Musings on Life’s Absurdities ‘Really Pushed My Button’

In writing recently about the absurdities that abound in modern life (not that they haven’t always), I inevitably offended some readers who did not agree with my examples.

They were taken from “The Journal of the Absurd” (Workman), by Bernard Garfinkel and Jules Siegel, so most of the choices were theirs, not mine; but I agreed that they were absurd.

One man’s absurdity is another man’s truth.

Among the absurdities I culled from the book was a proposal by MacFarlane Burnet, an Australian biologist, that all infants who are not “genetically normal” should be killed at birth, “to avoid overpopulation and genetic deterioration.”

My question was “Who’s going to decide?”

John K. Evans, a member of Mensa, the high-intelligence group, sends me a paper he wrote in answer for Lament, newsletter of the Greater Los Angeles Area Mensa.

Evans said he did not disagree with the other absurdities, but he objected to my including Burnet’s notion about infanticide.

“Then he compounded his own absurdity,” Evans wrote, “by asking the parenthetical rhetorical question, (‘Who’s going to decide?’). He has really pushed my button this time.”

Button pushed, Evans goes on as follows:

“Hey, Jack, overpopulation and genetic deterioration are not absurdities. First off, if the human race continues to reproduce itself at current rates, destroying arable land, cutting forests, and consuming irreplaceable natural resources in the process, the Earth will be uninhabitable in less than a hundred years.

“Second, genetic deterioration is for real. Only the human species spends more time and money on preserving its defective specimens than it does on educating its best and brightest. It is idiotic for a society to spend millions of dollars on wheelchair ramps, sign-language translators, highly trained teachers and classrooms for the mentally retarded, and countless other special treatments for its defective children, while normal and above-average children are deprived of libraries, music education and adequate teacher-student class time. . . .

“In a rational society, the defectives are eliminated. In a chicken yard, they’re pecked to death. In a wolf pack, the dominant female kills the weakest cubs. In an Inuit (Eskimo) tribe, defective babies are left on the ice for the polar bears. . . . It’s only the mush-brained so-called civilized humans who can’t understand that life on Earth is only for the capable. . . .”

As for my “absurd rhetorical question” (Who’s going to decide?) Evans says that’s easy. He and I are going to decide. “We will decide that this child is too flawed to live, and that one has a chance.”

I don’t know whether that answer is absurd, or simply naive. Is Evans going to decide only whether his own children live? Or is he going to decide whether mine live, too?

My question remains. Who is going to decide? A doctor? A court? A committee? Some government agency?

And that question leaves unanswered the question of what flaws shall be considered unacceptable. Do the blind get thumbs down? The deaf? The lame?

My wife and I were having dinner recently at the Rancho Las Palmas Resort, in Rancho Mirage. We sat by a window that overlooked a terrace and the swimming pool. Suddenly an attractive young woman strolled into view in a summery evening dress. She was followed by a young man in a tuxedo. I pointed them out, saying something like, “Pretty young couple.”

Soon other young couples joined them. “It must be a graduation class,” my wife said. Then we realized that they were talking to one another in sign language. All of them. They were deaf. But they seemed to be in high spirits. They were very animated, laughing and touching one another tentatively, like any other graduating class. They were beautiful.

I wondered whether, if Evans were to have his way, such buoyant young people would have been interdicted at infancy.

But perhaps Evans’ essay is only a spoof, in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which he proposed that economic conditions might be improved if the children of the poor were to be used as food for the rich.

OK, Evans; even if I’m not a Mensa, I can get a joke.

Meanwhile, two other absurdities have turned up in the news. One of them was the exclusion of Esther Williams from a party at the Los Angeles Country Club because she was wearing pants (Oscar de la Renta, by the way). How stuffy can they get?

The other was a school bus driver’s ejection of a second-grader from her bus (1 1/2 miles from school) because he was carrying a box with two lizards in it for show and tell.

I would say that driver was a greater threat to the safety of her riders than two lizards in a box.

Absurd.