The last time I wrote a “What If” column, my editor, Tom the Butcher, sabotaged me by making the questions trivial and stupid. This time, he again insisted on asking the questions, but promised he wouldn't do the same thing. This time, he made them profound and stupid.
What if one's gender became a choice, in the sense that adults could change their sex any time they want, for as long as they want?
You women are thinking: This raises intriguing questions of identity and social norms. Freed from the tyranny of biological imperatives, would we dare to experiment with the very nature of who we are and, if so, at what cost to oneself and to society?
You men are thinking: Hot diggity, a free pass to the ladies' locker room!
You men are idiots. A man who turned himself into a woman for the purpose of entering a locker room would find himself surrounded by naked people for whom he suddenly, exasperatingly, had no physical desire. Horrified by his mistake, he might even change back immediately, resulting in his being battered to death by exfoliative pumice stones.
What if what goes around doesn't actually come around?
First, the bad news: There would be no orbits – not macrocosmically, in planetary systems, and not microcosmically, in the structure of atoms. Matter would not exist. The entire universe would be raw energy: a howling, timeless inferno, a perpetual explosion with no beginning, no end and no meaning.
Now the good news: No Donald Trump.
What if God were one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home?
Don't focus on “slob”; that's a red herring Tom threw in there to confuse you. Focus on “trying.” God, as we know him, does not “try.” God “wreaks.” His Earthly works have been “wrought.” God commands, impels, drowns, smites, punishes, delivers. God does things and declares them “good,” and that's that.
If we accept that God “tries,” we must reject every contemporary theological notion of an omnipotent and infallible deity. If God is fallible, then it follows that rather than being part of a vast, unknowable, eternal master plan, anything we see might just be some slob's boneheaded mistake. In a sense, this liberates us to answer questions that might otherwise be unanswerable.
For example, people ask, “If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?” 'Cause it was a mistake!! They were supposed to be made out of bowling-ball rubber!
What about the spawning of salmon? Maybe they don't swim upstream because they are fulfilling a foreordained destiny, metaphorically recapitulating the story of Job in an eternal demonstration of the power of faith and the drive of instinct. Maybe they have to swim upstream because God had a hangover.
And what about Pat Robertson?
D'oh.
What if there were some sort of naturally occurring substance that imparts to the person who eats it the true meaning of life?
There is!
It is a pretty, little white mushroom that looks sort of like an angel descended from the heavens or Tinker Bell in a petticoat holding a parasol. It is so lovely and delicate that its very appearance seems to embody the beauty of nature and the limitless possibilities of life and love on this bounteous planet. Its name is Amanita phalloides, and it gives you six to 24 hours to contemplate the meaning of life before the onset of projectile vomiting, cramps, bloating, fire-hose diarrhea, frothing at the mouth, jaundice, thrashing convulsions, coma and death, followed by the involuntary evacuation of whatever fluids or solids are left in your ravaged, twitching corpse.
Listen, the meaning of life is that it ends. What's so complicated about that, Tom? Make the most of it while you can – do good, love your family and don't waste time looking for the meaning of life. OK?
What if you wrote your own damned questions?
I'd need a raise.
Gene Weingarten's e-mail address is weingarten@washpost.com.
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