THE
REAL McCAUGHEYS (December 1997)
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BY
PETER KURTH
Stand
back, everybody. Wear a bib if you have
to. This one's going to be messy.
I'm
talking about babies. Seven of them, to
be exact, born to a couple of nitwits in
"Ma-a-ahm's doin' fine," says Kenny
McCaughey (when he's not saying "Wow!"). "I'm just worried about Ma-a-ahm.”
Ma-a-ahm herself, Bobbi McCaughey, is too busy weeping with joy, or shock,
to grasp the reality of the situation.
"I
know that it's extraordinary, or whatever, to have this many babies and go this
far," she confides, "but it's something I just did. They were my children and I wanted them.” Bobbi already had a daughter, Mikayla (one of
the phonetic Mikaylas) and now she's got -- well, Bobbi’s a little confused,
looking for ways to tell Kenneth from Kelsey, Alexis from Brandon, Natalie from
Nathaniel and Joel.
"A
couple of them have a little different hair color," Bobbi ventures
tentatively. "But there is
something about their feet -- all their feet look the same to me.”
“Or
whatever. “ Kenny adds that "this is one of the most blessed events that I
have ever encountered," leading you to wonder what other adventures of
similar nature he's met with in the past: "We're just trusting in
"I
never thought they would come off the ventilators so fast," said Bobbi the
other day, while Kenny held her hand.
"I can't wait till I can hold all of them."
"If
we have the arms," said Kenny, grinning at his joke.
Well,
they don't. They don't have the arms,
the money or the brains to raise seven children at a swoop. I've got nothing against
Instead,
we've got praise being heaped on the two "fertility specialists" who
kept Mrs. McCaughey company while she lay trussed and bound like a turkey from
the ninth week of her pregnancy. We've
got the usual stories about scientific wizardry on the eve of the millennium,
and "bio-ethicists" hemming and hawing about what it all means (in 20
seconds or less).
What
it means is a million-dollar hospital bill, glory for doctors and a line of Ma-a-ahm wannabes stretching around the
block. You'd think there weren't enough
babies crawling around already. On
"Politically Incorrect," Bill Maher says the only strange thing about
the McCaughey septuplets "is that none of them were abandoned at a prom,
left in a toilet or shaken to death,” and as far as I'm concerned he's the only
one with a point.
News
of the McCaugheys' "blessed miracle" arrived just days before the New
York Times Magazine, in an article that takes the cake for contemporary
scare-mongering, raised the alarm about a predicted decline in the world's population, sharply contradicting the usual
warnings that the boom is out of control.
You'd think the fact that only 7.7 billion people will inhabit the
planet in 50 years, instead of the previously estimated 9.4, would be the best
news anyone's had all month.
But
no. What's that going to do to the economy, the Times inquires? Who'll be
consuming things if there aren't enough consumers? "Where will the money come from?” And money’s not all. "The West has been the driving force of
modern civilization, inexorably pushing toward democratic values.” And Nike factories. And Asian stock markets. "Will that continue when its share of
the total population is only 11%? No one
knows.” Even the Gray Lady, apparently,
wants women to have babies for the state.
“Young
DINKS [`Double Income, No Kids’] may be cute," says the Times, but
"Old LINKS [`Low Income, No Kids’] may be tragic. … Clergymen say that the
saddest funerals are those in which the deceased has no offspring."
Can
you believe it? Me neither, if I can
slip for a moment into
*
THE UNOFFICIAL McCAUGHEY
SEPTUPLETS PAGE!
Ya gotta love `em, but it
sounds kinda sick to me!
"No people ever
recognize their dictator in advance. He
never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the
instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up
you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for
everything traditionally American. And
nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they call him `Führer' or `Duce.'
But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike
bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" --
Dorothy Thompson, 1935