Dear Amritsar,
I am a researcher with the Potrzebie Institute of Hate Studies in Gotterdammerung, Germany. We're a non-profit, non-partisan, nonsensical group of social scientists, political aphorists and tuxedo fetishists whose goal is to understand the nature of really, really, really, really, really disliking somebody or something. The Potrzebie Institute is not racist, sexist or cummerbundist; how our research is used by others is not in our control (although we try to draw the line at having it used in party games).
For the last several years, I have been engaged in a research project to prove that animals are capable of the same level of hatred for those who are different from them as inner city (wink wink) police officers. The benefits of my research should be obvious. Inner city police chiefs seem to see them, in any case.
We chose the Sumatran elephant as our test subject. Why Sumatran elephants? They were smart and cheap. But, mostly cheap. When they no longer have their tusks, nobody cares what happens to them, so we were able to buy several herds for less than the cost of transporting them to a research facility we set up in Ukraine. Don't ask. Anyway, one of our junior researchers knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a gal who was related to a guy who had heard of a guy who could put us in touch with a guy who had heard rumours about a guy who could get them for us. And, it's rumoured that he did.
We genetically manipulated the elephants so that they came in two flavours: the - ooh, that's icky. Many members of the research team licked the hides of the elephants in order to - never mind why, the important thing is that there aren't enough opiates in the world to ease their nightmares. Substitute "types" for "flavours" in the opening sentence of this paragraph. In any case, we created two kinds: pachyderms of pallour (with pure white skin) and pachyderms of pigment (with dark brown skin).
We assumed that, because of the differences in their skin, the pachyderms of pallor and the pachyderms of pigment would fight each other for domination of the watering hole, food sources and the TV remote during prime time. In fact, none of this happened; pachyderms of both descents were content to share scarce resources with each other. While this had the benefit of allowing the research team to watch the latest episode of The Spinsterette unchallenged, it did not support our theory.
Worse, our genetically altered elephants began to cross-breed. This resulted in elephants with pallor on one side of their bodies and pigment on the other side, distributed randomly on left and right. At first, we thought they might succumb to Lokai and Bele syndrome, but, again, they exhibited no animus against each other just because they looked different. Some on our research team are worried that we could end up with elephants with checkerboard patterns on their bodies, but they're junior members, easily ignored.
The problem is that one of our major funders - the Hoover be Dammed Institute - is threatening to pull its money out of our research if we don't prove conclusively that racial hate is common in the animal kingdom. By Friday. Obviously, we've had to do some scrambling.
One of us (it could have been me) theorized that the elephants needed to be more anxious and fearful before they would turn on (mutated) others of their kind. There were a number of proposals for how we could accomplish this. We could give them random electric shocks. Or, we could introduce more predators into their environment. Or, we could promise to take them to Disneyland, then cancel at the last moment because of "unavoidable business commitments." While these are all viable options, we couldn't begin to set them up by Friday.
Is there anything we can do in order to maintain our funding?
Ivan Torgborgen
Hey, Babe,
Sumatran elephants? Really? Couldn't get your hands on enough leatherback turtles? The Yangtze finless porpoise didn't fit your purpose? Afraid mountain gorillas would have pulled you apart if you tried this shit on them?
I would suggest that you subject the members of your team to electric shocks while increasing predators in your environment (World Wildlife Federation lawyers would do the trick) and promising each other a trip to Disneyland that you have no intention of giving them. This won't help you maintain your funding, but it will make a lot of other people happy!
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service's sex, love and technology columnist at questions@lespagesauxfolles.ca. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: You are clearly familiar with the rule of three, but have you ever heard of the rule of nine? The rule of nine states that you should limit yourself to no more than three rules of three in any piece of writing less than 10,000 words long, because excessive. If more people were familiar with the rule of nine, we could avoid war, famine and running an otherwise entertaining premise into the ground!