Hagfish and Project 2025

Political slime is a primitive and disgusting, but effective, defense

from YouTube video: Hagfish Facts: a SPINELESS Fish

330 million years ago an odd fellow (or gal, it’s hard to tell) stuck his stake into the evolutionary chain ... and stayed there, perfectly safe and happy being his/her quite weird self, out of sight and definitely out of mind until we developed underwater cameras that could watch him mouthlessly munching away on his dead neighbors at the bottom of the ocean floor.

Thus is the hagfish, a boneless, jawless, vertebrae-lacking vertebrate that looks like a defenseless sea worm with too much skin. This defenseless guy should have been toast eons ago. One video I watched showed a shark and several other much larger predator fish chomping into a hagfish, hoping for a lunch tidbit ... and then spitting him out instantly, undamaged.

Did he taste bad? No ... worse. Hag (for short) filled the mouths of predator fish with a rapidly expanding slime which shut down their gills causing a suffocation reflex. Hags have slime pores that run the length of their bodies, so no matter where a fish bites them, they get a mouth full of suffocating goo instead of a tasty morsel.

So what’s this got to do with politics?

1. Hagfish slime is gross and suffocating … but a highly effective defense mechanism. It reminds me of the past nine years of radical MAGA rhetoric which has sucked the air out of our political discourse, using a vile blend of truth-and-trust-destroying hatred and intolerance.

2. Recent American elections grew slimy, suffocating productive conversation and creating barriers against the ideals of democracy.

3. Now, we have a chance to replace slime with hope.

What is slime?

Name-calling, lies, hate speech, voter suppression, the corrupting influence of money, and misuse of social media to spread any of the above.

What is hope?

Coming together to live up to our democratic ideals of liberty, equality and justice with a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

NEW HOPE … NO SLIME

Appologies to Hagfish: they are productive bottom feeders that clean the ocean floor. They are the first to arrive at a whale fall and have been part of the Earth system for hundreds of millions of years, cleverly using slime and their versatile bodies to avoid most predators.

Now they are endangered by fishing practices and climate change. Hagfish are neither cute, nor cuddly, and there are no environmental regulations in place to protect them.

And, by the way, October 16, 2024, is Hagfish Day.

Project 2025 does not address hagfish but it does call for a widespread erasure of all efforts to address climate change. It aims to reverse climate change policies and avoid the very language around policies to address climate change.

For more about Project 2025, click here.

If you would like to know more about hagfish, this video is a good place to start.

Special Thanks to Rev. Jamie Hinson-Rieger, visiting minister at Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara whose message this morning sent my mind spinning down an unexpected channel as he introduced us to the weird and wonderful hagfish.

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