Column: Not quite Nietzsche
Following Hurricane Katrina, the British newspaper “The Observer” stumbled upon one of our government’s darkest secrets. According to the paper, the United States had been secretly training 36 dolphins to attack terrorists by means of toxic darts held in special harnesses. After Katrina, these killer dolphins apparently escaped into the Gulf of Mexico, posing a serious threat to surfers, divers and other tourists.
If you’re anything like me, the only thing scarier now than taking a dip in the Gulf is the idea that there are people in the world who actually believe this story. In fact, they’re all around us.
Being an investigative journalist, I naturally took the issue to campus. “They train dogs to sniff for drugs,” sophomore Mike Seeley argued. “And dolphins are way smarter than dogs.”
While his logic certainly seems sound, I have trouble buying into the whole thing. I mean, am I really expected to believe that the government can train killer dolphins but can’t evacuate New Orleans, write a balanced budget, find Osama bin Laden or even fix the pothole in front of my house?
I’ll admit our search for Osama may have been sped up had we released these killer dolphins sooner, but the whole thing still seems shady to me. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, the government is, after all, run by people like you and me: people who, more often than not, believe in silly things like UFOs and killer dolphins and who would really, really like to be in Disney World right now.
With that perspective, I’d be less worried about the government and more worried about that quiet, geeky guy four houses down that drives a taped-up Toyota and never mows his lawn. The government will always be in shambles, but that guy has the potential to turn his kiddie pool into a killer-dolphin breeding ground.
The everyday things are, after all, the things we really need to be worried about. Aliens may or may not be busy abducting people, examining their insides and implanting tracking chips into their necks, but there is no doubt that, should such aliens exist, they are excellent drivers. Have you ever heard of a UFO crash? Contrasted with the bunch of NASCAR hopefuls that drive up and down Main Street, aliens seem like pretty decent people to share the road with.
The danger in the everyday isn’t limited to motor vehicles. Cases of food poisoning from cow tongue, pig intestine and kim chee are so rare they’re almost nonexistent. On the other hand, rumor has it that Taco Bell is just now removing hepatitis A from its Value Menu. But even so, when given a choice between the two, we will still retch over cow tongue and go order a burrito with an extra side of botulism – all because we don’t realize how scary normal things really are.
It’s no wonder why, whenever someone glimpses Bigfoot, he’s always running away. I mean, can we really blame him for not wanting to cozy up to people as crazy as we are? And if there really is a pack of killer dolphins marauding its way through the Gulf of Mexico, we can be sure that they are not hunting us, but are smart enough to high-tail (or is it “high-fin?”) it for somewhere sane.
When all is said and done, dolphins don’t kill people. Nature left that kind of thing to IRS agents, landlords and tenured professors.
Zach Pendleton is a junior majoring in English.
Comments can be sent to
zpendelton@cc.usu.edu