December 31st, 1969
Republicanism Shown To Be Genetic In Origin
via A Commonplace Book
The discovery that affiliation with the Republican Party is genetically determined was announced by scientists in the current issue of the journal NURTURE, causing uproar among traditionalists who believe it is a chosen lifestyle. Reports of the gene coding for political conservatism, discovered after a decades-long study of quintuplets in Orange County, CA, has sent shock waves through the medical, political, and golfing communities.
Psychologists and psychoanalysts have long believed that Republicans’ unnatural disregard for the poor and frequently unconstitutional tendencies resulted from dysfunctional family dynamics — a remarkably high percentage of Republicans do have authoritarian domineering fathers and emotionally distant mothers who didn’t teach them how to be kind and gentle. Biologists have long suspected that conservatism is inherited.
“After all,” said one author of the NURTURE article, “It’s quite common for a Republican to have a brother or sister who is a Republican.”
The finding has been greeted with relief by Parents and Friends of Republicans (PFREP), who sometimes blame themselves for the political views of otherwise lovable children, family, and unindicted co-conspirators.
One mother, a longtime Democrat, wept and clapped her hands in ecstasy on hearing of the findings. “I just knew it was genetic,” she said, seated with her two sons, both avowed Republicans. “My boys would never freely choose that lifestyle!” When asked what the Republican lifestyle was, she said, “You can just tell watching their conventions in Houston and San Diego on TV: the flaming xenophobia, flamboyant demagogy, disdain for anyone not rich, you know.”
Both sons had suspected their Republicanism from an early age but did not confirm it until they were in college, when they became convinced it wasn’t just a phase they were going through. The NURTURE article offered no response to the suggestion that the high incidence of Republicanism among siblings could result from their sharing not only genes but also psychological and emotional attitude as products of the same parents and family dynamics.
A remaining mystery is why many Democrats admit to having voted Republican at least once — or often dream or fantasize about doing so. Polls show that three out of five adult Democrats have had a Republican experience, although most outgrow teenage experimentation with Republicanism.
Some Republicans hail the findings as a step toward eliminating conservophobia. They argue that since Republicans didn’t “choose” their lifestyle any more than someone “chooses” to have a ski-jump nose, they shouldn’t be denied civil rights which othe minorities enjoy.
If conservatism is not the result of stinginess or orneriness (typical stereotypes attributed to Republicans) but is something Republicans can’t help, there’s no reason why society shouldn’t tolerate Republicans in the military or even high elected office — provided they don’t flaunt their political beliefs.
For many Americans, the discovery opens a window on a different future. In a few years, gene therapy might eradicate Republicanism altogether.
But should they be allowed to marry?
Fiction |
December 31st, 1969
My throat wells with sadness at this news and my heart, which ached to be both immersed in and to emulate this man, feels suddenly vulnerable.
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” was found dead Friday night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jackie Morales, a records clerk at the department, said Wallace’s wife called police at 9:30 p.m. Friday saying she had returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself.
Wallace, who had taught creative writing at Pomona College since 2002, was on leave this semester.
Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday.
“What was a party is now a wake,” Ulin said as the news of Wallace’s death circulated. “People were speechless and just blown away.
“He was one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” Ulin said.
“He is one of the main writers who brought ambition, a sense of play, a joy in storytelling and an exuberant experimentalism of form back to the novel in the late ’80s and early 1990s,” Ulin said. “And he really restored the notion of the novel as a kind of canvas on which a writer can do anything.”
Wallace won a cult following for his dark humor and ironic wit, which was on display in “The Broom of the System,” his 1987 debut novel; “Girl With Curious Hair,” a 1989 collection of short stories, and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments” (1997). In 1997, he also received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
A year earlier he shot to the top of the literary world with “Infinite Jest,” a sprawling, ambitious novel with a nonlinear plot that ran 1,079 pages and had nearly as many footnotes.
Critics marveled at the prodigious talent evident in his imaginative take on a future world, comparing him to Thomas Pynchon and John Irving.
In a 1996 profile in the New York Times Magazine, Frank Bruni wrote, “Wallace is to literature what Robin Williams or perhaps Jim Carrey is to live comedy: a creator so maniacally energetic and amused with himself that he often follows his riffs out into the stratosphere, where he orbits all alone.”
While many may consider his work intellectual to the point of pretentiousness, I enjoyed every moment of devious humor, brilliant insight and pure entertainment of Infinite Jest — which, not ironically at the moment, brushed its fingers across the deep and unknown pool of death. As I quoted in my review of Infinite Jest:
“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (my note, or fiction, perhaps?) — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what?”
Fiction |
Head in the clouds, nose in a book… such is the life of a bookworm, word smith and lover of all things literary. Welcome to the Web site of Kate Jonuska, a freelance writer based in Colorado Springs, CO, where I post my souvenirs from this literary journey called life.
