My mother once suggested that my sister should bear my father’s babies.
I’ll give you a moment to read that again slowly.
My loony yet somehow highly functional mother—a retired gynecologist who, as a 27-year-old med school graduate, emigrated here from India with a full-time hospital job waiting and then sponsored her parents and three brothers to come over within a couple of years—once suggested that my then-unmarried sister in her 30s should continue the bloodline by impregnating herself with our father’s sperm.
She was giggling as she hinted at this. My parents had been divorced for more than a decade at that point but my mother still spoke of him as if he were a movie star (at least when she wasn’t painting him as the worst, laziest, weakest, dumbest man on the planet).
Such a shame that his lineage will end with you two girls!
I was already a parent but via adoption after infertility, so that put me out of the running as a vessel for dynastic furtherance. My wombly incompetence wasn’t something I’d willed but you can understand why growing up with a mother like mine hadn’t particularly inspired me to add to the genetic family tree.
When it dawned on my sister what my mother was suggesting, she flipped out and started yelling. Of course.
What is the big deal? said Mom. They did it in the Bible! Lot’s daughters, remember!
I’ve since come to label my mother’s pathological line of thought as Narcissistic Incest by Proxy. But maybe I should have been more open-minded! They did it in the Bible! Think about it, sis: right now you could be raising your own sibling who might just turn out to be a near-clone of the handsome, passive-aggressive, sometimes sweet but mostly ineffectual man who sort of didn’t raise us! Who was once a church elder and all.
A news item last week focused on Elon Musk’s gleefully randy 76-year-old father. He just had a second child with his 34-year-old stepdaughter, who, he notes with apparent pride, looks exactly like his two biological daughters. No family secret. Errol is the out and proud grand-stepfather/actual father of two children whom he considers no less than the products of his ethical duty.
"The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce," says the Musk polypatriarch, like some less pillagey-rapey Genghis Khan who’s been coached by a public relations team. He’s hardly alone. His more or less estranged son Elon—who, as a child decades ago, reportedly tried to intervene whenever his father would beat his mother—has his own curiously resonant ambition. (Apple; tree; you know how it goes). The Tesla founder/conspiracy mouthpiece/father of an “estimated” nine children (bwahahaha) has the twin advantages of a gift for sciencey-sounding bullshit and an unearned reputation as humanity’s imminent savior. It makes him the most horrible and dangerous person to propagate propagation propaganda. (Earth to Musk: WE DO NOT NEED MORE HUMAN BEINGS, YO.)
He’s worried about a non-existent risk for “population collapse” and is probably obtuse enough not to realize he’s echoing North American and European white supremacists worried about becoming minorities in their own homelands. Yes. I am saying that Elon Musk is probably racist but also too stupid to quite realize it. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe he’s an entirely self-aware racist. Wouldn’t be unexpected for a Brit-Afrikaner-Huguenot boy raised in apartheid South Africa.
Oh, but wait, this explains it. He’s not talking about Earth’s population, according to Mark Cuban, who asked him about the matter. Musk texted him an answer. “Mars needs people.”
So he may not be a high-end innumerate after all. Still, he seems to be a raging narcissist just like his father—and just like the recent ex-White House occupant, whom Elon Musk thinks is being treated so unfairly by the likes of Twitter.
Speaking of which, were you at all surprised by Donald Trump bragging years ago about how he’d date Ivanka if she weren’t his daughter, or those Ewwwww pictures of her teenage self languorously draped over Daddy’s lap?
I wasn’t surprised. This is human history, people. The procreative narcissism of conquerors and tyrants and tech billionaires and the occasional looney mother. The incestuous self-centeredness of dynastic families frightened of “contaminating” their bloodline/sharing their power. It’s a time-honored tradition as well as a growing conversation within academic and clinical psychiatry. Father-daughter incest, that unthinkable thing that some men think about quite readily, seems almost obvious when you parse it this way. I am the only person who counts and since I can’t quite fuck myself, I’ll fuck the closest approximation and maybe make more of me.
Of course, obsession with racial or ethnic purity is a watered-down version of the exact same urge. Nearly 30 years ago, the Irish-American grandmother of my then-boyfriend, later husband, still later ex-husband saw me across the room at the first big family event he’d invited me to and commented to her other grandkids, Why can’t he find one of our own kind?
It makes me laugh now because all I had to do to win her over a few years later was swing by her apartment in Queens on Christmas Day with some gifts from Bath & Body Works. Thenceforth I was an acceptable and even charming form of the Other-as-family.
But that phrase itself, our own kind, always gave me the heebie-jeebies and still does. Even when it was implied by my Indian parents or other South Asians, who’ve got their own common cultural weakness for pathological self-regard. At this point, haven’t we all seen enough “mixed-race” supermodels to understand the great benefits of genetic diversity? I’m being cheeky, but also not. Maybe I was overly influenced by the movie version of the Adelaide Farrell/Alvin Toffler book FUTURE SHOCK which predicted (if memory serves) a multicolor fate for humankind, in which all traces of ethnic identification had been complicated by intermarriage and surgery-enabled choice of skin tone.
Wait, maybe I’m thinking of the film adaptation of Ursula LeGuin’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN. Or Star Trek. I seem to recall Captain Kirk cruisin’ the universe to fuck pretty much any humanesque being who (to quote Seinfeld) possessed all the qualities prized by the Superficial Man.
The future, we were told, would bring happy miscegenation, liberated from its procreative purpose by universally available contraception. We would roam the galaxy increasing our cultural competence, respecting other people’s traditions unless they conflicted with ours, spreading our insistently optimistic vision of democratic federation everywhere we went, and getting laid by aliens.
Then again, Captain Kirk was kind of a raging narcissist, too.
As for my mother’s exceedingly cuckoo notion that the Bible justified her obsession with the end of her ex-husband’s bloodline (hmm, right now I’m wondering if this was transmogrified guilt for the fact that she miscarried a male fetus between my birth and my sister’s?)…in any case, as for my mother’s batshit yet commonplace notion that a 2,000YO multiply redacted mishmash of texts justifies anything about anything, I’d just like to point something out, as many others have done: the very first logical leap or missing info in Genesis. Where did Cain, the fratricidal son of Adam and Eve—allegedly the only two human beings God created—find his wife?
The people who take this fable literally are sometimes honest and analytical enough (within the confines of their religion-addled blinders) to come right out and say it.
Adam and Eve, the original parents, went forth and were fruitful, but of course they were the only ones around to have been given this mission. Unless God was his own kind of polypatriarch who’d lied to them about their specialness and was keeping
other Adams and Eves in other Edens dotted around the planet. Nope, for the world to have become populated by Adam and Eve’s lineage alone, Cain must have married and fucked his sister. Or maybe his niece. By this analysis, the whole human race is an incestuous clan.
We are all made in “God’s image” because he is, after all, the ultimate narcissist. I AM THAT I AM. He says it right there in the text.
And also, via his many promiscuous propagandists throughout monotheistic history, one might attribute the following sentiment to the alleged almighty fella:
I ALONE CAN FIX IT.
Yeah, yeah. We’ve heard that before. I’m sure we will again.
An estimated nine children Elon Musk has, by it seems three different women, four if you count the surrogate who carried one of the fetuses to term. There may be more babies and mommas, who knows. He may be harboring some secret progeny. Musk now goes on social media to encourage people to have more kids. There is absolutely no good reason to listen to him on this and every good reason to call him out. Even the predicted global famine that may kill 2 billion people in the next few years won’t reverse the trend toward 10 billion and beyond. Musk’s anxieties only make sense in the context of wealthy Western and East Asian industrial nations filled with—I suppose he must believe, somewhere inside his undoubtedly damaged, patriarchal-abuse-victim, apartheid-privileged Self—the master races.
Or in the context of Mars, I guess.
Nine children, just like Catholic ideologue/Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who philosophically paved the way for his theocratic siblings-in-arms, the ones who’ve just killed Roe v. Wade and may not be too keen on contraception, either.
Although I think in Scalia’s case, the nine kids were confirmed rather than estimated.
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Far-reaching and oh so near.