Part 2: Love Has A Nasty Habit Of Disappearing Overnight

PART 2

. . . . . .

LOVE HAS A NASTY HABIT OF DISAPPEARING OVERNIGHT

February 1, 2008

ARTICLE 6 Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

The Broken Seal

ETI Asylum Seekers Raise an

Existential Legal Question

How do we define human rights for nonhumans?

By Nils Ortega

JANUARY 29, 2008

Hello, Friends and Strangers,

The Cheney administration has pushed back their official information release yet again. We at The Broken Seal have come into possession of documents that may contain an answer as to why, and, dear reader, even I was not prepared for this.

Two individuals of a species called AG-ETI (“amygdaline”) have requested asylum. We know the two only by species code (“AG-ETI”) and their numbers (30 and 31)— AG-ETI-030 and AG-ETI-031. The reason given for this is the same as it would be for any human requesting asylum; AG-ETI-030 and AG-ETI-031 “fear persecution in their home country” and specifically fear persecution “on account of at least one of five protected grounds: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or particular social group.”

Interesting.

Perhaps we can get into the deep, horrifying implications of this asylum request another day, but what we are dealing with in terms of more practical matters is the question of whether or not the Department of Homeland Security should treat AG-ETI-030 and AG-ETI-031 as legal persons. Should AG-ETI-030 and AG-ETI-031 have human rights, same as you and me? The only people who can decide that are the fine, upstanding folks in the United States Congress.

I do not envy the legislative body the deep existential debate that is to ensue in the weeks and months to come—it is doubtful that legislators have ever had to create laws with such profound existential implications. But here is the problem—the only thing we know about AG-ETI (“amygdaline”) is what we can extrapolate from their name, which I’m guessing was given to them by some bureaucrat working for the Department of Health and Human Services in the 1970s.

The root amygdal comes from the Greek word meaning “almond.” Was the name “amygdaline” inspired by physical characteristics, as animal names so often are? The word rhinoceros, for instance, comes from rhinos (“nose”) and keratos (“horn”)—literally, “nose-horn.” I have seen speculation that “almond-like” means we are effectively dealing with a race of ambulatory spacefaring almonds.

But it could be more obscure than that—amygdalin is also the name of a naturally occurring poison found in peach pits, apple seeds, and, you guessed it, almonds. Are they somehow poisonous? It is also possible that the word refers to the amygdala, a part of the human brain responsible for regulating memory and emotion. This theory seems to be the most popular, concurrent with a growing number of people who believe that these alien beings are so named because they are able to influence human thought. Google searches for “amygdala hijacking” have skyrocketed in the last two weeks alone.