From the Slope of Hope blog: After I got off the plane and was heading toward the airport exit, I saw something I don't think I
had ever seen before: a woman with a beard. Although I only took in this image for a moment, three things were immediately clear to me: (1) she was, in fact, a woman with a full beard (2) even clean-shaved, she would have been quite unattractive (3) she was wearing Star Wars pajamas in the middle of the day at the Los Angeles airport. It was only this third quality that I found appealing.
In spite of the pajamas, I did not want to have sex with this person. I did not want her to have children with me. I hope some of you reading this can find sympathy with my disposition.
Many years before this, I encountered a very different woman: a person who was indescribably beautiful and was one of the smartest, if not the smartest, individual I'd ever encountered. I did, in fact, want to have children with her, and as unlikely as it might seem, we did. We've been married a long time, and thanks to the choice I made, I now have beautiful, brilliant kids since I was fortunate enough to marry a beautiful, brilliant woman. DNA is kind of like that.
So I doubt my choice would rub anyone the wrong way, with the exception of whatever young men wanted to have the same outcome as I did but didn't have the opportunity. So in this roundabout way, we come to the topic of eugenics, whose definition from the topmost result in Google is, in part, "the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race."
It goes on to say eugenics was quite a popular notion until the Nazis embraced it, and then, as with most concepts the Nazis applauded, it kind of lost its lustre.
None of this would be on my mind were it not for the top story in Palo Alto's little newspaper:
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You see, about a year ago, some nut job in the city got his panties in a wad that the people for whom some of Palo Alto's schools were named might not totally agree with his own politics, so he compelled the district to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the Renaming Schools Advisory Committee, which I suspect consisted of people with the same smug self-assurance as the Film Actors Guild did in Team America.
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So after a year of debate and research into the seventeen school names here in Palo Alto, they decided that two men - Terman and Jordan - were supporters of eugenics when they were alive (pretty much like everyone else back in those days), and their names should therefore be stripped from the campuses (which itself is going to cost more money).
I want to make clear I do not support the forced sterilization of unattractive or stupid people. The shareholders of Walmart would lose out, and frankly, the state shouldn't get itself anymore involved in our lives than it already is. Allow me to lay out a couple of facts:
(1) The majority of people of my left-leaning city objected to the renaming, so the board's decision actually ran against what the public wanted.
(2) Kids in school don't give a flying shit about the background of the person for whom their school was named. Give me a break! For instance, I went to a middle school called Joaquin Moraga. I assure you, at no point during my time there did we discuss the background or beliefs of Mr. Moraga. Added to which, should it have come to light that, in the loneliness of the mid-19th century California hills, Mr. Moraga liked to have intercourse with unsuspecting sheep, we still wouldn't have devoted our energy to renaming the place to something more politically palatable like, say, Caitlyn Jenner Junior High.
My little anecdote at the start of this post suggests that I was, in my own private way, exercising a form of eugenics, and it was for selfish reasons, not the betterment of mankind. We are a devolving race, however, since what I've consistently seen in my life, without exception, is that the best-looking, best-paid, most-attractive couples that I know have maybe one kid (or many times ZERO kids), whereas repugnant dumbshits seem to excel at only one thing in life, and that is making lots of copies of themselves.
A specific anecdote about this can be had from just last week, when I went to a private screening of a forthcoming movie starring this lovely young girl. Her parents were both there, and holy Lord, they both looked like they were international models. During the Q&A, it came to light that McKenna was their only child, and I just wanted to grab them both and shout, "What's wrong with you two? Look at her! Make more kids!" But I controlled myself.
I'll close by offering up the response one of the Renaming committee members offered the reporter when asked why the board (unanimously!) voted in favor of the action. I want to stress that this is a real quote:
The renaming will allow students who feel targeted by these names to not have to think about this when they are in the classroom. This way they can spend all their time on their education, so the district can actually close the achievement gap, which is its goal.
So let me get this straight. Until now, a given child - - let's say an underachieving, gender-questioning, one-legged kid - - sat in their classroom with this thought: "My classmates will not want to reproduce with me when I am an adult. I do not have desirable genes. I am thinking of this because this school was named after a man who, one hundred years ago, supported the idea of eugenics, and in a society controlled by such a man, I would be sterilized and would not have the opportunity to reproduce."
I will stand in front of God almighty and declare that such thoughts were not had. I strongly suspect far more prevalent were thoughts about Snapchat, what crap they were serving as lunch today, and how many minutes until the bell rang so I could leave this goddamned school and go home.
So for any of you who figured the days of a dozen different kinds of bathroom designations, safe spaces, and special snowflakes were over, I can tell you they are not. On the contrary, I suspect the insanity we saw peaking in 2016 is, within two or three years, going to re-emerge with a vengeance.