituents:
Introduction
I know many of you are wondering whether you should be outraged or overjoyed by the cloning of a sheep. As someone who personally loves sheep and who strives to be an authority, it is incumbent on me to shepherd your thoughts and feelings concerning this issue while my political opponents are vacillating according to the most recent poll. I urge you, Do not to be swayed by the reflection of your own opinion in the polls, no matter how narcissistic you might be. If you are really concerned with your aggrandizement, allow me to make the decisions for you, then you may gloat over my mistakes after I'm elected.
Yes, maybe we should have cloning. At least we should be ecstatic at the opportunity. What should dismay us are the many efforts to camouflage ignorance with ethical balderdash and to disguise ulterior motives by reference to good intentions. As if there were any such thing as ethics other than "anything goes" in our post-modern culture. Not that I mean to disparage our pathetic ethos: I merely refer to our mode of thinking.
The Ethics Assessment Subcommittee
Ethics is a system of morality. This is what I would have you do before taking up the discussion of cloning: ask yourself, "Do I have a system of morality?" Write down your answers and send them to me, the self-nominated Chairman of the Ethics Assessment Subcommittee (EAS). Our members - two anthropologists, one sociologist, one psychoanalyst and three convicted criminals - will then proceed with our inquiry, carefully sorting out the agreements and disagreements. The EAS will probably discover that the lowest common denominator prevails as usual under the agreement that everyone really disagrees to a different digree as to what is right and wrong, good and evil. No doubt masochistic serial killers and suicidal maniacs will send in a copy of the Golden Rule and recommend suicide-bombing as a decent profession. I suppose Ten Commandments with many finely printed, footnoted Ifs, Ands, or Buts will be delivered to the committee.. A psychoanalyst might assert the romantic notion that, although there is no apparent system, a system exists in the Unconscious. As a result of all this, I predict the following description of the current habit will be provided by the EAS: "Each person should do whatever the situation calls for according to their intuition."
The Philosophical Systems Subcommittee
Now then, if you have in fact placed me in the position of great authority that I so fervently deserve, as Chairman of the EAS I will have the Report describing the current ethos sent over to me in my capacity as Chairman of the Philosophical Systems Subcommittee (PSS) for review by its members: six philosophers, a theologian, two barbers, three jazz singers, two taxi drivers, and a Marxist. It will be the mission of the PSS to define whatever it finds to be the Universal Good. Of course the PSS will take under advisement but not be bound by the reported popular morality, and it shall transmit its findings as vaguely as possible in esoteric code to the cryptologist on the Casuistics Subcommittee (CS), chaired by Yours Truly, for decoding and application to possible cases.
The Casuistics Subcommitee
Sitting on the CS will be an economist specializing in utilitarian computation, a neurologist with expertise in pain thresholds, an expert in genetic algorithms, a number theorist doubling as cryptologist, two holocaust survivors, a priest, a rabbi, Sarah's mom, a fireman named Joseph, four union representatives, and Al Sharpton. The CS will be charged with drafting a set of rules, based upon the Universal Good, applicable to all the possible cases that might occur; and, as an alternative to the foregoing, the committee shall recommend a general Rule of rules to serve as a principle for flexible action. The CS will take into consideration not only the particular cases that spontaneously occur to it by free association, but also those cases presented to it by the SciFi Subcommittee (SS) chaired, of course, by the undersigned.
The SciFi Subcommittee
The SS will be composed of a physicist, a biologist, a science fiction writer, a peyote enthusiast, a Broadway producer and director, and two alien abductees. They will collaborate in the production of a three-act ethical play set at some distant time in the future. For instance, I present a possible scenario as follows:
"Since rapid technological advances, as explained by the modern perpetual innovation ideologeme, violently rattles the Chain of Being, producing provocative situations that throw the society out of kilter, our ethical play will represent a synthesis of futuristic ideas. The third act will take place on the planet Procaryotia, in the Kingdom of Moneria by the Algean Sea. Although the monoploidal Monerian culture presented on our stage reproduce by fission, THEY (the Monerians) are well aware of sexual reproduction, for Procaryotia was once invaded by a conjugating band of Paramecians who had escaped from the penal colony Cilia on the planet Eucaryotia. The Paramecians were especially abhorred by the Monerians for their morbid sexual intercourse, ungrateful necrophagia, and selfish nuclear identities. In fact, it was only after the invasion was put down that the Monerians finally managed, with the help of the Invisible Hand, to bring their culture under absolute equilibrium, matching their reproductive fission rate with the accidental death rate and calibrating their state, once and for all, to the plenitudinal cosmos. THEY liquidated the illegal Genetic Casinos, eliminating the mutants amongst THEM once and for all, achieving Beauty: that is, the Unity of Everything, especially Race. "Nothing Is Save US" was their corporate Statement. The Monerian world mirrored the Monerians perfectly: the World was Monerian and the Monerian was World, a World of In-Your-Face-Beauty, Devoid of Conflict and, most importantly..."
But I digress. The ethical play produced by the SS will be performed by Equity actors before the audience of Casuists in order to stimulate their imaginations with the aforementioned futuristic frame of reference. Now after the CS considers the possibilities plausible and implausible, it will transmit its report to... (break)
The Decisively Fuzzy Logic Poem
I beg your pardon, prospective constituent, for the red tape, which I must cut short here. (For a copy of a hand written Organizational Chart, please send in $250 payable to the order of my good friend, whom I often long for, Cash). Suffice it to say that, eventually, the Poet Laureate, assisted by his cohorts of poetasters, dilettantes, and data entry clerks, will construct a Master Data Base and render, according to random sorts thereof, the Digital Table of Ethics. Since I am not adverse to accepting the crown of Poet Laureate, I will promulgate a Decisive Poem on cloning, in the Classic fuzzily analogic quantum form, based on my emotional intuition of the collective moral faculty electronically engraved on the Digital Table of Ethics. You can rest assured that my enthusiastic poetic justice will be neither right nor wrong; after all, my emotions transcend merely rational proofs - my mission entails the immediate apprehension of ultimately important values, not subsequently consequential rationalizations which are in themselves inconsequential metaphysically speaking, which is the only way of speaking so to speak.
Pardon the interruption, the mail just arrived...
Damn! No checks came in today! What's this? Hmmm. A letter from a Prospective Constituent:
Letter From Josh Jones
"Dear Mr. Forthright, Although I expected a fiery-eyed, horny black goat with ears of an ass, Dolly is a sure sign of the imminent apocalypse! This is our last chance to repent or be trampled into dust by the Mutant Beast! I am sending under separate cover a copy of my screenplay, Jericho Park. Please read it, and Praise the Lord! God exists and we are under a Covenant not to compete with Him! It is a mortal sin to tamper with Creation. God does not make mistakes. Everything He does is for the best. The devils in their vile laboratories concoct their own fiery doom! And Mr. Forthright, do not let them abandon the little ones. Remember what Senator Singleton says, 'Real people need real parents.' If you don't believe in God or politicians, at least take the word of a devoted Family Man. Faithfully Yours, Josh Jones".
A very outspoken man, I'll say! Well I'll be, here is another letter:
Letter From Lloyd Overstreet
"Dear Sir: I heard it on the Web that you are writing a letter to Prospective Constituents regarding the Dolly Affair. You really should get yourself a modem and save us from the personal load of handling hardcopy. If I can afford it on my salary as a hospital orderly, I'm sure you can find enough money to get wired. Anyway, I want to say that cloning is a definite must. But we've got to be careful and limit its use to achieve certain goals. I think we should use cloning to solve the dispute always going on about whether we inherit stuff like violence or if we get it from education after we get born. I wonder about that after a fight. Maybe it's both? Sometimes when I take a doobie break down in the morgue I think the way we grow up from fishes and chimpanzees is the same way our minds grow up. Like, man, everything is connected. I didn't get my GED because of the arithmetic, but I'm not so stupid, you know. I come from a whole bunch of people before me that survived. My mom says one of my ancestors killed fifteen knights in one battle with his bare hands before both arms were cut off, then he ran around knocking others off their horses, butting the horses with his head. O.K., so we could make a commune of clones, with everybody the same person and give them all the same stuff and the same education and see what happens. If you need some DNA stuff for the experiment, please call me at the hospital. Sincerely, Lloyd Q. Overstreet."
Maybe I should get wired. These folks are really fascinating. Gee, not much junk mail today. Oh, here's another personal letter:
Letter From Darla Swanson
"Dear Dr. Forthright, In regards to that letter to prospective constituents you have been writing over the past several days, you should know that you are being observed. Some of your notes were recovered from your trash bin and posted on the Web. Incidentally, you should learn how to use the Internet so you don't waste postage on the propagation of your ideology, whatever it is. So far, judging from your trash, it appears that you are on a random stroll. Anyway, while you were busy scribbling, you probably missed my appearance on Channel 235, The SocialPaths Show. Senator Singleton said that the polls proved cloning is a bad idea, demonstrating that real United States citizens want real parents, and that everything must be done to protect families. Well, I cracked up. The idea that he could be so sincere about the American family, having just downsized his own family because of its emotional and monetary costs, was so incongruous that it left me in hysterics. Furthermore, I did not appreciate the rude and callous manner in which the moderator, that witch Sheila Shield with the eye bags, silenced me, virtually evicting me from the show, having the gall to tell the producer I had no business being on any family show! Yes, yes, I know: even the Observers don't believe I bear watching, so I'm hoping you will air my doctrine on parents, in your letter as follows:
"Who needs parents? That is something more worthy of debate than cloning! Most of us love kids, so why don't we just turn them over to ChildHomes shortly after birth and raise them collectively, under the loving guidance of ChildRaisers? Then we will all have a psychological share in our produce on an equal opportunity basis, whether one is single or married, a biological parent or not. And we would all have our fair share of sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, as well, under the astrological family system described in my forthcoming book.
"In fact, cloning will greatly facilitate the liberation of society from the parental burden and the largely dysfunctional nuclear family, especially when we liberate woman from childbirth by developing ExVivoTeX. ExVivoTeX is a process whereby the embryo is raised in a special plastic bag made from materials derived from transgenic plants and nourished by special blood brewed by Gensoma Brewing Corporation. Since the technology is there, its use is inevitable. It is our responsibility to ensure that it is not abused by those developers contaminated by the profit frenzy who plan on establishing a BabyStore franchising operation. According to my sources, their strategy is to create special categories of humans for private sale to selfish individuals. Believe it or not, boys would be offered for sale in blue bags, girls in pink, with racial-somatic-intellectual product descriptions on their bar-coded price tags!
"We must save our progeny from the free market horrors of geometric progression! You will find herein a draft of my Cosmically Regulated Population Production and Distribution Plan for your edification. I know you will find it useful when you have the rights you are naturally entitled to.
"That's my plan, Mr. Forthright. By the way, did you notice during the cloning hearings that Congress represents sexual discrimination? Did you see how many male heads were nodding up and down when the virtues of childbearing were discussed? Did you see the committee chairman chortle when someone mentioned that the sheep was named Dolly after Dolly Parton's mammary glands? Well, once it is truly realized that sex should be performed solely for the pleasure of it and never for reproduction, liberated women will finally evolve into the narrow hipped, flat-chested athletic martial arts beauties that we now only dream about in the movies.
"Furthermore, I would like to say that..."
Conclusion
I can see that her letter is never ending so I'll put it down here. In any event, I think you have seen enough of the thoughtful process that I am engaged in on a quotidian basis to know that such affairs as the Dolly Affair should be left to me to manage in your best interest.
In any event, you can also see by this example of my thinking that, since I am broadly informed and am endowed with organizational talent and decisive cognitive skills, it is in your best interest to defer to my voluntary directives on general public issues regardless of what you might think or feel without my guidance. Therefore, I continue to look forward to the spontaneous organization of a party from your complexity, and my subsequent placement on the ballot in the very near future. References will be supplied on request.
Signed,
Horace Forthright
Senatorial Candidate
{i}Please Replicate Ad Infinitum
Copyright Waived
Plagiarists Will Be Hunted Down And Shot On Sight{/i}
