After reading about genetic modification of food, I got scared. That’s a big thing coming from a guy who had a can of spaghetti for supper and six malted milk balls for dessert. Food’s never scared me, and I do not shrink back even when faced with “pasteurized processed cheese food,” in a can, which I like to squirt on pork rinds.
But even if you can eat any kind of manufactured, brightly colored, salty, canned or plastic-bagged slop, there’s something in you that revolts at the idea of the white-coated boys breeding cattle that secrete their own barbecue sauce or corn that pops itself.
It ain’t natural, I tell ya!
But, if the idea of genetically fooling around with pig DNA scares me, the idea of the genetically modified politician does not. In fact, I’d suggest genetic modification of all members of the upper class. If we had started screwing around with the DNA of the Bush family some years ago, maybe Jeb wouldn’t be as big a dope as his grandfather. Could of genetically modified the boozehound right out of the Kennedys, too.
Maybe a whole race of politicians whose throats close whenever they lie, like a guy with a peanut allergy after he wolfs a Snickers Bar.
“Senator, if you really do love working families, as you just said, why are you writhing on the floor like a fresh-caught bass flopping around on a wet deck?”
What reporter doesn’t LOVE that thought?
You probably couldn’t successfully modify Ted Cruz, the former Rafael Cruz who has successfully de-Canadian’ed and, de-Hispanic’ed himself. He’s beat you to it.
Unlike tragic pop star Michael Jackson, who tried to bleach himself white from the outside in, Cruz is working from the inside out with the help of institutions as whackily non-diverse as the 700 Club and Liberty University (which should not use either word in its title.)
I’m not suggesting there’s anything phony about Ted. Reinventing yourself so you can get elected is what this great country is all about.
I’m just thinking that, in the future, the ability to manipulate the DNA of families with known or emerging political tendencies might give us all a better chance at avoiding, not nasty surprises, but nasty certainties.
Breed a little religious respect into ‘em, so they’re less likely to grab at the extreme end of any faith. Twist that DNA until you get some structure of compassion, so they don’t always feel poor people need to be pushed further into poverty. Make them think of mothers when they see soldiers. Move a molecule here and a molecule there. If you can make a turkey with a breast the size of a bowling ball, you can tug some of our leaders and want-to-be leaders away from the kind of political opinions that, until the last 25 years or so, were regarded as something the nation had turned away from, like burning crosses, Father Coughlin, John Birch and a host of other things you associated with the kids who dropped out of high school, the ones whose parents sent notes to the teacher written in pencil on a piece torn from a brown paper bag.
That was the DNA we hoped home ownership and union jobs and a shot at college would breed out of people. That’s what the suburbs were for, back before the self-modified Ted Cruz and others taught us to be scared enough to hate again.
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist. Dion’s book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns, “Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America,” is available for Nook and Kindle.