(pieces of this were orginally published elsewhere)
Science is a hypocrite. It preaches Darwin while sabotaging natural selection, working hard to ensure all our lazy breeders survive, right down to the most miserable of mutants. In short, science closes its one good eye and refuses to pay the consequences for its obscene benevolence. Never pausing in its ceaseless promotion of longevity, science gradually renders the world uninhabitable via overpopulation and a bankrupt social welfare/Medicare system. As they extend the lives of the elderly and prevent hideous burn victims, screaming crack babies, and comatose vegetables from the blissful death awaiting them like a nervous lover, science vehemently denies death its chance to truly heal the sick... planet.
In eradicating all viruses science turns
us into a virus... it's only a matter of time before Earth wises up and sees a doctor about getting rid of us.
Take the theories on the origin of humanity: the Darwinian vs. the Creationism. Science says man was the result of chemicals swimming together for billions of years. Christian crazies say God created man from the dust of the stars, just two ways of saying the same thing! Why argue?!
Instead of man's origin let's talk about art: Van Gogh's "Starry Night" for example: Darwinsim would say Van Gogh didn't paint 'Starry Night' and it's not a picture of the night sky but merely a piece of stretched linen canvas heaped with different colored pigment applied via a brush operated by a half-ape Dutch schizophrenic. If Darwinists had their way, the painting would be attributable to the brush and the pigments, not the man.
Come see the opening of the new 'Windsor 2" horsehair bristle! Man, that brush can paint. Creationism takes the opposite approach: Van Gogh
couldn't have used a brush because he is a 'true' master - He created the work in seven days, hands-off, with his
mind. It's not just a brush - it was never a brush. If he used a brush then somehow it wouldn't be 'divine.'
These are the sorts of art collectors who, for example, might get mad if their kid draws on the wall but has Twombly and Basquiat works 'worth' more than his kid's entire future college education two times over on the same wall - in fact if the kid scribbled something on the Twombly in pencil, the dad might not even notice.
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| TWOMBLY: This sells for more than your house |
Take western medicine's initial response to the Chinese practice of acupuncture: only after decades of proven effectiveness are western hospitals allowing it into their buildings. Since western science isn't quite sure
how it works they can't admit it does or they have to change their whole concept of the human body. Chinese medicine sees the body in terms of energy flow, chi, instead of western science's concept of the body as a series of organs connected to each other in a Rube Goldberg-like system.
Similarly, while science can admit life on other planets is all but a certainty and that our own technological evolution is limitless, alien visitation in the past is absurd. Scientists can create new life forms but the idea that someone created the scientists in the same manner is, to them, contemptible.
On the other hand, the Christians rear back at the idea that God might think in DNA, and dream time into existence via a matrix-like universal intelligence that permeates the galaxy. No, God is a person and don't ask them how they arrived at the idea of Him creating the world in seven days and seven nights without a spinning orb moving in a rotation around the sun to measure it in the first place. Right? Now, exhale, and then INHERIT THE WIND! That's the big argument reveal that cracks it wide open, Pollock!
A few years ago I was visiting a urologist for prostate trouble and I asked him about pumpkin seeds and stinging nettle and saw palmetto all the various herbal remedies I'd read about for prostates and he said "well, I am not allowed to say they work, but, I
do take them myself," and he slipped me an email address to an expensive mix of the three. He couldn't ---due to his AMA bullshit oath, say they worked, but he knew they did, so bam.
(PS - I never did get them, cuz I'm too damn cheap). Thank god (small 'g' cuz they'd want it that way) for those doctors who find ways around their profession's inflexible standards, to slip patients what actually works, regardless of whether or not it can proven via our current understanding of the body. Unless it can make the pharmaceutical industry a profit the medical industry won't bother with the enormous expense of proving an herb works to heal the body...so if no one can patent it, it can't work, because no one has confirmed it via clinical trials. And no one will pay for the trials if they can't patent it. Great logic, dad. That was the big argument I had with my father, a Merck market research analyst and pharmaceutical graduate when I was preaching the gospel of...what was I into then... ginko biloba? I can't remember... the memory one.
All of which leads up to SPLICE (2009).
SPLICE dares us to believe a weird-looking mutant couple (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley), with Williamsburg hipster loft furnishings, are genius gene splicers. That seems rather wrong, even if we do see them on the cover of
Wired, it doesn't convince us (nor does it ever in real life), nor do the interestingly-lit barns and basements where they keep their little Frankenstein kitten daughter-scorpion-hybrid. It's all a little too well-under lit and perfectly colored in dark greens and reds and perfectly stressed/aged furniture and inherited grandma afghans (see top).
But what does work on a believability chart is the sudden shift in the monster from CGI scorpion-kitten to human cat-eyed actress (Scorpio model Delphine Chaneac) whom they name 'Dren.' Both elements--the CGI and the actress-- deliver a knock-eyed performance that in its way reverses the switch from Jeff Goldblum to animatronic Brundlefy in David Cronenberg's remake of THE FLY.
Scenes of Dren leaping to and fro from the rafters, her scorpio tail like a monkey, work like a clinical trial-tested charm. Less effective however is all the tough corporate acting going on in the boardrooms as douche bag manager David Hewlitt spews testesterone-addled threats about closing down the program if the hipster duo doesn't produce results, then admonishes them about breaking Christian fundamentalist-enforced protocol using human genes in conjunction with animals. Make up ya mind, Hewlitt. Besides, you'll blow a gasket with all this 'playing both sides of the fence' scenery chewing.
I personally feel those concerned Christians should take a moment to protect not just the human hybrids but
all hybrids, even if they're 10% cooked from animal DNA or CGI. Those bizarre bloody worm monsters the couple create early on seem like a mess of Franken-pain. Science should have to keep all these things opiated or else not make them at all. The cruelty with which even these supposedly hip scientists treat animals shows that on a certain elementary level they are worse than children torturing scorpions in THE WILD BUNCH. We can only hope a stray bullet takes one or both of them out and they keel over into the thriving mound of red ants.
The second round of horror comes with Sarah Polley's cruel treatment of Dren once they have to get her out of the lab. Locking her up in the barn, taking away her kitty, refusing to let her fly, run, swim, and crawl free, Polley's a real c--nt. When Dren's back butterfly bat wings sprout they look like tattoos from
Red Dragon or
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo come to life (or the tattoos that come to life in
Elektra if anyone else saw that besides me), and with her bald head and alien eyes, Dren's a bit like Britney Spears or Sinead O'Connor.
O'Connor, as we may recall, got flak by drawing attention to the innate cold cruelty to children perpetrated by organized human power, in her case the Catholic church instead of biotechnological science, but the vibe is the same and in the end the real villain of the piece is Sarah Polley herself, dead-eyed determined to show the world that she can be as mean as Joan Crawford is to adopted daughter Christina.. as illustrated in MOMMIE DEAREST (1981).
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| c. Sofia Mauro |
The bald head of Dren also conjures chemo, enhancing the idea of scientific torture and deprivation in the name of extending our lives even a hair longer. It may be too little too late, but at least the mad scientist genre has finally found its most worthy villain, a female scientist who, like St. Joan of San Antone herself, figures out a way to get around the messy laws of adoption and child protective services so she can torture, control, manage and stifle her daughter to her heart's content. Forget it Jake, it's
science. There's no animal or human rights for a being that's neither. For a fucking scientist like Polley that's music to the ear.
Meanwhile, for the empathic amongst us, even a drawing of a screaming mouth can send us writhing to the floor in sympathy. Is that something admirable, or just a bid for attention gone seriously awry?
PS - 1-9-6
I got off topic, fuck it. There never was a topic. The topic was always death - we avoid it too much for our own good. When I was at my peak of convergence 2012 enlightenment I stopped thinking these things, the population control anxieties, and started loving all creatures. My God/Alien/higher power told me I was '
recused from the bench' - meaning I didn't have to worry about it, 'they' had it taken care of. My job, they said, was to love all life as if it were my own children. And I was able to do that, even unto people I'd normally sneer at as I hustled past them on the street. All God's children glowed rosy and angelic.
Then... the cosmic alignment ended. I got super sick and woke up with all my chi absconded with by demonic harvesters, like ghost conductors whisking all our ticket stubs off the chair tops at the arrival of the last stop.
OR - I had a manic episode that lasted two months and was triggered via expectation of apocalypse; in other words, I had a nice messianic complex incident (I have one every three years, it seems) and then got sick from messing my diet up trying to be a vegan.
I'm a Pisces, so I don't believe in astrology, but I know it's true. If you get the inherent paradox of that statement, then you know what it is to be a 'mutable' sign. One fish swims in the mystical ether, the other smiles to itself and accepts it all might be a lot of hippie nonsense. The problem is, America can't relegate itself to the same harmonious dichotomy. America needs to be a Pisces and embrace its own duality. Maybe we can all agree that some higher power some of us choose to call God created man but he used apes as a jumping off point, as the paint and canvas if you will, to make his masterpiece, and maybe both the typical Christian idea of God and the atheists' idea of the Christian's idea are very shallow and outdated images. Maybe the God we first imagined as bored Sunday schoolers staring out the window isn't correct but that doesn't mean there is no God.
If we enhance our conception of God to include all things and people, the higher consciousness of which the entirety of our known universe is its full reflection, then we lose our terror of death, and maybe science can stop being so short-sighted.
Then again, when I start to feel afraid I might actually die, I panic and pray and shuttle through the Kubler-Ross 7 like my bald head's on fire.
