HORACE FORTHRIGHT
Dolly Party Candidate for High Political Office
General Delivery
Washington, D.C. 20500
Dear Prospective Constituents:
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: Please, please do not to be swayed by the reflection of your own opinions in the polls, no matter how narcissistic you might be. If you are really concerned with your aggrandizement, you may vote against me and gloat over my mistakes after I'm elected.
Quite frankly, I am ecstatic over the cloning of a sheep and the opportunities cloning affords for the improvement of the Animal Kingdom. And I am dismayed by the many efforts to camouflage ignorance with ethical balderdash and to disguise ulterior motives and base prejudices by reference to good intentions.
As if there were any such thing as ethics other than "anything goes" in our culture! Not that I mean to disparage our ethos: I merely refer to our postmodern way of thinking.
Ethics is a system of morality that justified whatever we think is correct in our time. Now this is what I would have you do in order to determine our morality 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, Chairman of the Ethics Assessment Subcommittee (EAS). Our subcommittee members - two anthropologists, one sociologist, one psychoanalyst and three convicted criminals - will then proceed with the inquiry, being careful to sort out the agreements and disagreements.
The EAS will find that the lowest common denominator prevails, that the only agreement is that everyone disagrees as to what is right and wrong, good and evil. Masochistic serial killers and suicidal maniacs will of course send in a copy of the Golden Rule.
The last time the EAS took up this subject, two copies of the Ten Commandments were received along with many finely printed footnotes of ifs, ands, or buts.
A psychoanalyst submitted the romantic notion that, although there is no apparent system, an irrational system exists in the Unconscious.
Given present day mores, I predict the following description of morality will be provided by the EAS: "Each person should do whatever the situation calls for according to their intuition.”
I shall have the Current Ethos Report sent over to me, Chairman of the Philosophical Systems Subcommittee (PSS), for review by its members: an ivory tower philosopher, a theologian, two barbers, three jazz singers, two cab drivers, and a Marxist. It will be the mission of the PSS to define whatever it discovers to be the one universal Good, taking under advisement, but not bound by, the reported popular morality, and to transmit its findings as vaguely as possible in esoteric code to the cryptologist on the Casuistry Subcommittee (CS), chaired by myself, for decoding and application to possible cases.
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 and cryptologist, two holocaust survivors, a priest, a rabbi, Sarah's mom, a minister, and four union representatives. The CS will be charged with drafting a set of rules, based upon the Sole Good, applicable to all the possible cases that might occur, from which I shall select 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 by myself.
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.
Since rapid technological advances explained by our 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 postmodern synthesis of radical futuristic ideas embedded in the origin of the Chain of Being. As Chairman of the SS, I have already outlined the third act along biological lines.
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 have digressed. The ethical play produced by the SS will be performed by Equity actors before an audience of Certified Public Casuists in order to stimulate casuistic imaginations within the aforementioned futuristic frame of reference. After the CS considers the possibilities plausible and implausible, it will transmit its report to, ah….
I beg your pardon, my dear prospective constituents, but I must cut the red tape a bit short here. (For a copy of a hand written Organizational Chart, please send in $250 payable to the order of my best friend, Cash). //
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 averse to accepting the crown of Poet Laureate, I shall promulgate a Decisive Poem, in the classic fuzzily analogic quantum form, on the cloning aspects of the Dolly Affair based, of course, on my emotional regard of the Collective Moral Faculty electronically engraved on the Digital Table of Ethics.
You may rest assured that my Poetic Justice will be neither right nor wrong: my emotions transcend merely rational proofs - my mission, after all, entails the immediate apprehension of ultimately important values, not subsequent consequential rationalizations which are in themselves inconsequential metaphysically speaking, which is the only way of speaking, so to speak.
Ah….
Pardon the interruption, the mail just arrived...
Damn! No checks came in today! What's this? Hmm, letters from prospective constituents well worth quoting to demonstrate strong interest in our campaign:
"Dear Mr. Forthright: Although I expected a fiery-eyed horned and hoofed black goat with an ass’s ears, 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! 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 laboratories who hope to clone Superman concoct their own doom! And Mr. Forthright, do not let them abandon the little ones. Remember what Senator Singleton says: real persons need 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:
"Dear Sir: I got email that you are going to write a letter to prospective constituents regarding the Dolly Affair. I am a hospital orderly, and 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 his arms were cut off, then he ran around knocking others off their horses by 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, Dennis Petrikof."
These folks are really fascinating. Gee, not much junk mail today. Oh, here's another personal letter:
"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. 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, 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 and 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 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 power you think you deserve.
"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..."
All right, I can see that her letter is never ending, so I'll put it down here.
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 interests. Since I am broadly informed and born with decisive cognitive skills, it is evidently 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 look forward to the spontaneous organization of the Dolly Party from your complexity and my placement on a ballot for a high public office in the very near future.
I approve of this message,
Horace Forthright
David Arthur Walters
Manhattan 1996
