What’s this shit I’ve been hearing about Pluto? I know this Pluto stuff is a current event and I’ve reserved this space for memory mulling, but this current event is fucking with my memories. If my memory serves Pluto is a planet and not some fucking “planetary body.” I learned this for a fact back in elementary school some time. Seemed like I had to memorize the planets a number of times. First, Mercury, then Venus, then Earth, then Mars, and after that things gets sketchy for me, but always I knew out there on the edge– planet number nine–was Pluto.
True, I got Pluto the planet confused with Pluto the Disney Dog on occasion, and if you had asked me like in fourth grade I might have said the last planet was Bluto, after the guy who was always stealing Wimpy’s burgers and trying to duke it out with Popeye.
But for as long as I can remember and as is currently recorded in jillions of textbooks, encyclopedias, books and magazines, Pluto is planet number nine. But some freaking scientists got together at some international conference and decided among themselves without consulting the public at all that Pluto is NOT the ninth planet because it is not a planet at all but a mere “planetary body.”
Seems as if one part of the this international body of planet makers wrote a report that said, if Pluto counts as a planet, then so must a number of other planatary bodies, like moons and that big piece of shit out there in the asteroid belt. So it these radicals had there way there might be 10, 12, 18 planets, who the fuck knows? Pluto would still have been planet number 9 I guess but it would not be the last planet. The poor elementary school kids of the future would have had a hard time of it trying to memorize all these planets some of which don’t even have proper names.
But the other guys in this international planet making body decided not to go with the report. So Pluto all of a sudden stops being a planet, not because it doesn’t fit the definition of a planet, whatever that might be, but because of a power struggle between the radicals and conservatives of the international planet making group. I don’t have to be there to know that sure as shit somebody brought up the goddamn slippery slope argument.
Whenever anybody wants to change things, the guys who oppose it bring up the slippery slope argument. Abortion for a woman who was raped? Hell, no, if we allow an abortion for even one set of circumstance we have started down the slippery slope, or what about euthanasia; look at those fucking Belgians; they are way down the slippery slope and letting people decide to kill themselves right and left just because they are old and sick and don’t want to live anymore. I mean what kind of argument is that.
So to avoid the slippery slope, the fucking scientists had to cut Pluto out, had to make like a goddamn canyon, without a slippery slope, and throw Pluto into the pit of being a non-planet. This is like fucking stupid because what goddamn difference does it make. Some of the things scientists say make a difference; like don’t drink the water because it has cholera in it. But what differences does it make to anybody if Pluto is a planet or not. As far as I know there’s no Agency for the Protection of Planets that might lose some funding of Pluto is not a planet.
So now what’s the last planet? Is it Neptune or Uranus? I forget which but neither one sounds right to me. Pluto will always be the last planet for me, planet number nine.
