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Monkey Genes The election is over and the war begins in earnest. By Susan Zakin WELCOME TO THE DARK AGES. The real war is over resources. It always has been, only now the ideological smokescreen has cleared unless you happen to be among the Great Stupid Masses who get their news from television. Last week, TV pundits gibbered about Ashcroft and Chavez while stealth Department of Interior appointment Gale Norton, a.k.a. "James Watt in a dress," looked like she was about to fly in under the radar until someone unearthed a speech she gave about the greatness of the Confederacy. As if crowing over their recent partisan putsch, the U.S. Supreme Court turned back two decades of environmental protection by ruling that the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate wetlands unless they are "navigable" or abut navigable waterways or their tributaries. So much for the Clean Water Act's protection for arroyos in Tucson. Chalk up the first casualty of the Bush Kristallnacht. Nothing has changed, really, but we can take comfort in the fact that now things are out in the open. "Hi, I'm an American and my country is a corporation registered in Delaware." The counteroffensive has also begun. Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck, the most brilliant man to hold that post since Yalie aristocrat Gifford Pinchot persuaded Teddy Roosevelt to start the agency back in the 'teens, declared war on behalf of conservationists by stopping all cutting of old-growth trees. This uncharacteristically crude move by the usually careful and systematic Dombeck followed a more leisurely administration decision to put more than 50 million acres of roadless land off-limits to logging. This move was supported by more than 2 million Americans who weighed in with letters, e-mails and phone calls. Dombeck promised to stay in office until the corporate barons kick him out. My guess is that won't take long. At least Dombeck will make it tough for Shrub to turn back the clock. But this is hardly a one-front war. The New York Times last week carried a full-page ad from conservationists practically begging President Bill Clinton to declare the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a national monument. The coastal plain has been in play for almost 20 years, with oil companies clamoring to exploit it and environmentalists lobbying for full-tilt protection for the place they call "the American Serengeti." Clinton refused to add the Arctic Refuge to the list of recently declared monuments. (By the way, if you think those monuments are a big deal, think again. A scary number of them are in the hands of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which hasn't yet convinced me that it no longer deserves its time-honored nickname "The Bureau of Livestock and Mining.") But if you had asked me a year ago to pick a legacy move for Clinton, I would have chosen protection for the coastal plain, which has the iconic power of Alaska to help sway the public. Now I think Clinton is right to leave the calls on both the Arctic Refuge and a stepped-up missile defense to the Shrubster. George W. Bush will hammer the first nail in his own coffin when and if he lets his marauding oil buddies loose on Alaska. Let him do it. Shrub had better hope that the Bible he puts his hand on this Friday has the Comeback Kid's crib notes scribbled in the margins. What can I say? The idiot supporters of Ralph Nader have gotten their wish. The presidency of George W. Bush already promises to be the most anti-environmental in U.S. history. Nader's robust defeat hasn't chastened circular firing squad leftists like Alexander Cockburn, who was booted off the Village Voice more than a decade ago after taking money from a Palestinian support group. Cockburn told his readers in The Nation not to be fooled into supporting mainstream Washington, D.C. environmental groups. Don't fork over your hard-earned (or undeserved dotcom) cash to those bloated capitalist suckups, wrote Cockburn. Donate to small, feisty environmental groups that have no political presence in Washington. Until the Bush coup, I doled out similar advice. But the game has changed. Now is the time to support the big boys. That means the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Earthjustice. They may not wear Birkenstocks and eschew animal products, but they have the taxonomy of the Washington, D.C. power structure tattooed on their brains. We need to supply them with Arnold-size weaponry (a.k.a. big bucks) and let them get ugly. Strange, but as I face the prospect of going 'round one more time with jackals like Cheney and Bush, I am haunted by the photograph of a genetically engineered baby monkey that I saw on the New York Times website. Scientists inserted a marker gene into a monkey egg, fertilized the egg, and came out with this smart, vulnerable-looking baby primate. Researchers plan to produce a whole herd of these monkeys, inserting genes that predispose them to a human disease so they can research cures. We share 98 percent of our genetic material with chimpanzees. We're not a lot farther from monkeys, baboons and gorillas. The photograph of the genetically engineered baby monkey showed a hand with dark nails that looked strangely like a woman's manicured hand. It gave me the shivers. Primates are among the most endangered of the world's animals. As the presidency of George W. Bush turbocharges the commodification of civic life, we're moving even faster toward a creepy, decadent world where oil rigs replace jungles and Baby Boomers live forever so they can pay top dollar for wonder drugs. This is a bad dream in which both human and animal life is perverted for the crass, stupid and, worst of all, unimaginative goal of simply making money. What I want to know is this: If it's just a dream, when do I wake up?
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