Hard to digest

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Hard to digest				January 13, 2007

If any more randy news about what really went on in Jamestown trickles out, we’re going to have to rewrite the tourist lures to emphasize what amounts to an historical freak show. In addition to murders, a vigorous slave trade, the introduction of king tobacco and the lynching of a ship’s master on charges of sodomy, we now add cannibalism to the tricks up the sleeves of these mind-mangled colonial miscreants.

It seems as though the so-called “starving time” brought out the best of their creative instincts and led one bat-brained wizard to get through the food crisis by slaughtering his pregnant wife, tossing their unborn child into the river and dining on the flesh of his liberally salted spouse for days.

Cannibalism certainly is nothing new, and I suspect our colonist knew that he had good biblical precedent for what he was doing.

In Second Kings we find the story of two women who made a pact to cook and eat their own children. The first woman butchered her child and put him on the grill. But after that meal, the second woman demurred. Apparently they ran out of mesquite.

In Deuteronomy there is the note that God punished the Hebrews by allowing their enemies to besiege them. As a result, they suffered through their version of a starving time and were forced to dine on their own offspring.

There has always been a somewhat bizarre attraction to cannibalism on the theoretical level as a result of the process known as theophagy, or eating the god one worships. The followers of Dionysus annually dined on first a human, and then an animal representing the god. The idea is that by inhaling the divinity worshipers become one with the god and hence enthused with a sense of the divinity in themselves.

Certainly there is a long road between the egocentric brand of cannibalism practiced by our Jamestown colonist and the transubstantiate symbolism inherent in dining on divinities. There is a huge difference between the moronic nature of the first and the albeit irrational associations of the second.

So broad has the concept of cannibalism become that these days one can cannibalize just about anything. By over-interpreting or misinterpreting it, you can easily cannibalize a scientific theory or a work of literature. After chewing it up and disgorging some fandangled new thesis you can make hash of Darwin’s theory of evolution or Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and force other scholars to eat it and concoct more mush from your premises.

All of which brings me to the Virginia General Assembly.

While there are some who consider President Bush the arch-cannibal for his mastication of the Constitution, my vote for the epitome of legislative cannibalistic chicanery goes to the Virginia House of Delegates.

While the legislatures in more progressive states are dealing with universal health care, mass transit and the alleviation of property taxes, our General Assembly, despite its horrendous track record last year, will once again devour valuable time on issues that should automatically find their way into the slop bucket of moldy legislative leftovers.

Rather than focus entirely on transportation and other intensely pressing statewide issues and expenditures, they will once again entertain a full-fledged discussion of – and I’m not making this up – the castration of sex offenders. According to its sponsor, this bill will save taxpayers thousands as a result of putting castrated criminals back on the streets as “outpatients.”

Not to be outdone by the brilliance of this proposal, our chef-de-resistance of legislative flesh boiling, Del. Robert Marshall (R-13th), has come up with a new brew of socially mechanistic stew. Having served up gays last year on his marriage amendment menu, he will now turn his talents to a recipe for rectifying the evils of heterosexuality.

His chief ingredient will be adultery, which will now include just about every kind of sex other than that consummated via the missionary position between two consenting married adults. According to Marshall, by broadening the illegal scope of adultery we will strengthen the marriage vows and thus lower our abominable divorce rates. Needless to say, all gay sex will now be adulterous and hence illegal.

Despite a plethora of suggested transportation cures emanating from the Senate and the governor’s office, Bill Howell, the Republican leader of the House of Delegates, has already made it clear that he and his free ride cohorts will countenance no proposal that would raise revenue to ease the state’s transportation crisis. Castration they will discuss. Adultery they will discuss. Restricting abortion and Gay-Straight Alliance clubs they will discuss. But transportation? Forget it!

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Del. Melanie Rapp (R-96th), the legislature trucked down Interstate 64 on Wednesday to open their 2007 session at Jamestown. If we wanted to celebrate the real Jamestown, we should have had a truckload of salt and at least 50 cauldrons of water at full boil awaiting their arrival.

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