Farewell, Dear Friend.

Is anyone else upset that Pluto is no longer a planet?! Or even about the way in which its prestigious planetary designation was so ruthlessly revoked?

I’m all for democracy…but we didn’t take a vote to decide if the earth was flat or round. Today, astronomers gathered in Prague defined the namesake of my favourite Disney character out of the text books. How exactly are historians of the future supposed to treat this subject? Nobody is going to care about the dwarf planets. Is society so determined to place everyone and everything it encounters into discrete categories that we’ve now become planetary racists? How is this new category going to be received by members of our own society who are short in stature – for surely they are not lesser people. I for one was happy to admit Pluto into our solar systemic family regardless of its elliptical orbit. And if allowing Pluto into the family meant inviting 50 more, so be it. We could have started celebrating the diversity of our solar system. Perhaps with festivals and parades.

If you ask me, this is all part of Bush’s plan to stimulate the sagging economy. Posters, planetary models, school textbooks – they all need to be reprinted.

In honour of Pluto’s planetary passing, I think it only appropriate to mark the occasion with a little revamping of an old classic. In fact, I think if August Stringberg were here himself he would reinterpret his own words on conceptions of masculinity in much the same way. I call it….

Pluto

Yes, I am crying, although I am a dwarf planet.
But has not a dwarf planet three moons?
Does it not live peacefully in the same milky way?
Is it not wounded by the same weapons…warmed and cooled by the same sun?

If you prick me, I will bleed some spacey substance.
If you tickle me, I will chuckle. Perhaps heartily.
If you poison me, I will die.
Why should a planet be forbidden to
Complain, or its clouds to weep?
Because I am unplanetary?
Why am I unplanetary?

Planetary Pluto: 1930 - 2006
May it Orbit In Peace