'The Law is a Ass'

. . .  as Dickens's Mr. Bumble succinctly reminds us. 

Mr. Bumble (by 'Kyd')

This one gets filed under "You Can't Be Too Careful." An Oklahoma state senator named Ralph Shortey has introduced a bill in his state's legislature to ban the use of aborted human fetuses in food, "despite conceding that he's unaware of any company using such a practice." (This according to HuffPost.) The honorable senator "discovered suggestions online that some companies use embryonic stem cells to develop artificial flavors, but added that he is unaware of any Oklahoma companies doing such research." Not the first time the Internet has sent some poor sod off on a fool's errand.

Senator Shortey's primary concern appears to be the rumored use of embryonic stem cells to develop food ingredients such as flavor agents. The University of Oklahoma student newspaper first broke the story, reporting that Senate Bill 1418 "effectively bans the selling or manufacture of food products that contain aborted fetuses or which used aborted fetuses in the development of their ingredients." Which suggests that the senator hopes to spare fellow Oklahomans the prospect of tiny fingers, lips or eyeballs protruding from their deep-fried calamari-and-okra plates.

"There's only two apiece."

An FDA spokesperson says the agency "is not aware of this particular concern." Which has never been a reason for the peculiarly vigilant not to suspect that it might be going on somewhere and to propose visionary legislation to forestall any possible future malfeasances. Proscriptions against sh'aria law proposed by various legislative bodies are kindred pieces of forward-looking legislating.

Hon. Ralph ("Hold the Eyeballs") Shortey

According to the HuffPost story, Shortey has not been behindhand in sponsoring other such visionary legislation. "He sponsored a measure . . . to crack down on illegal immigrants by authorizing law enforcement to seize their homes and vehicles, and to deny Oklahoma citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants. He also offered an amendment to a bill that would have allowed legislators to carry firearms anywhere in the state, including the floor of the House and Senate. This year, Shortey has introduced a bill . . . amending the Oklahoma Constitution to abolish the Court of Criminal Appeals." The Hon. Senator apparently regards the denial of Oklahoma citizenship to be in some way disadvantageous.

As it seems the best legislative minds are thinking preemptively these days, there are lots of other things besides embryonic cannibalism our elected representatives might render unlawful in their unstinting effort to make every genuine American's life a better, more secure one. For starters, how about a few strictures on the wily Islamic enemy on our Christian soil,  just to close loopholes?

• A law making it a crime for any adherent of Islam, whether native born, naturalized or a visitor in our country, to carry out a suicide bombing.
• Ditto for lying to further the scheme of Islamic world domination.
• A law prohibiting the grilling, frying, or the otherwise preparing for consumption any halal meats on domestic or international airline flights.  
• A law making it a crime to conspire against the United States or against the public peace in any foreign (non-English) language.

Then of course there should be other laws guaranteeing the rights of God-fearing Americans, for example why shouldn't there be . . .  

• A law permitting that citizens may shoot intruders who otherwise pose no threat to the shooter's safety, and generally to kill other citizens in defence of private property. Oh - they can already do that in Florida?

"Welcome to the Sunshine State. Was y'all makin' eye contact?"

• Well, then, maybe some more prohibitions (since we really seem to prefer them over general liberties) - a law requiring all sale copies of the Koran to display prominently the Surgeon General's warning about the effects on the eyesight of prolonged reading. 

 "Just one word - 'world domination.'

• A law making it a crime for any foreign-born alien, whether illegally, legally or maybe resident, to eat their own children.
•  A law prohibiting "ass coning" or other such use of an offroad motorized vehicle on public roads in any manner calculated to cause any offense to any legally resident person.

The law is a ass indeed.

One Man's Meat

As the world population balloons blithely towards seven billion people, one of us is missing and presumed eaten. A German tourist (by now a redundant expression like 'round circle') has disappeared in the bush of Nuku Hiva, a large island in the South Pacific archipelagoes. The chap was reported lost by his female traveling companion, taken off on a goat hunt by a resident guide who returned without him, attempted to lure the lady into the brush on a search for her "injured" mate, and then attempted to molest her credulity further by tying her to a tree and making some suggestions which did not invite a broad interpretation.

 The Preprandial Tourist

Searchers have found recently charred human remains, including teeth, bones, jaw and skull fragments and what appear to be melted dental fillings scattered around an extinguished fire. Both local authorities and French police are searching for local tribal people, many of whom had noticeably left before the dessert course. According to one "newsiness" source, "The tribe suspected of killing and eating Mr Ramin had claimed they gave up cannibalism years ago. Local authorities are investigating but it remains unclear if any tribesmen have been held, or even found."

It would naturally be unconvincing to merely deny having enjoyed Mr. Ramin at all (as if they might have stood accused of a mere dietary lapse or a hankering for a seasonal specialty). No, the times demand that the practice itself be soundly repudiated. The current age also demands that French and Nuku Hivan authorities, wherever their personal proclivities may tend, concertedly launch a furious and outraged search for the absconded dinner party.

"Not me, Doc - can't stand tourists."

In this age of "individual rights" it is natural to suppose that we all have the right to travel freely and unmolested wherever the wind or democratic fancy might take us. In our saner moments, we (especially Americans) understand that this isn't the case. But it's easy to think that Siemens and ExxonMobil and Mitsubishi and Tata and Suzlon and Nissan have not only tamed the globe but that they own it and obligingly invite us to burn their gasoline in their automobiles and airplanes to enjoy the usufructs of their civilizing global omnipresence.

Without diminishing the gravity of murdering - or, more charitably, eating - an innocent traveler, the world is not yet like that. It seems to make a difference that the German was probably eaten, but why should it, really? Had this happened in, say, the United States (saving Texas, Utah or Nevada), it would be a clear case of psychotic aberration. But we Amero-European naifs can still stray beyond the pale of "civilized" humanity into old and "unaccustomed" customs, into places of the globe where (unbeknownst to us) we had no business being in the first place - places like Afghanistan where, though we may not be eaten outright, we might be converted to a godless Islam or shot on sight. We know better than to walk through the Hindu Kush these days, but how much else do we know? Dead is dead, whatever the state of the corpus delicti. Other cultures, not so distant from our own, already know this vaguely.

(They can't remember how Captain Cook tasted)

The "global" economy is one of our fondest myths. Even to call the act a murder is to presume that our own "developed" moral code has suffused the globe and made it a finer thing than it was at the creation. Had the poor sod not (by all appearances) been a group barbecue it would have been just the murder or disappearance of a luckless traveller, the usual Muslim terrorist cells would have been under heightened suspicion for a week, a foreign minister would have expressed condolences, and that would have been the end of the affair.

But, presuming he's been eaten, the moral abhorrence is palpable. Whatever for? Most of what human beings have done over the last, say, six or seven or eleven millennia was never dictated by some theory of "free market forces" nor by some Judaeo-Christian proscriptions about what's fit to eat, nor (mirabile dictu) by any "global" economic considerations such as fostering a "robust tourism industry" or "encouraging World Bank participation through the good faith removal of economic barriers." But it's still the case that large cultural tracts on the globe owe Western capitalism no moral debt whatsoever. Quite the contrary.

An ancient culture still rules in many places, mainly because culture is an evolutionary mechanism that still bonds us. Talk about "economic barriers to development." Maybe we still need some faint gasps of cultural individuality (maybe not cannibalism, but . . . ). It once fused us into survival groups (however murderous we were). Granted that survival is, for roughly two-thirds of the globe's population (so far), not an immediate issue; granted that lots of those old cultural adaptations may be a bit outdated or irrelevant to modern survival.

Nonetheless, custom dies hard. Adaptive behavior is not abandoned merely because it is no longer necessary - if that were the case, who in the hell would willingly eat a turkey at Thanksgiving?

(Which ones just smoked some weed before dinner?)

No, much of what humans do and persist in doing beggars the economist, the global market theorist, the theologian, the aid worker and the missionary. Take them all in all, human beings are a tough lot. Too bad more of us aren't a hard sell.