Originally published via Armageddon Prose:
As evidenced here in his father’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vintage T-shirt, my son, Luca Holden Bartee, known otherwise as The Butternut for esoteric reasons, who just turned ten months old, spends his waking moments smiling.
Every now and then, though, I catch him glimpsing the abyss, as portrayed here at his ten-month birthday party next to a psychedelic snail on wheels that shoots neon lights out of its shell — ostensibly in order to prepare children at a young age to enjoy raves and MDMA later in life and/or to trigger seizures in epileptic babies and thus weed out the undesirables (more on natural selection and its failures later).
When I do observe him, in those rare moments, staring into the abyss, it occurs to me that I’ve seen that exact face a thousand times in myself, as depicted here on a desolate mountaintop in the Carpathian Mountains in the bitter Ukrainian fall cold some years ago.
“A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
-H.L. Mencken
Look at that side-by-side.
Uncanny.
Aside from the implicit trust in my wife’s faithfulness, this is how I know he’s my son.
(I understand that American babies, for purposes of this discussion, do not significantly differ anatomically from the babies of the outside world. What’s more, in fact, my own is half-Ukrainian. Nonetheless, caveats aside, “Natural Selection Has Failed American Babies” strikes me as a catchy bumper sticker campaign slogan that some enterprising politician should adopt.)
The Butternut’s appetite for all manner of non-edible physical items knows seemingly no bounds and includes :
· Electrical cords, especially ones that are plugged in
· Cardboard boxes of all varieties
· The tube of butt cream his mother applies after a bath to keep him feeling fresh
· The dust bin and broom while I’m sweeping the kitchen
· Any toy he touches, the paint of which he’ll strip off due to over-chewing if no one intervenes
Through diligent research, I have come to understand that gnawing on everything in sight is what all babies do as a means to explore the world through the senses, so much so that the phenomenon has its own term: “baby mouthing.”
(My prior ignorance stems from the fact that, prior to having my own, I had little to no interactions of note with any baby. Although I harbored no animosity toward them, neither did I find them particularly compelling until I had one.)
Via Healthline:
“There are several reasons why baby mouthing happens…
While older children and adults get the feel of things with their hands and fingertips, a baby’s chubby little hands are mostly good for grabbing things and accidentally hitting themselves.
You’ll notice that as your little one’s coordination improves, they’ll put their fists (and whatever they’re holding) into their mouth. Their hands and fingers aren’t yet well developed enough to really poke, squeeze, or stroke something.
Their lips and mouths, on the other hand (pun intended), are full of sensory nerves that let a baby really get a feel for what something is. So baby mouthing tells your baby if something is squishy or hard, furry or smooth, warm or cool.”
While chewing on everything in sight is undoubtedly great for getting acquainted with three-dimensional time and space, it would also seem, perhaps, to pose an evolutionary liability, given the unavoidable choking hazards.
(An aside: To be fair to babies, “mouthing” is perhaps not confined to human children. My father’s ex-wife, for example, had an American bulldog called Detroit. While he was strong as an ox with a heart of gold, sweet as the day is long, everyone who knew him maintained and often commented out loud that he was legitimately mentally handicapped, even by dog standards. One piece of evidence to this effect among many was that Detroit once ate a piece of a plastic laundry basket, a shard of which ended up lodged in his colon for months. This triggered rapid weight loss. The veterinarian had scheduled surgery to remove the plastic laundry basket shard from his rectum but then, in serendipitous timing, he somehow managed to expel it from his butthole on the very morning of surgery, saving thousands of dollars in medical expenses.)
Anyway, Natural Selection, one would hope, out of a sense of moral duty — as the designer of life itself, God in a godless materialist universe, as materialist scientists perceive it — would intervene in this scenario in order to equip babies with some kind of anti-choking technology if they are going to be hardwired to chew on everything.
After all, depending on the exact age, they either have no teeth or barely any to speak of and, if they do, they’re mostly useless. What’s more, their tiny throat hole is just waiting to get something stuck in it at any time of day.
In other words, they’re sitting ducks for obstruction of their esophagus.
(Had Ford designed a car in such a reckless manner, the authorities would issue a recall and tort lawyers would have a field day. But you can’t sue Natural Selection, nor can voters impeach it, nor can enraged mobs give it the Louis XVI treatment; such is the benefit of being an ethereal entity invented by atheist scientists with apparent agency but no responsibility. Total immunity from liability.)
In terms of anti-choking mechanisms, I’m imagining a sifter of sorts in the back of the baby’s throat, like the grate on a sewage drain or on the bottom of the kitchen sink.
When I was twelve years old or so, my aunt used to have me scrape all the disgusting rotting leaves out from the gutter on her roof during the fall months for a fiver, because I was supposed to learn responsibility or whatever and probably also because I was cheaper than a Mexican.
During my personal enrichment scraping leaves out of roof gutters for less than minimum wage, I marveled at how much time and effort a simple filter on the top of the drain running down the side of the house saved by not having all of the leaves fall down it and then get stuck halfway and have to be plunged out.
So, something like that, only for babies’ throats.
Modern science has partially solved for this hazard. My wife procured a medical-grade baby face plunger — similar to the one demonstrated by the kindly Chinaman below — that, thankfully, we have never had to use and hopefully, knock on wood, never will.
After it arrived in the mail, I tested it on my own face, which is substantially larger than The Butternut’s.
It produces powerful and actually frightening sucking action — but again, a problem that one would have hoped the all-wise, benevolent entity called Natural Selection that the materialist atheists are always raving about might have been kind enough to solve for.
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Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback), is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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