Eliot Page and Virtual Fiction

 He had to rent all the hotels-- John Dos Passos

Many years ago there was a PBS documentary on nomadic fishermen drowning a dugong to death for its food, and in terms of human cruelty to marine life, it was relatively sanguine. Gaunt and impoverished Filipinos need to eat, but the capture stays with me. The dugong was helpless. The men didn’t have to hold it beneath the shallow waters to drown it and lift it into the miserable dinghy to carve it up for very long. It was substantially larger than what the dugong hunters and turtle carvers do here, and yes, please pity the large sea turtle, even though environmentalists always rather lead naïve Americans to conclude the native and indigenous people are barbarians at the mercy of the Australian press. In terms of whose competing interests are more justified, these examples represent why I am not a species optimist, never will be, and conclude that evolutionary mechanisms overcompensated human success in my carnivalesque fun and games with excrement over 50 in this miserable last decade of a ferocious battle lost in the will to live. Fairly soon, given our outrageous numbers, the ineptitude of social media’s populism, China’s centrist methods will overtake all but small communities in enclaves centrism cannot quite control, and individuals such as myself will be euthanized, but avoiding extinction? Slowing a man-made climate crisis? Perhaps my physiology is over-reacting to the non-existent Eliot Page insisting it’s a transgender male. It took a small effort to realize I was familiar with the face of Ellen Page and viewed Juno casually, not enough to engage with it as an armchair critic, but these bait and gender switches are magic, aren’t they? If I desire to walk, it turns out, all I have to do is assert I can walk, and orthopedic specialists can loop straps under my armpits, and quadriplegia then doesn’t exist. This is the totalitarianism and deceit of trans identity.