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Editorials, opinion pieces, letters, columns and other rants against how boorish we really are

On the question of human children tumbling into our enclosures: opposing views

Tikitu the Gorilla Tiny humans equal big problems

Young gorillas in zoos nowadays think that humans are our friends, and that despite their chemical stink, ear-splitting whines, and shriveled, hairless bodies, we could all live side by side, as equals. Just last week, I caught my own grandson waving an ice-cream wrapper to get the attention of a tribe of passing humans who were idiotically taunting us with bonobo imitations. After I’d roundly beaten my grandson and threatened him with infanticide, he confessed that he was hoping to lure a human child close enough that it might tumble into our enclosure and become his pet. After beating him some more, he explained that all the young gorillas today dream of having a tiny human to call their own.

The silver hairs on my back stood on end. If my grandmother communicated it to me through a series of emphatic grunts once, she communicated it a thousand times: tiny humans are the most dangerous ones of all, and if a tiny human ever falls into your zoo enclosure, just walk far away and pretend to sleep. “Uh ugh, rumpgf,” she would solemnly add, shaking her head, but today, such wisdom falls on deaf ears.  

Little humans may look harmless — pale weaklings fed nothing but sugar water and taught to capitulate at the slightest roar — but I urge you to recall the story of Mooki, the great silverback from our ancestral lowlands who found an infant human abandoned in a tent. Rather than eat it, he freed the puny creature from its cage and allowed the females in his troop to feed it wholesome gorilla milk so that it might live.

Before the next sunrise, Mooki’s head adorned a human hunter’s lodge.

The gorillas who want little humans as pets are the same ones who flaunt their bipedalism and make fun of us older knuckle-walkers. But with life experience on our side, we look at those naive youngsters with a mix of pity and scorn as they beat their chests when they should be slapping them. And we know that grooming one another is not a gross and tiresome chore, but a sacred ritual ensuring social cohesion.

No matter how regularly the zookeepers feed us and provide us medical checkups, we must not forget what the ancients taught us: humans are an unpredictable lot. Take the snaking lines of squawking humans who pass our enclosures day after day. One minute their females are tapping on our enclosure windows to show that they’re ready to mate with us, and the next minute they’re recoiling in horror when we rush forward to take them cheetah-style.

Tiny humans may look cute, and the urge to drag them around by the arms and lovingly bounce them against a wall might be very strong, but you must resist this urge. Feign indifference. Walk away. Lie down. Your life — and the life of every gorilla around you — could depend on it.

Tikitu is a 42-year-old silverback who lives in a Florida home for retired eastern gorillas

Harambe the GorilllaHuman children could be our best friends if we would only unshackle ourselves from fear

The other day at the zoo, some young members of the tribe and I were snacking on ficus leaves, discussing the sudden abundance of flies, and wondering how to spend our afternoon. Suddenly, we heard a sharp cry for help as a small human leaned too far over the rail and seemed as though he would fall into our enclosure. As it turned out, he merely landed on a ledge and was quickly retrieved by a large shrieking female. I confessed to my friends that I’d always dreamed of a little human tumbling into our enclosure so that I might keep him as a pet. Imagine my surprise when my companions confided that they harbored similar longings.

So why can’t we have little humans to care for and throw onto our backs? When the subject comes up, older gorillas will tell you the same thing, that it’s in every gorilla’s best interest to stay far away from humans, and that little humans are downright dangerous.

Sure, this is what elders have been saying since the dawn of time, but is there any truth behind this prejudice? If young humans are so dangerous, why do their elders build us these expensive enclosures and provide us with an abundance of food — when many of their own females look anemic and underfed? Why do they heal our wounds and provide us with medical care, instead of routinely tranquilizing and consuming us, as they surely do with the wildebeests and ostriches in the enclosures just over yonder hill? Even the oldest and wisest silverback would admit that, in the right light, the humans who peer at us through the enclosure glass often appear as curious and intelligent as we are.

“Humans are dangerous, and the little ones are the worst, period,” I can hear all the old fogies saying.

Yet I remain unconvinced. Humans have no claws or fangs, and with their with stick-like appendages, even the strongest male among them would be easily pummeled by our weakest female. The fear of humans is nothing more than an inherited bias, an irrational fear. I read an article in last week’s Enclosurist that says there have been no instances of human attacks on gorillas in zoos in over 50 years. That’s half a century! And the Urban Lowlander published a study that says gorillas and humans share up to 98 percent of the same DNA. We’re practically cousins!

Yet so many among us cling to the expired idea that small humans are dangerous. And don’t tell me about Mooki. We all know that’s just an old chimpanzee tale passed down from our great-great-great-grandparents who, quite literally, spent their entire lives eating grubs in the jungle. But times have changed. We live in city zoos, surrounded by humans who care for us and only want to see us happy. They couldn’t hurt us if they tried, and they wouldn’t hurt us if their lives depended on it, because they love us that much.

The next time a human child wanders near your enclosure, don’t react with fear. Encourage it to tumble in. If you’re lucky and it does fall into the enclosure, approach it as you would a baby gorilla. Take its hand. Remove bugs from its cute little patch of head fur. Make it laugh by pulling it through the water. Who knows? You might find that you’ve got a new best friend.

Harambe was a 17-year-old western gorilla who lived in the Cincinnati Zoo until his recent tragic death. He dreamed of moving to a more vibrant and tolerant gorilla enclosure in the Los Angeles or Bronx zoo. 

Enough humanitarian awards, just let me tongue Justin Bieber

Enough humanitarian awards, just let me tongue Justin Bieber

As a women’s advocate, I have spent much — perhaps too much — of my young life fighting so that girls around the world may enjoy basic human rights: the right to education, equal treatment under the law, and the simple teenage pleasure of sucking face with a cute boy.

Because I spoke out for these rights, in 2012, while I was still a girl myself, I was viciously attacked by the Taliban while on a bus in Pakistan. People made a big deal about the fact that I was on my way home from a school exam when I was attacked, that I was “risking my life in pursuit of knowledge” and a bunch of stuff like that, but they never ask themselves, “What was Malala thinking about just moments before those armed barbarians boarded the bus?”

I’ll tell you this: I wasn’t daydreaming about my algebra and history lessons. No, I was neck-deep in hot fantasies about a certain bad-boy Canadian popstar jamming his tongue down my throat.

Since that vicious assault and outpouring of support that followed, I’ve been given numerous awards, including a Nobel Peace Prize and a bunch of others whose names I scarcely remember, the freedom-medal-this and humanitarian-prize-that. But what good are such tokens when you’ve missed out on the most exciting years of your life? An honorary university degree won’t pull you to a dark corner of a nightclub, nor will a monetary prize plant its mouth on yours.

If the global community really wants to offer me something special and memorable, why not arrange for me to have an hour-long makeout session with Justin Bieber? I don’t need to be warmed up with drinks, entertained with idle chitchat, seduced by an escalating series of flirtations. I won’t even ask that Justin feel me up. Just let me have a solid hour of some good old-fashioned tonsil hockey with him. Do I not deserve such an honor?

Our sweaty encounter wouldn’t need to take place somewhere fancy, like in a two-story VIP changing room at a gala event. We could simply take a walk through a forest, let’s say on a nice spring day, where we might observe the flowers in bloom, during which Justin could serenade me with his old songs “Baby” and “Never Let You Go.” I’ve got a whole playlist in mind. Then I’d tell him about the challenges faced by schoolgirls in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and other countries.

He’d tell me how brave I am, and he’d say, “Wow, Malala, I’ve never met a real Nobel Prize winner. I wonder what your lips taste like.”

And then he’d lean over and thrust his tongue down my throat. And that would be the best prize of all.

Malala Yousafzai is an internationally recognized women’s rights advocate and was among the first in her village to download Justin’s Bieber’s debut solo album “Baby.”

Want to make America great again? Let’s start by improving our women

 

Want to make America great again? Let’s start by improving our women Everyone keeps saying, “Donald, why are you always insisting that America is the best at everything. That gets on other countries’ nerves.” I never said that America is the best at absolutely everything. I didn’t. Technological innovation, military stuff, action movies, basketball, yeah, sure. We’re really good at all that. The best. Other countries are okay, and some are just awful, truly terrible. Who goes out to watch a Chinese movie, or cheer for an Egyptian NBA team? Just bad stuff.

I love America. I love it more than anybody. I’m the best at loving America. This country has been so good to me. I look around and I say, we are the best at so much. But not everything. You can’t be the best at everything. We’ve got the best people in the world, except when it comes to top-quality ass.

I’m talking about our women. I love American women. They’re confident, fun, and they have great teeth, but we lost the edge to Eastern Europe a long time ago. Ages ago. If you’ve seen my wife, you’ll know what I’m talking about. She’s from Solvenikstan. You say, that is the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen her, boy are you missing out. Look at some photos, but not the naked ones some creep left on the internet, because I’ll sue you. Just Google “Melania Trump clothed” and compare what you see to that slob sitting across from you. And have you seen my daughter Ivanka? She is very hot. Her mother is Russian. Do you see what I’m saying?

Don’t get me wrong. America has a lot of potential in this regard. The best potential, because we don’t give up. I’m going to do something about this when I’m president. I know some great people who work in nutrition, and they’re going make sure that our little girls are fed the right stuff to become beautiful. We’re going to have millions of beautiful women by the time I’m done. We already know what the mainstream media is going to say, those losers. “But Donald, what about fully developed adult women, you can’t do anything about the way they look.”

Donald has a great plan for that, too. America sets the bar for cosmetic surgery. You got people from all over the world flocking here to steal our know-how, to learn how our guys do plastic surgery. Then these foreigners go back to their countries and make a ton of money. This isn’t a win-win situation. This is a lose-win situation. Here’s what I’m going to do:

Let’s keep those aspiring plastic surgeons coming here, paying tuition, because you can’t blame them from wanting to learn from the best. We’ll say, “Okay, we’ll give you your student visa for six years, come learn the secret to great tummy tucks and nose jobs. But before our medical schools hand over that degree, you’re going to do five years of plastic surgery on our women, for free.” That’s like 1000 procedures per foreigner, per year. Our women will be perfect in no time.

“But Donald, what if I like the way my wife looks, and what if I don’t want some overworked Peruvian medical student taking a scalpel to her tits?” Stop settling for less than best. What are we, Canada? If we’re going to make this country great again, we need to get off our butts and work for it.

It’s not just these beautiful Eastern European women we need to worry about. I’m thinking about the future. China’s on the move. In China, they’re doing stuff to their women that you wouldn’t believe. They’re doing plastic surgery on an industrial scale. The whole country’s mobilizing, because they want their women to be the best in the world, and unless we act, we’re going to be nothing in no time. And I don’t want us to be nothing. Because we’re not nothing. We’re so much more than that. Let’s make our women the best.

Donald J. Trump is a businessman and presidential candidate from New York

Taking down Confederate flags is not enough. It’s time we dug up the corpse of General Robert E. Lee.

Forward Thinking by Franklin J. Dubbles We are at a turning point in history. Just as the pendulum of justice is finally swinging in the right direction, a tide of indignation is rising. In short, a maelstrom of metaphors is sucking us all in, forcing us to look one another in the eye as we swirl round and round.

Given that we are finally willing to evict the Confederate flag from public spaces and condemn it to gather dust in basement museum displays next to Andrew Jackson’s copy of “Mein Kampf” and Dolly Madison’s leather KKK-patterned thong, might we not go ahead and exhume the commander of the Confederate Army and give him a good talking-to?

General Robert E. Lee, also known as the Racist of Raleigh, the Bigot of Birmingham, and the Neckbeard of Nashville, is the most recognizable face of the losing side in the War to Eradicate Hate. Many people, myself top among them, know that unless we get this man to open what remains of his heart to love — and reject the Confederate flag and all that it’s politically expedient to say it stands for — this country will never heal itself.

I know what you’re thinking: Robert E. Lee is dead, and so are his ears and brain. Even the clothes he was buried in, the nice grey suit, all rotted away, along with the tiny embroidered Confederate flag that a kooky old granny probably sewed to his lapel seconds before the coffin was sealed. And even if he could hear us, you wonder, how could we possibly change the mind of a 209-year-old villain who not only fought a war to preserve and protect hate, but whose very legacy depends on it?

But what if … we could raise his consciousness?

Might he admit that he had been, well … wrong?

Would our generous use of ellipses … appeal to the better angels of his nature?

It’s not desecration of a corpse if it’s for a good cause

A good friend of mine, who incidentally writes code for military-themed video games, says that any mission needs one thing: a plan. And what a plan I’ve got.

I’ll form a crack commando unit of social justice warriors — the brightest undergrads from the best peace and social justice studies programs at the top schools — and in the wee hours of night, we’ll break into Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University, wherein lies the General’s tomb. Energized by nothing but our righteous indignation, we’ll dig up the coffin and remove the General, all the while passing no judgment on his degenerated physical state, as doing so would constitute ageism, lookism, and alivism.

Once he’s secured in the back of a rented freezer truck, I’ll bid my farewell to Justice Team 6 and embark with the General on the two-hour drive to where resides Miriam S., an old friend of mine from prep school whose estate happens to contain a climate-controlled wine cellar — perfect for a serious tête-à-tête with Lee.

While Miriam and I are getting reaquainted with each other, her personal assistant will take the General into one of the cool, dry caves to be coiffured and given a change of clothes. A simple Brooks Brothers grey three-piece suit should suffice. Personally, if I’m not bathed and shaved, I’m in no mood to listen to others, no matter how just their cause.

The conversion

Face to face with such an infamous personage, how does one proceed?

It’s possible that General Lee has spent the last few decades stewing in his own guilt, just waiting for the chance to come clean. I’ll take his hand — assuming that it’s still attached to his wrist — and say, “Are you, sir, ready at this moment to renounce hate and all symbols of hate, including the Confederate battle flag?”

If the General appears to nod, we’ll take a selfie and post it to Instagram with the hashtag #HateLoses. History will crumble into to sea, a renewed spirit of love will sweep over the land, and my social justice warrior friends and I can expect to be honored with a slew of honorary degrees, glowing profiles in the best news websites, and 20 years of highly paid speaking engagements.

But what if the conversion does not go so well? What if the General is angry that I’ve removed him from his resting place, and he loses his temper, comically stands up on his rickety bones, adopts the voice of Foghorn Leghorn, and declares, “Go, I say go away boy, you bother me. Leave me be.”

What if General Lee is stubborn, tells me that I know nothing of history, that I’m the one who’s got his head up his ass?

I must remain strong, for I am on the right side of history — assuming that time goes forward and can be diagramed by a single line, easily divided to two sides, that is. Of course, if we  believe in the existence of multiverses and accept that time is relative, well, then there’s no such thing as the right or wrong side. What if General Lee has been studying theoretical physics this whole time? What if he’s a regular Stephen Hawking and just blows my bold proclamations out of the water? How will I respond? I know nothing of physics. Might I lie? Insult him? No, I will remain true to the cause.

I will declare in no uncertain terms that hate is bad. Who but the devil himself could disagree? Next, I’ll posit that symbols of hate are just as bad as hate itself, if not worse, because symbols keep emotions burning long after their grip on the heart has naturally loosened. General Lee, a keen thinker and a graduate of West Point, would recognize this as “reason” and concede the point.

Check.

I will say in a firm but loving voice, “You and your rum-sipping plantation owner friends waged a war in the name of hate, General Lee. You lost that war, but you thought you could keep hate alive by sneaking your little flag all over the place, from beer cozies sold in Mississippi truck stops to the tops of Dodge Chargers driven by the Duke boys. Your plan worked for 150 years, but not anymore. Do you know why, Mr. Lee?”

I’ll wait for him to shake his head and hope that it doesn’t roll off his neck. Then, in the most of economical of arguments, I’ll say:

“Love.”

And mate.

Will he cry? Will I cry? Will Miriam save a space for me in that large bed of hers? Will federal agents come bursting through the door? We’ll never know until we try. So let’s try. Because doing something is better than doing nothing. Even if that something fails. Because failure is the first step to success.

Franklin J. Dubbles is the publisher of the Dandy Goat. He completed nearly two semesters of art school and has travelled extensively.