Canto Thirty-Six – The Bio-Dome
Alden stood a safe distance from the man-eating plant that Brekka had said was called Lester. He studied it. It was a meat-eating plant and didn’t rely totally on photo-synthesis, but it was much greener than a Venus flytrap from Earth. And the important thing that struck Alden’s farmer mind with nearly thirty years of farm-working experience was that it seemed totally untouched by the blight that was killing nearly every growing thing on Galtorr Prime.
“What’s the matter, Alden?” asked Gracie. “Does something about that plant bother you?” Gracie’s concern colored her beautiful little-girl face. Alden had never seen that face except in old black-and-white pictures in the family album. This new body she inhabited took some getting used to, but as far as Alden was concerned, she had never been more stunningly beautiful. It made being naked shamefully hard. “Did you hear my question, my love?”
“Yeah… didn’t Sizzahl say this man-eater was an alien plant? Not from here?”
“Yes, I think she did.” Gracie turned around and looked where Sizzahl seemed about to leave the flower garden following the others. “Sizzahl? Can you come over here and talk to us about Lester?”
The naked lizard girl walked back across the garden path to where Alden and Gracie stood. “What now?”
“This plant has no blight,” said Alden, pointing at the green leaves.
“Is that important? It is from a different world. It comes from a planet called Telos Three.”
“It is a green plant, and it is resistant to the disease killing the ecosphere of this planet. Couldn’t we cross-breed it or something with cuttings from the dying plants, and maybe save them?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Sizzahl made some serious-thinking lizard faces. “I can go one better. I have a gene splicer that I also want to use to make a Galtorrian/Human fusion. We could use that to transplant resistance genes into the dying plants. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.”
“Alden thinks like a farmer. He’s battled corn borers and burdock weed and corn smut for years in Iowa.” Grace looked at Alden with obvious pride embedded in her smile.
“I have learned a few things about saving crops.”
“If I could isolate the gene for cross-species use, I might be able to defeat the bio-weapon diseases once and for all.” Sizzahl seemed to be getting excited by the idea.
“What exactly is the Galtorrian/Human fusion idea all about?” asked Gracie.
“Oh, that wasn’t about disease resistance. I wanted to make better people for our planet. I figure if we can combine aggressive Galtorrian methods with Earther peacefulness we could make a race of people that would be better than either side at present.”
“Don’t you like your own people, Sizzahl?” Gracie asked.
“I hate their evil, vengeful, selfish ways. A few corporate emperors own everything on this planet. They treat the people as things that can be used up and then disposed of. A few nasty old gators decided that they were the only big lizards who mattered, and now you can see what their fighting amongst themselves has done to this whole planet.”
“I hate to say it, but Earth humans aren’t that different,” said Alden. “We make wars and kill our own people too. We put a lot of artificial chemicals and poisons into our own environment, and we don’t even do it to try to wipe out the other side of every argument. At least… I don’t think we do it on purpose.”
“I need to try the plan anyway,” said Sizzahl. “I don’t know if your people deserve to live without being fundamentally changed, but I do know that mine are a bunch of sorry, verminiferous beasts that deserve to die a horrible death. I want to replace them rather than re-grow and save them.”
“I am so sorry your world is like this,” said Gracie. “I’m sure if more of your people were like you, they’d be a very worthy race.”
“You are wrong, but it is a happier thought than most I have had in life.”
*****
The baseball player in the upstairs sitting room where nobody sits, once spent an entire winter at the bottom of the swimming pool. That’s why his blue uniform turned a bit putrid green. He stays in this room with my Wish-nik Troll from 1967 and the Winkie Soldier from Oz, who is naturally green in the face and never took a swim.
Making Fun
So I made a funny picture of the Keebler elf we put in charge of the Attorney General’s Office of the United States. This is my homage to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the elf who invented the best-selling cookie in the South, the Keebler Kluxie Cookie. But, of course, if I call the man a racist, angry Trumpkins are going to immediately tell me that I am the real racist. I admit it, though, I am prejudiced against people who hate others based on skin color, religion, or other factors that allow them to feel they are inherently better than the group that they hate. And I don’t apologize for making fun of the people I am prejudiced against. I have, after all, a good reason for making fun. I am a cartoonist at heart, if not a professional. And making fun of the things that I hate and fear makes me fear them less. I feel it is a much better response than to build more bombs and give the police more freedom to murder those I hate and fear. Laughing at the darkness is, I think, better than filling my own heart with the darkness and allowing it to snuff out my light.
For example, here is a vicious real-life Boris Badenov who really scares me. He is a very angry man who wants to punish people for being immigrants. He also hates Jewish people and is on record blaming them for the world’s troubles in a way that sounds frustratingly retro-Nazi-fascist in tone.
This is, of course, the same kind of fun-making that Jay Ward unleashed on the Russian threat that had American school children learning how to “duck and cover” in response to fears of imminent nuclear first-strikes back in the 60’s when I was a small boy. Rocky and Bullwinkle made us laugh and made it better. In this picture I have stolen you see Steve Bannon using a cane to threaten the All-American Moose. And you know that however dastardly the plan, there is every reason to believe the Moose will magically survive and we will get a good laugh at the bad guy’s expense.
And making fun of these cartoon villains (there is no member of Trump’s basket of villains who is not a human cartoon character) is not a matter of actually hating the people. I don’t personally hate any of these individuals. I make fun of them because it makes me feel better. It may also make some of you who I share these things with feel better too. I do hate many of the things they have said and done. And I feel I have a right to make fun of these things and thus make fun of the cartoon villains who said and did them.
I identify as a liberal for these reasons, and do not apologize for it, so make cartoons of me too if you feel the need.
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