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FRUIT FLIGHT
BY PETER KURTH (published 07.06.05)
One of the oddest things about War of the Worlds, Steven
Spielberg’s latest high-tech, doom-and-redemption, all-schmaltz
disaster picture, which “broke box-office records” over the
Independence Day weekend, is that the aliens who invade from space to
destroy America and Our Way of Life seem a tad too stupid for the job. They have no notion of reality “on
the ground,” as it were.
“Blood-drinking monsters from outer space
who haven't heard about HIV?” Peter Preston wonders in the Guardian of London. “Earth invasion plans a million
years in the plotting that forgot to factor in microbe immunity? A US army that never panics, but just
keeps shouting `Move along there!’ as though it were winding up a Live
8 concert? Tom Cruise singing `Hushabye
Mountain’ … as
thousands die 50 yards away? This is tosh.”
Tosh or not, I can understand the aliens’
confusion about the difference between science and culture, because, down
here, we’re a little confused about it ourselves. Many Americans disapprove of science
altogether when it clashes with their “values,” by which of
course they mean their religious values.
These people think science is just dandy when it keeps brain-dead
women alive for fifteen years after their natural expiration date, blasts rockets
into speeding comets, develops a pill to ensure penile erection or provides
artificial limbs for children blown to pieces in Iraq -- but not, you know,
if it goes against the Bible.
Schizophrenic?
Maybe, but let’s not use technical terms for people of
faith. In War of the Worlds, Spielberg’s multi-legged aliens have
no religion at all, and certainly not the “right” one, fundamentalist
Christianity. Otherwise God would
surely have spared them in the last reel and taught them to focus their
murderous attack on people who really deserve it –
“liberals,” “activist judges,” Darwinists, Planned
Parenthood, stem-cell researchers, pharmacists who dispense birth control
to shameless sluts, Jane Fonda, “Deep Throat” and, above all,
“homosexuals,” those bad, bad Americans who are doing
everything in their power to snatch innocent babies from the cradle and
turn them into perverts.
Disgusting!
Now that gay marriage is about to be legalized in Canada, our
sinister neighbor to the north – which, as of last week, also stopped
selling us drugs on the cheap! -- there’s no
telling what might happen if God’s army doesn’t get on the
ball. Gay unions have already been
legalized in Spain – Spain, of all places, former home of brave
conquistadors, bullfights, General Franco and the Inquisition – as
well as in Belgium and Holland (which used to be called “the Spanish
Netherlands,” so you can easily see the connection). And, while all this is going on, science
is telling us that sexual orientation is genetic, not “chosen,”
much less a “lifestyle,” as evidenced by a recent study of the
sex lives of fruit flies.
I don’t know how many of you saw that story,
but it’s really, really scary, and something needs to be done about
it. A report from Austria’s Academy of Sciences –
Austria, don’t forget, was ruled for centuries by the Spanish branch
of the Habsburg family – last month concluded “definitively
that sexual behavior in fruit flies is genetically governed,” leading
Dr. James Dobson, Christian founder and chairman of the right-wing
“Focus on the Family,” to issue a press release.
"Gay Activists Twist Fruit Fly Study,”
Dr. Dobson proclaimed, at the same time urgently reassuring the faithful,
“Despite what you may have heard in the media, a report on the sexual
genetics of fruit flies has no bearing on human experience."
Thank God for that – what a narrow
escape! Dr. Dobson is a PhD,
incidentally, not a medical doctor or a scientist of any kind. But never mind: God speaks through Dobson, as He does
through President Bush, who supports a bill
currently before the Alabama legislature that would ban the use
of state funds to purchase any books or other materials that “promote
homosexuality” in the public schools.
This bill’s sponsor, Montgomery Republican Gerald Allen, says,
“We have to protect our young people!” and who can argue with
that?
Forget for a moment that America’s teenagers
are now so busy having “oral sex” in order to avoid having
actual “intercourse” that they wouldn’t know a fruit fly
if it bit them on the peach. Allen
thinks it would probably be OK to keep Shakespeare on the shelves, but
Alice Walker, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Edmund White and Gore Vidal
have got to go.
Not a minute too soon -- science
isn’t through with its evil work. At a zoo in Bremerhaven,
Germany, three out of
five existing pairs of “endangered Humboldt penguins” –
what you might call “married” penguins – turn out to be
male.
“The zoo had been mystified as to why [the]
penguins had failed to breed,” according to reports,
“until they realized that the males had paired off together. …
Last year, two of the male pairs spent months sitting on a stone instead of
an egg.”
Good heavens, what next? "The central question
is, are our penguins really gay or is it simply a lack of
opportunity?" asks the zoo's director, Heike Kück. “So far the males have scarcely
thrown the females a single glance.
The men have had the opportunity but haven't done it.” Of course, says Dr. Kück, “"If
the penguins really are gay then obviously they can stay gay," but
this is just what you’d expect from Germany,
isn’t it? Germany
was once ruled by – well, never mind that either, but the word begins
with “N.”
Get it? As
Gay Pride Day approaches in Vermont
on Saturday, go see War of the Worlds
if you want to know what red-blooded Americans are really like. That word begins with “N,”
too, I’m afraid, but don’t quote me. I have enough trouble already, looking
for a fruit fly that might understand.
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