Wednesday, April 1, 2015

THE GREAT ANTHROPOCENE PLAYBOY BUNNY EXTINCTION


Having failed to turn baroque landscape paintings  into propaganda, the counterfactual side in the Climate Wars has gone surrealist, demanding the debate be rendered "more vivid" with
To save the Playboy Bunny from a similar fate, and limit the conscription of  lagomorphs and other furry creatures as Culture Wars cannon fodder, let  us review the sad tale of  Robert  der Grosse, the gargantuan gigabunny a philanthropic rabbit farmer from Berlin sent to starving North Korea
 "with the aim of setting up
 a breeding program to alleviate famine."
Herr Szmolinsky and his  late Meisterstuck, Robert der Grosse
Alas, the unfortunate uberbunny arrived on the eve of
Kim Jong-il's 2007 birthday party only to be spotted by
one of the Great Comrade's culinary talent scouts.


In a matter of hours,  the  world's  largest  rabbit became the

Dear  Leaders  lunch,  diverted  from a  petting  zoo  into  a

wok,  and served up as an entree' beside Uzbek malossal caviar

and a Zambian hippo cutlet hot pot.


The Hermit Kingdom hasenpfepper fiend's Berlin embassy denied the Guiding Sun Ray and Invincible and Ever Triumphant General ever authorized the asssasination of the Greatest Living Easter Bunny, but his personal chef later confessed to carrying out the  alleged  lepicide, and  combining  the  Prussian Giant  Grey with a giant pumpkin into a supersized crunchy stir-fry. 'North Korea won't be getting any more rabbits from me, they needn't bother asking.'  Szmolinsky told Der Speigel.


Some hope to see his dream's resurrected. Though 50 pound giant rabbits are fodder-intensive to raise, biofuel and gasohol plants spew nourishing rabbit roughage by the megaton,making Lapin en civet à l'ancienne sustainable as tofu.



The tragedy is that absent Pyongyang's orgy of lagomorphagy, the late Robert der Grosse and some winsome Manchu mega-Mopsey might have founded a dynasty fit to catapult Korea into the front rank of  protein-exporting countries, with the leftovers serving to raise the productivity of the DPRK's free-range tiger farms to the level of Princeton, New Jersey.


Instead, the world is left wondering how many divisions of Prussian Giant Greys Kim may send  thumping across the 38th Parallel if his minions decipher the growth hormone sequence of giant rabbit DNA. 




Should GMO Giant Greys escape into the Siberian wilds  the fate of the Earth will be sealed. Gene hopping and the evolutionary pressure that created the snow white Arctic hare could create a race of Frankenbunnies breeding like rabbits beyond the Arctic Circle, whose Malthusian multiplication could upshift  global albedo like the takeover of  New Zealand by sheep, and plunge us all into the frozen hell of a cottontail-catalyzed Snowball Earth.