Let me preface this, the opener to my trifecta of dying-columnist gasps, by saying I make no secret of the fact that I really, really don't like children.
I think the \maternal"" component of my female genome that's supposed to make the sight or sound of a baby activate an innate drive to nurture is profoundly corrupted, for when confronted with any manner of infantile stimuli, I'm compelled to smother the source with something decidedly other than hugs and butterfly kisses.
So when I heard of an experiment the Environmental Protection Agency recently canceled in the epicenter for a disproportionate amount of this nation's wrongness that is the state of Florida, I was amused, yet measuredly stunned.
According to The New York Times, the EPA, in cahoots with the American Chemistry Council, offered parents $970, a free camcorder, a bib and a T-shirt to expose their infants to pesticides by routinely spraying their homes, then document the effects. The acronym for the project was, I kid you not, CHEERS, for Children's Environmental Exposure Research Study.
Though some of us might still drink to that, and with relish, the irresponsibility at work here verges on veritable lunacy, principally and fiscally.
It's like running a government-subsidized experiment to see what happens when you douse a squirrel in nail polish remover-perhaps nobody's ever actually done it and cataloged the precise results, but odds are overwhelming they're going to be more than a trifle unpleasant, and will make, at best, a nominal contribution to the collective cognitive corpus. Granted, such scientific shenanigans are cheaper than a Bush-aggrandizing mission to Mars, but still.
Then again, this experiment could be a sign the whole ""culture of life"" fancy is beginning to crumble on its contradictions and bend to the almighty American current of capitalism and commodity.
Could we finally be closing in on a ""no voting to authorize a war unless you, Senator, send your children to fight it"" provision?
Or nearing a day when politicians stop campaigning with their children, as if their having procreated is a privileged accomplishment and their posterity qualifies them to preside over a polity?
Or at least the day when we who refuse to become willing cogs in the ""real family"" machine might reap some societal regard?
Because if fortunes should ever align and I find my dream tall, scrawny Adrien Brody-doppelg??nger, I'm not about to go and ruin it all by making really tall, really scrawny, probably profoundly creepy-looking babies. I'm going to spend my time with the hot man-not incubating, birthing and rearing his vile spawns-and I'd like to spend it in peace.
For truly, anyone whose rubric of polite dinner conversation includes sharing her idea for selling baby T-shirts printed with phrases like ""Vote Pro-Choice"" and ""Shake Well"" just isn't meant to be a mother.
But perhaps she is meant to enjoy a lucrative career designing baby T-shirts for the U.S. government: Forget that lame CHEERS logo with a chain of children holding hands across Florida and instead picture a simple rendering of a baby's crib, with tiny arms/fins reaching up to welcome a cloud of insecticide spewing from the Mr. Yuck mobile suspended above.
Next season, all the cool little tax write-offs will be sporting them.
Holly Noe's column runs each Friday. Recuse yourself from the gene pool at flamingpurvis@yahoo.com.
at flamingpurvis@yahoo.com.
