And the Winner Is ...

Illo for The Gene Pool by Trevor Stone Irvin. See here for his other great work.

Dear Trump regime:

Congratulations. You have just won the Gene Pool’s first annual end-of-year Snidely Whiplash™ Shitty, Petty Cruelty Prize.

You’ve been vying for this honor all year, building credits, earning points. Oddly enough, what put you over the top is not your most recent monstrous accomplishment, vis a vis Rob Reiner. That got you real close. What puts you over the top happened eight months ago, but slipped past our attention because it was overwhelmed in news coverage of your more universally damaging horrific cruelties, which swirled by in a daily, septic torrent, and still do, to this day. We’ve just been alerted to this one, which is from last April. It distinguishes itself for its combination of smallness, profound evil, naked bigotry, and metaphoric magnificence.

To be quick, back in April, it turns out, this happened:

Apparently based on the recommendation of your chief sewage-master Stephen Miller, the same guy who services your implacable, tyrannical ICE machine, your regime ended a Biden-era $26 million initiative to bring a modern sewage system to rural Lowndes County, Alabama, pop. 9,200. Lowndes County is one of the few places in America to lack basic sanitation services due to the poverty of its residents and the county’s hard soil, unsuitable for digging septic systems.

Guess what? Lowndes County is mostly Black! Biden’s Justice Department had said the area suffered from “environmental racism.” They allocated money to fix it. (Twenty-six million dollars is petty cash to the U.S. government, a mere pittance. It is exactly what the government spent last year to install extra electrical vehicle charging ports in federal buildings.)

Here is how bad the situation is in Lowndes: People have feces bubbling up in their backyards and toilets, particularly after heavy rains. This has been going on for years. One in three residents of Lowndes has hookworm, an intestinal parasite eradicated almost everywhere else in America. Hookworm is spread by raw sewage. Minor hookworm infections cause chronic diarrhea. Severe, long-term hookworm infections cause iron-deficiency anemia, and impaired growth in children due to blood loss.

So, why did your administration end the program? This is the beauty of the thing, the reason for your award:

Because it is “illegal DEI.” Yep. People need to drown in their own shit because — and these are the words of your assistant attorney general for civil rights: “[The government] will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens.”

Clapclapclapclap.

Please feel free to have Mr. Stephen Miller pick up your trophy, barefoot, in the backyard of a resident of Lowndes County, Alabama, after the next big rain.

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Speaking of prizes, a couple of weeks ago we inaugurated the third annual contest to win a free, one-year full-force subscription to the Gene Pool, financed by our mysterious benefactor known by the pseudonym John Beresford Tipton. Free one-year subscriptions were to go to the four people who submitted the best/funniest/most interesting answers to the question: What does the Gene Pool lack the most?

Winner One: Gregory Koch

“You need a mascot. An animal or object to epitomize your fine product. I suggest a stuffed spleen.”

Indeed.

Stuffed Spleen is apparently the national gourmet dish of Morocco. Here it is.

It is a cow’s spleen, stuffed with a seasoned mixture of ground meat, rice, herbs, spices, and … unspecified “offal.” The mixture is sewn shut and slow-roasted, then sliced and served.

Recipes abound. I will make one and freeze it and award slices to favored fans.

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Winner Two: Ed Reeder

“You need some full frontal nudity.”

This seemed like a good idea, so I started image-Googling “full frontal nudity” for some ideas. It took — literally — 24 pages before I found one I could publish and which did not objectify one gender over another. Here it is:

So, that one’s checked off already.

I would like to point out that Ed had to send his entry three times because he kept forgetting to read the rules, or quick-reading the rules, so he kept coming up short on what info he had to cough up to enter: First time he forgot to include his name; second time, his email address. Like Gregory Koch, above, Ed was also already a subscriber, so he, like Greg, had to designate another giftee. Ed immediately designated his wife. That required yet another followup email, because he also forgot the rule of “one to a household.”

Ed Reeder is a typical Gene Pool reader. He ignores instructions!

Also, his name is an aptonym, so I love him.

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Winner Number Three: Andrea H.

Andrea wrote at great length. She is a word nerd, and a fine writer. But she won me with her rarity. Her extreme and … non-sensical rarity.

“Sorely lacking in your Gene Pool, I am sure, are people who belong to my minority: aphantasics. According to one study cited in the Wikipedia article on aphantasia, 0.8% of the population can’t form visual mental images. It was in my fifth or sixth decade of life before I realized that the mind’s eye was not just a rhetorical expression for most people. I find this trait interesting.

“I also have anosmia, ever since I had a terrible, terrible flu in 1995 or 1996. I can taste but I can’t smell.

“And I am redheaded, freckled and blue eyed, so now we are getting into a very small subset of people indeed.”

(Redheads with blue eyes are only 0.17 percent of people, said to be the rarest hair and eye color combo in the world.)

Well done, Andrea. And I am sure you smell just fine.

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Winner Number Four: Lynn O'Connell

Lynn suggested that The Gene Pool create a prize. That’s all. Indirectly she inspired this very column and as such, gets prize number four.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls:

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To those who answered more likely: