Here Be Monsters

Between the 1870's and 1930's
science, religion, and popular culture
warily circled each other,
each of them presenting the rest
as if they should not exist.

Out of this conflict
science trumped religion
and out of this triumph
a secular innate white male superiority
emerged through the name of  'eugenics'.

This became the hook of false reason
on which to justify the holocaust.

The myth of a Nordic master-race
of tall blond haired blue eyed boys
became the replacement for religion
for men who would never look like that. 
That Nordic genetics were non-existent
matter little; the ignorance around genetics
lent itself well to false fantasies of superiority,
which soon became reason to lay waste to the Jews.

Horror was popular in silent cinema,
with the talkies horror exploded, creating 
the grossest parodies of 'eternal life',
Dracula and Dr Frankenstein's monster,
who never had a name, but his creator
became famous through his creation.
The monster should have ben named 'Eugene' 
but such a name would have been
all too human and too telling.

Meanwhile in the land of the free
real science went on the rampage
by sterilising the sexually illiterate and poor
as if modern science was the new frontier
in a new civil war where the children of ex-slaves
and the poor were the new and easy-to-hit targets.

What a genuine science would have done
would have been to encourage
numeracy and literacy for all,
and have a well organised programme
where every woman would learn
about their reproductive rights,
responsibilities, and choices,
within a fairer economic framework.

That would have been the best reparation for the sins of the past.

Last but not least in this carnival of grotesques
made in the name of entertainment there is 'Freaks'
where adult circus performers of reduced height
and other differing abilities survived society
by performing for it, and took care of their own,
including settling jealousy within the troupe,
by the cruellest and most entertaining of means.