This year has not been good to the Republican Party. President Bush's second-term agenda has stagnated and the national GOP has been marred by the successive scandals of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. These events, when combined with the Feds' lethargic response to Hurricane Katrina, give just cause to GOP election anxiety.
But conservatives have little to fear, for a new hero waits on wings over the political horizon. From deep within the same \family values"" fires that produced the Bush dynasty will emerge a walking, talking ... (err, make that waddling and chirping) embodiment of American conservatism ... Ladies and gentlemen, the Emperor penguin!
The summer blockbuster ""March of the Penguins"" is perhaps the most unlikely of battlegrounds in the cultural wars. But if I have learned anything in a year writing about politics it is to never underestimate people's penchant for insanity. The movie, it seems, has allowed the imagination of many conservatives to do what the flightless stars of the film could not-take off.
According to the New York Times, at a recent conference of young Republicans, the editor of The National Review ""urged participants to see the movie because it promoted monogamy."" A widely published conservative Christian magazine said that the movie made a compelling case for intelligent design. Not to be outdone, in Ohio, the director of a 153-member church organization claimed that ""the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians."" Notable conservative film reviewer Michael Medved was quoted as saying that ""'March of the Penguins' is the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child-rearing.'"" He went so far as to suggest that these family-friendly themes are so ubiquitous that the film befits the same religious reception of ""The Passion of the Christ,"" so much in fact that he has renamed the movie ""The Passion of the Penguins.""
But are penguins too passionate? This is a question that many conservatives are asking of their new moral stewards since the movie clearly states that penguin partners are devoted to each other for only one year. In addition, a 1999 study in a prominent ornithologist journal found that Emperor penguins ""have much lower mate fidelity than do smaller species of penguins, despite their high rates of survival."" So they are still champions of monogamy, but only in a strictly Hollywood sense. But the picture of penguins as right wing dandies gets fuzzier still.
Most disturbing to the penguin peddlers among us no doubt, is the fact that Emperor penguin society is tolerant to homosexuality. There are gay penguins, and they are not ashamed. Case in point is the Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany, where so many of the zoo's penguin couples were gay that zoo officials became concerned about the lack of pregnant penguins. Zoo officials were so distressed that they planned to ship in four female penguins from Sweden, because everyone knows Swedish penguins are just so damn hot. But just as conservatives see themselves in the birds, so do liberals. Gay-advocacy groups the world over launched a massive public relations campaign to save the gay penguins from ""the organized and forced harassment through female seductresses."" The campaign worked, and the city mayor decreed that the penguins could stay gay.
I think that most people, or rather most sane people, who watched the movie would agree that the lives of penguins are tough enough without people projecting their partisan world view onto them. Whether gay or puritan, penguins are not models for human society. They exist in a realm no more political than the grass we walk on. Their lives are an endless struggle to survive and reproduce, and in this way they are no more brave or noble than the un-neutered dogs and cats among us.
If there is truly any divine message to be inferred from the movie, it is to thank God we are not penguins. Let's keep penguins out of politics until they can vote.
So if you take seriously the claims that penguin behavior is a reflection of how we should behave, allow me to make a suggestion on the behalf of the rest us. Move to Antarctica and join your mentors because I'm sure they'll be happy to have you-but I can't say the same thing about us.
