ONLY THE CLONELY
The Daily Telegraph, March 1, 1997
THE DAY HAD been going downhill ever since lunch. “This lamb tastes awfully bland,” I said.
“Sorry, darling,” apologized the wife. “I could only afford clone this week.”
We made Covent Garden with minutes to spare, just in time for the inevitable announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, at today’s matinee, the part of Cho-Cho-San will be played by Dame Kiri Te Kanawa’s clone, Dame Kiri 2 Kanawa.”
“Not again,” I groaned. “Ninety-eight quid a ticket and all we get is the clone.”
“Oh, come on,” whispered Chloe, determined to look on the bright side. “She can’t be worse than Dame Clone Sutherland.” As she spoke, I spied the familiar figure of Sir Georg Solti making his way to the podium, though, on closer inspection, it proved to be Sir Georg Soltoo. They’re almost indistinguishable, but Soltoo likes to wear a revolving bow-tie and a buttonhole that squirts. As he passed, he glanced down my wife’s cleavage and said, in that distinctive Hungarian accent: “Don’t get many of those to the pound, luv.”
“You see?” I hissed. “Solti would never have said that. You can’t tell me that’s an exact clone.”
“I know,” said Chloe. “But it’s his own fault. He had it done on the NHS. And at least this one doesn’t start with ‘I Will Survive’ like Sir Georg Solthree does.”
Well, it drove me mad sitting there thinking that the real Dame Kiri was probably cleaning up at La Scala and the real Sir Georg was getting in a little light lunchtime recital with the Chicago Symphony. Things got worse at the interval, when my ex-wife Arabella spotted me from across the bar. It had been a messy divorce, resolved only when the judge came up with the ingenious solution of awarding sole custody to both of us.
“Mark!” she said. “You look great! Been cloned?”
“Certainly not,” I retorted, and made a perfunctory inquiry about the kid. “How’s Rupert One?”
“Oh, he’s fine,” said Arabella airily. “How’s Rupert Two?”
“He’s doing well,” I said. “He’s out on probation and we’ve got him into a good substance abuse clinic and the vicar says he’s thinking about dropping the charges.”
“Really?” said Arabella. “We’re very concerned about Rupert One. I’m worried that being captain of the First Fifteen this year will leave him less time to concentrate on his violin—EMI did so want a second album. Calvin Klone has asked him to do one of those heroin ads, but we’re not sure. Might be more suited to Rupert Two?”
By now, I was grinding my teeth so much I never heard the orchestra tuning up. As we walked back down the aisle, a young lady complimented me on my cologne/after-shave. “Why, thanks,” I said. “It’s Clone Cologne—For Men Who Want to Smell like Themselves. What they do is extract the DNA from your armpit, put it in an attractive bottle, and sell it back to you for forty-seven pounds.”
The next day, I was up bright and early for my role as Mr. Rochester opposite Demi Moore in the new Jane Eyre. I hadn’t seen Demi in a while, but I instantly recognized her as she stood there naked oiling her breasts in a scene I couldn’t quite recall from the novel. “Hi, Demi!” I said. “I believe we’re doing the next bit together.”
“In your dreams,” she said snootily. “Everyone knows I don’t do clothed scenes. I leave that to my body double.”
“Which one do you want today, Demi?” shouted the director, Oliver Clone, and on cue a veritable entourage appeared—Semi-Demi Moore, Hemi-Semi-Demi Moore, and Demi Moore-Or-Less—all entirely indistinguishable, give or take a cup size or two.
I’d only taken the role because I was still a bit short after giving a hundred thousand dollars to Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign in return for a night in the Lincoln Bedroom and coffee with the president. The bed was incredibly historic, complete with a sign saying: “Abe Lincoln Slept Here. So Did Barbra Streisand And Several Dozen Indonesian Businessmen.” But at coffee I began to suspect something was wrong. “Great coffee, Mr. President,” I said.
“Thanks. It’s Nescafé,” he said, and looked soulfully into my eyes.
“You mean I paid a hundred thousand bucks for instant coffee?”
“Ah feel yo’ pain,” said the President, putting on his sincere expression, and stroking my hand. Which I thought was very thoughtful of him, until his other hand flew up to my chest and started unbuttoning my shirt. Instantly I leapt to my feet.
“You’re not the President! Bill Clinton’s ferociously heterosexual. You’re a clone. . . .”
“The clone with the gay gene,” said a sinister Manchurian type in a white coat who’d slipped into the room quietly behind me. “Normally, we don’t let him host fundraisers except in Fire Island, West Hollywood, and Riyadh. But we were short-staffed this morning.”
“But where’s the real Clinton?”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha,” he cackled, in an oddly Hillary-like manner. “Ha-ha-ha-ha, you poor deluded fool. Don’t you get it? There is no real Clinton. There’s a left-of-center Clinton, there’s a right-of-center Clinton, there’s a tax-raising Clinton, there’s a tax-cutting Clinton, there’s a non-inhaling Clinton, there’s a triangulating Clinton, there’s a demagoguing Clinton. . . . But they’re all Clonetons. There’s no such thing as a genuine Clinton.”
“But what about his distinguishing characteristics?”
“Oh, they’ve all got those.” And I noticed that down on the floor the President had begun humping my leg.
On the way home, I listened to the news: Tony Blair announced that he was cloning himself so that he could stand in all 650 constituencies. “We believe,” he said in unison, “that this further demonstrates New Labour’s ability to fully and totally unite behind the leadership.”
“What’s the world coming to?” I said to my clone back home.
“Relax, have a drink,” he said. “Everything’s under control. I’ve washed the car, put the cat out, had sex with the wife. Nothing special, she won’t suspect.”
“Thanks,” I said. “What about the Telegraph column?”
“Done it.”
STORK REPORT
The Sunday Telegraph, October 31, 1999
A FEW YEARS BACK, I happened to be on a radio show with Gore Vidal, who, for some reason, assumed I was gay. During the off-air banter, another guest began talking about her newborn. The great man of letters gave me a conspiratorial twinkle and sighed wearily, “Breeders!”
Gore may still be a non-breeder, but he’s the last of a dying non-breed. The twenty-first century is upon us, everyone’s broody, and, in case Gore’s wondering, it no longer involves anything as ghastly as being in the same room as a woman with no clothes on. The stork has diversified: You don’t have to look for his little bundles of joy under the gooseberry bush any more—now you can order them online. And, as his traditional market—or, as The Guardian calls it, “the family lobby”—has shrunk, he’s moved on to expand his share of key niche demographics. Now, infertile women can have babies, and so can sexagenarian women and gay men.
Take Barrie and Tony, a couple from Chelmsford, Essex. They’d been trying for a baby for some time, but nothing seemed to work. Then it occurred to them that this might be because they’re both men. So they found a woman who happened to have four eggs lying around that she hadn’t yet auctioned over the Internet. You’d think two boys and a girl would have been enough, but they figured they needed someone else just to even up the numbers, so they roped in another woman who happened to have a rare nine-month vacancy in her fallopian timeshare. After that, it was just a question of getting the girls in the mood: the lights down low, Johnny Mathis on the hi-fi, the FedEx package with Barrie and Tony’s beaker of co-mingled sperm on the coffee table, the check for two hundred thousand dollars in the mail, and the turkey baster wandering in from the kitchen with a comehither look in his eye.
The result of this happy union is twins: a boy for him and a girl for him, to modify “Tea for Two.” Barrie Drewitt and
Tony Barlow are planning to name their son and daughter (or vice-versa) Aspen and Saffron Drewitt-Barlow. In a landmark decision in a California court, the proud parents will be the first British couple to both be named as father on the birth certificate, though neither mother rates a credit.
The babies have not yet been born, but both mother and surrogate mother and co-father one and co-father two are doing well: Barrie and Tony still have a few eggs in the freezer from the same woman so, in a year or two, they intend to provide Aspen and Saffron with a sibling named after some other spice or ski resort. “This ruling,” said Tony, “affirms that gay couples are entitled to the same fundamental procreative freedoms as heterosexual couples.”
It’s fair to say heterosexual couples of the old school did not think of “procreative freedom” as an “entitlement”—like, say, public education or a senior citizen’s bus pass—but rather as, to use an archaic phrase, a “fact of life.” Today, though, there are no “facts of life”: de facto, it would seem biologically impossible for Messrs Drewitt and Barlow to come together to produce young Saffron or Aspen, but, de jure, it’s a breeze. Neither parent supplied the egg, neither parent carried the child, neither even went to the minimal effort of personally whacking the seed up the ol’ vaginal canal, but nonetheless the birth certificate will certify that they’re responsible for the birth—essentially for the reason that that’s the way they want it: Yes, sirs, that’s your baby / No, sirs, we don’t mean maybe. “The nuclear family as we know it is evolving,” said Barrie. “The emphasis should not be on it being a father and a mother but on loving, nurturing parents, whether that be a single mother or a gay couple living in a committed relationship.”
That’s great news if you’re a gay couple living in a committed relationship or a single mother living in several uncommitted relationships, but in the murky territory in between lurk all kinds of unsuitable parents. In Britain, as was reported last week, Penny and Stephen Greenwood’s baby will emerge from the womb and immediately be taken away by social workers and put into foster care. The Greenwoods, of Bradford, who have already had one child confiscated by the state, are both epileptics and, although they insist their conditions are mild and controlled, the authorities aren’t prepared to let them be loving, nurturing parents. Apparently, it could be very traumatizing for a child to see his parent with his head thrown back and his tongue lolling out—unless, of course, it’s at the local bathhouse.
Despite the claims of the technobores, in the second half of the century hardly anything has changed—except the nature of change. Our bathrooms, kitchens, cars, planes, and high-rises have barely altered. Instead, having run out of useful things to invent, we’ve reinvented ourselves and embarked, with a remarkable insouciance, on redefining human identity. In the two decades since the first test-tube baby, “procreative freedoms” have become the new frontier. We began with “a woman’s right to choose”—whether or not to abort. Next came an Asian’s right to choose the sex of his child and get rid of any unwanted female fetus (at one point China had 153 boys for every one hundred girls). We’ve now moved on to a couple’s right to choose their baby’s genetic characteristics on the Internet, a lesbian’s right to choose to be impregnated by a gay male friend, and a career woman’s right to choose to have her eggs frozen in her late twenties, stored away, and fertilized in her forties or fifties or whenever she feels she’s ready to raise a baby. There is a logical progression in all this: if you have the right to end life (with abortion), surely you also have the right to decide when, where, how, and with whom you wish to initiate it. And, in one sense, the culture of death and the culture of new life form a kind of balancing act: if there is a gay gene and straight parents start aborting their gay fetuses, it seems only fair to allow gay parenting as a kind of corrective. Likewise, if girl fetuses are shouldering an unfair percentage of abortions in regrettably misogynist societies, female numbers can be kept up by human cloning—which, in theory, eliminates the need for sperm. And, if you don’t need sperm, do you really need men? Women could go on cloning women until Amazons ruled the earth, except for a handful of gay male enclaves in West Hollywood and Miami.
Human cloning will happen, if only because there’s a market for it—as there’s proved to be with eggs and surrogates. If it were simply a matter of wanting to be “loving, nurturing parents,” adoption would do it. But there’s a biological imperative driving these advances. Since Barrie and Tony are so proud of their “committed relationship,” it must be irksome to have to let Tracie the egg-donor and Rosalind the womb-renter into the picture, since neither woman has any commitment to the relationship once the check’s cleared. Lesbian parents, like the pop star Melissa Etheridge and her partner Julie Cypher, would in future have no need of third parties: the clone of one would grow in the womb of the other—and what could be more loving and nurturing than that? The first human clone will enter the world in a clinic in Mexico or Morocco or some such, but one day she will come to the United States or Britain and endeavor to get a driving license, and at that point, even if cloning remains illegal in those jurisdictions, the state will balk at turning her away because she’s officially a nonhuman. They will recognize her as a legal human being on the grounds that that’s what Morocco says she is—just as the British authorities are recognizing the California court’s decision on Barrie and Tony.
The public will most likely go along with these innovations. Half a century ago, Ingrid Bergman gave birth out of wedlock and it almost finished her career. Now, single mom Jodie Foster is put on the cover of People magazine as a paragon of motherhood, and everyone thinks it’s bad form to inquire who or where the dad is, never mind whether a woman who thinks the only function of a father is to get the globules of bodily fluid into the beaker and then push off is really such a great role model. As always, the dismantling of ancient social structures is more positively expressed as a tolerance for diversity. “There is no one ‘perfect’ model on which all family structures can be based,” Barbra Streisand recently told America’s leading gay newspaper, The Advocate. “If we surveyed human history, we would see representations of every type of possible social arrangement.” Miss Streisand doesn’t give any examples, but you could survey all human history and be hard put to find any precedent for Barrie and Tony’s social arrangement. The reality is that, rather than returning to some pre-Judeo-Christian utopia, we’ve chosen as an exercise in self-expression to embark on a radical rejection of a universal societal unit.
Maybe it will work out. Maybe in fifteen years’ time Aspen and Saffron will be sitting in class surrounded by offspring of lesbian couples and geriatrics plus a handful of clones, and they’ll all be happy and well-adjusted. Or maybe they’ll be like America’s vast army of children born out of wedlock—six times more likely to develop drug addictions or commit serious crimes. Those statistics are part of the new “facts of life.” If you can afford it, like Barrie and Tony and Melissa Etheridge, you get to create your own “facts.” It will fall to the next generation to live with them.
THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE
Syndicated column, May 31, 2008
“SOMEONE WINS, SOMEONE doesn’t win, that’s life,” Nancy Kopp, Maryland’s treasurer, told The Washington Post. “But women don’t want to be totally dissed.” She was talking about her political candidate, Hillary Clinton. Democratic women are feeling metaphorically battered by the Obama campaign. “Healing the Wounds of Democrats’ Sexism,” as The Boston Globe headline put it, will not be easy. Geraldine Ferraro is among many prominent Democrat ladies putting up their own money for a study from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard to determine whether Senator Clinton’s presidential hopes fell victim to party and media sexism. How else to explain why their gal got clobbered by a pretty boy with a résumé you could print on the back of his driver’s license; a Rolodex apparently limited to neo-segregationist racebaiters, campus Marxist terrorists, and indicted fraudsters; and a rhetorical surefootedness that makes Dan Quayle look like Socr
ates. “On this Memorial Day,” said Barack Obama last Monday, “as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes—and I see many of them in the audience here today. . . .”
Hey, why not? In Obama’s Cook County, many fallen heroes from the Spanish-American War still show up in the voting booths come November. It’s not unreasonable for some of them to turn up at an Obama campaign rally, too.
But what of the fallen heroine? If it’s any consolation to Senator Clinton, she’s not the only female to find that social progress is strangely accommodating of old-time sexism. There was a front-page story in London last week about a British Indian couple in Birmingham—she’s fifty-nine, he’s seventy-two—who’d had twins through in vitro fertilization and then abandoned the babies at the hospital when they turned out to be daughters, announcing their plans to fly back to India for another round of IVF in hopes of getting a boy. In the wake of the media uproar, the parents now claim something got “lost in translation” and have been back to the hospital to visit the wee bairns. But think of mom and dad as the Democratic Party and the abandoned daughters as Hillary, and it all makes sense.
There’s a lot of that about. Sex-selective abortion is a fact of life in India, where the ratio has declined to one thousand boys to nine hundred girls nationally, and as low as one thousand boys to three hundred girls in some Punjabi cities. In China, the state-enforced “one child” policy has brought about the most sex-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun—“bare branches.” If you can only have one kid, parents choose to abort girls and wait for a boy, to the point where in the first generation to grow to adulthood under this policy there are 119 boys for every one hundred girls. In practice, a “woman’s right to choose” turns out to mean the right to choose not to have any women.