July 2

Walking back along Bloor after a sub-sandwich lunch today, I passed a piece of cardboard on the sidewalk. With some felt-pen writing on it.

Ever the curious little observer, I stopped, circled back, and bent over to read what it said.

“Will fuck for a ride.” In what was obviously a girl’s handwriting.

Well, I hope she got a good “ride” out of that. “Paradise by the dashboard light,” and all. Makes me wish I still had a car. Public transit just doesn’t have the same effect on women.

I’ve never hitchhiked. Ever. The closest I’ve come is re-reading Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy every few years.

So it’s not surprising that I’ve never been picked up by, say, even one redneck who had a morbid curiosity about the sexual life of the hippie, or had a stereotyped image of the hippie as an inexhaustible sex-machine with oversized genitals and a vast store of experiences, immensely varied.

Specifically, no hick or Bay Street MBA has ever ended up wanting me to expose myself to him, saying he had never seen a hippie naked.

For that, I am extremely grateful.

Still, it does bring up the whole issue of male genital size and its evolutionary purposes.

Ejaculated sperm can live for from two to seven days in the vaginal tract—they are not ones to “go gentle into that dark night.” Unless, of course, they were released as a product of tender lovemaking. In the dark night. In which case they might well have gone there gently enough.

So, if there’s jizz in a given Happy Place from more than one lucky “donor” at any given time, the more spunk that came from Guy #1, the more likely he’ll be the father, passing his genes onto the offspring.

Hence the evolutionary development of larger male genitalia among groups of animals where there are higher degrees of “parental uncertainty.”

Chimpanzees, for example, are extreme sluts—far worse than hippie chicks in the ’60s. While human females average 1.1 male sex partners per birth, chimp females average thirteen. Conversely, the male chimps’ ratio of testicle size to body weight is more than three times that of human males.

That’s what happens when you’re a society of chimp-pimps and monkey-whores.

It works the same way for us “naked apes,” though. So basically, the only way you could ever get notably larger-than-average male genitalia in any relatively isolated group of human mammals is if both the men and the women there had been sexually promiscuous (and too dumb to invent or use contraception) for many generations.

Which is why it really surprised me to read, in Dan Savage’s syndicated “Savage Love” column a few years after I moved to Toronto, of a young black woman who was lamenting how she was “used to ‘brothas’ who have larger, longer-lasting ‘equipment’” than her current, small-dicked white boyfriend. (Dan’s response: “Break up with this boy and go find yourself a long-lasting, big-dicked, freaked-out brotha.”)

Racist stereotypes never die easily, do they? Least of all when it comes to black people. Especially, well-hung blacks like Jesse Jackson (affair with a staffer, resulting in a child, Ashley) and Al Sharpton. In their attitudes toward white people, I mean.

Sharpton, for example, was quoted as saying to an audience at Kean College in 1994 that “White folks was [sic] in caves while we was [sic] building empires ... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them [sic] Greek homos ever got around to it.”

The irony there is that one of the major “black history” claims of contemporary Afrocentrists is that Socrates himself was black. Which would presumably mean that blacks not only invented philosophy, mathematics, and bad grammar, but homosexuality too.

Reverend Jackson, for his own part, apparently channeling his inner “eighth dwarf,” led students around Stanford University in 1988 chanting, “Hey hey, ho, ho, Western Civ [as a required liberal-arts course] has got to go”—an event “considered by some critics to mark the coming-of-age of academic political correctness.”

Jackson is also a “friend and ally” of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. That Nation teaches that black people were the original humans, and that whites are only “potential humans.” Plus some even more out-of-this-world ideas, from a Meet the Press interview with Farrakhan in 1997:

[Tim Russert:] Henry Louis Gates ... asked you whether you still subscribe to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad on Yakub, a black scientist who 6,600 years ago created the white man, and that by the end of the twentieth century, a spaceship will come and rain down upon white people and people who don’t embrace Islam. Do you subscribe to the teachings of Yakub, that Yakub, the black scientist, created the white man?

[Farrakhan:] I subscribe to every word that the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught us.

Until Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in 1964, knowing his life was in danger for doing that—he was assassinated in 1965—he promoted the same science-fiction teachings. And more:

White people are born devils by nature....

Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people.... Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee.

And when you’re eating fish, you ask for white wine. So? This is genetic science? Like, Gregor Mendel meets Juan Valdez?

Elsewhere, Farrakhan labeled the Jews, Palestinian Arabs, Koreans and Vietnamese as “bloodsuckers,” for allegedly taking from the black community but giving nothing back in return.

Farrakhan later confirmed that he is neither a racist nor anti-Semitic.

Enlarging on that same theme in a speech in 1994, the Supreme Minister of the Nation of Islam claimed: “Murder and lying comes easy for white people.”

Enlarging even further on that theme, in 1992 filmmaker Spike Lee stated:

A lot of people will have to do a lot of explaining on AIDS one day. All of a sudden, a disease appears out of nowhere that nobody has a cure for, and it’s specifically targeted at gays and minorities (i.e., Hispanics and blacks). The mystery disease, yeah, about as mysterious as genocide.

I’m convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. They got one thing wrong, they never realized it couldn’t just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out.

A year earlier, comedian Bill Cosby had reportedly claimed that the same illness was “started by human beings to get after certain people they don’t like”—you know, like formerly cutting-edge comics starring in lame, 1980s, father-knows-best sitcoms. And, in the July 1999 issue of Vanity Fair, Will Smith floated the idea that “possibly AIDS was created as a result of biological-warfare testing.”

All of which makes Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s probable plagiarizing of his own doctoral thesis, and his “notorious fondness for booze and for women a good deal younger than his wife,” look pretty mild by comparison, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, Farrakhan’s former chief spokesperson, Khallid Muhammad, may have had a point when he allegedly said: “The old no-good Pope—you know that cracker [i.e., honky, not a malicious hacker], somebody needs to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.”

Not to be outdone, in January of 1984 Jesse Jackson reportedly referred to Jews as “Hymies” and to New York City as “Hymietown.”

We all remember Hymie the robot from the classic Get Smart TV series, along with agents 86 and 99. Yes, Hymie was based on now-obsolete analog technology, with that ¼-inch reel-to-reel tape in his chest. But somehow, that made him all the more loveable than anything Asus or Intel have put out since then.

But if, as Reverend Jackson has indicated, Hymie-like robots already control the political process and the media in Gotham City, what’s next? Hollywood?

What will our culture look like in ten or twenty years, if the “Hymies” of the world are allowed to surreptitiously foist their special-interest robot politics on us, via movie screens across North America?

A chilling thought. Yet it’s already happening.

Star Wars’ R2-D2 and C-3PO. RoboCop. Terminator. Bicentennial Man. Star Trek’s Mr. Data. Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet. All of them, clear evidence of the “Hymie” bias in Hollywood. All of them, clear attempts at generating sympathy for the “Hymie” agenda.

So, in that context, Jackson doesn’t seem half so paranoid as you might otherwise have thought, does he? No moreso, at least, than the average B-movie “town-crazy,” who tried his best to warn the people around him about the latest alien danger.

Um, but regarding “them Greek homos” ... the phrase “Emergency Cancellation Archimedes” comes to mind.