Clone Wars

It seems like years ago that Dolly the sheep splashed onto the scene, and it was. Still, cloning is a pretty hot topic, especially for the American Christian, the Religious Right, but the cloning of living organisms is as old as life itself. Before people started doing it. No one can know what sort of metaphysical repercussions cloning a human being would have, probably none. Is it ethically sound to use cloning technology to create a perfect donor match for bone marrow, or a kidney or a whatever from the modified stem cells of another human being? These are problems I won't have to wrestle with for a long time, maybe not until the freezer shuts down and I emerge from a cryogenic sleep to pay the electric bill. Of course in the political world time lines are, on a regular basis, advanced quite a bit in the sciences. Nothing helps to gloss over a health care plan with a few holes like a moral hot button. Make it one with very little available fact checking and/or public comprehension and you could potentially ride it to any public office. At least I know people who have had abortions, I will probably never meet a reformed lush with a cloned liver.

I do know of at least one place where I regularly benefit from cloning technology: the produce stand. Never would I claim to be an expert but I've read and heard a little about the returning banana crisis. The bananas most of us are eating these days are clones. For American consumption, essentially every banana is plucked from a genetically identical plant, all the way back to the first Vietnamese Cavendish banana plants at the turn of the last century. Before the Cavendish banana there was the Gros Michel (Big Mike). The Gros Michel was a superior banana for shelf life, shipability, and according to those who claim to know, taste. Panama Disease, a fungus, spread throughout the world's banana plantations, the Gros Michel, being a cloned crop put up no resistance. By the second half of the century, the market was righting itself with the new variety. But now a new mutation of Panama Disease is sweeping through Southeast Asia and Australia, decimating Cavendish and local banana cultivars. No worries mate, someone will develop a new hybrid soon, probably before it affects most Western markets. Hey, we're the West, right?

Which brings me all the way back to the Religious Right. In a video clip I saw on Youtube, a man expounds on the divine nature of the banana. Showing how a fruit sealed in an easy to open container, ergonomically designed to fit the human hand, etc... is proof of creation by an omniscient being. Well, obviously the domestic banana has reached the pinnacle of human symbiosis through rigorous human intervention and as with almost every domesticated thing on this earth, without our constant intervening they would soon die off.

A lot of people have tried to draw religious inspiration from a lot of things and that is fine by me. If seeing "Star Wars" as a passion play makes you feel better as a person, then that's great. If eating a banana does it for you, wonderful. Certainly there are parallels between man's nurturing of his plant and animal food sources to better serve the hunger of the world and the Christian God constantly modifying his relationship with man in order to better serve man's purpose in spite of man's nature. Ah forget it, what really seems to work at motivating Americans isn't divine inspiration but identifiable enemies.