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Midwifery, Revisited

Once upon a wondrous time, I taught ethics in a college.
Among the series of 10-20 page papers required, I received
a paper on Midwifery. Yowzer, I thought! Where did this come from?
It was a fine paper, filled with facts and an understanding
of the process of birthing that caught my attention.

The Biology Department, which produced most of the pre-med students,
did not recognize the name. Neither did the Nursing Department.

Whoa! Whoa!, I thought. How did this happen?

I wrote a ten question true-false exam based on
the major points in the paper, including the name of it;
nothing tricky, just the main arguments of the paper.

I asked the student to take a few minutes after the next class
and take the exam. He got one question right: the name of the paper.

“We have a problem, here,” I suggested.

“I guess we do,” he hesitated.

He had bought the paper online. He had not even read it.
He was a . . . oh, I guess I should not tell you his major.

The kid made a career for himself, starting with that paper.
I have no hard evidence, but all the signs suggest that
he is a policy advisor to the Republican Party on how
to deal with Barach Obama: suggest he was not born!

The Birthing Movement! Say that Obama was not born
in Hawaii where he was born. Say that he was born in Kenya,
or on the moon. It does not matter what you say.
The important thing is to motivate the whack jobs to a frenzy.

Today the Birthers, when put to an actual vote, agreed
that Barack Obama actually had been born in Hawaii
where his birth certificate is on file, where the newspaper
reported, at the time of his birth, that he had been born.
Right up to that moment, many of them had said things like,
“Oh, I dunno! I ain’t have seen the birth license. His daddy
was from Kenya, you know. Maybe he is . . . he probably is
an Uhmurrican, just like us who is really is Uhmurrican. Probbly.”


Today that kid has a job!
He is shaping the nation!
He is lying through his teeth,
as he did to me, but he is employed!
But, as with the Republicans,
when the time came to put it to a test,
he flunked the exam; could only remember
what the title was, barely.

“Well, OK!” he said.
“I thought you were stupid,
like a lot of Uhmurricans.”

I suppose he had his reasons. Probbly.

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