What Would Godzilla Do?

In this new segment, thermonuclear destroyer of Tokyo, Godzilla, provides his take on current events, controversies, and the arts.

GUN CONTROL:

I am a giant fucking nuclear lizard. Think about what that means for a moment. Not only am I nine hundred feet tall, I am an upright electric stegosaurus that can sit at the bottom of the ocean and wake up whenever I want to wreak blood-soaked havoc upon whatever meets my narrow lizard purview. When I first laid Tokyo to waste in 1954, do you think assault rifles turned me back racing towards the Pacific? Do you think that if I decided to invade Phoenix, Arizona, for some sad, mid-life-dinosaur-crisis reason, that ‘Concealed Carry’ would keep me from mowing down your cookie-cutter ranch-style homes with the tip of my right toe? Didn’t think so. Assault weapons are meant for one thing and one thing alone: killing other humans with maximum efficiency. Which, you know, is supposed to be my job. Therefore, Godzilla would make it illegal for Americans to own assault rifles, close the gun show loopholes, and try to ensure that the beacon of Western Democracy comes up with less myopic ways to destroy each other. Better to spend your time evolving giant robot technologies for my next visit, anyway, so that you guys won’t feel so bad about yourselves when I flying tail-kick your nation back to the dark ages.

MONSANTO:

When I first rose out of the radioactive waste—which a certain nation (echem) put there to begin with—some people trembled at the monster created on their negligence’s behalf. Others, however, took it as inspiration. If nuclear waste can turn an ancient Japanese ape-whale into an amoral super weapon, then what would happen if you substituted sugar for high fructose corn syrup, or made chicken nuggets out of dextrose, strychnine, and yellow No. 5? Well, I’ll go ahead and answer that question for you: a species of super-diabetics. If it’s one thing Godzilla loves, you see, it’s an expertly crafted frisee salad with organic shaved almonds and a poached egg. And if it’s one thing Godzilla hates, its artificially altered food. Being exposed to high levels of radiation as a baby kaiju led me to crave a diet of uncontaminated earth matter, culminating in my written endorsement of the Slow Food Movement after I took down Mothra in 1962. Sure, I love to eat humans just as much as the next mega-monster, but not when they’ve been pumped so full of hormones and antibiotics they can be consumed in place of steroids. As for Monsanto itself, the corporation is so gigantic now I plan to battle it across the American Midwest. So stay tuned.

MALE CIRCUMCISION:

It’s not a well known fact to the world at large, but Godzilla has had his irradiated tip snipped. My father, for all his shortcomings, was a big proponent of the health benefits of foreskin removal. A liberal whose anti-nuclear rants were shoved back in his face as cruel irony when his very offspring bore the marks of the Atom bomb, his radicalism was softened by the realities of work-a-day democracies that developed in the wake of the Cold War and the anti-kaiju discrimination of the 1940s. The fact that he’d developed an acute fear of penile cancer aided his decision, being that male circumcision can be thought to reduce a panoply of ailments and injure the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. There’s all that talk of less sensation, but I can assure you, Godzilla’s little lizard feels plenty. Perhaps even too much, which likely explains the ferocious, libidinal thrust that drives me to fucking obliterate everything in my path. If I had the whole thing intact, there’s a chance I would just hump planet earth until I drilled it straight in half. Therefore, Godzilla says: just allow the parents the decision on their own terms. Godzilla also says that comparing the male circumcision to female genital mutilation is so preposterous it warrants an Atomic Breath Ray straight to the groin.

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION:

Okay, so I know I’d be out of the job if it weren’t for the ‘Fat Man,’ but isn’t the rise of one thermonuclear death dragon from the depths of the Pacific enough to shut down the WMD shop for, I don’t know, the rest of eternity? I have a firm comprehension of the concept of ‘deterrence,’ and what it means to stabilize the global landscape by threat of mutual devastation, but I assume if Edward Teller were here, or Professor Einstein himself, they would both be pushing to cast all of that technology into outer space. So what would Godzilla do? Well, Godzilla would have Mothra drag a cruise-liner of nukes into the Andromeda Galaxy, where they can become fodder for alien civilizations with a little less to lose then yours.

GAY MARRIAGE:

Speaking strictly from a lay-waste-to-everything perspective, sexuality is complicated. Or at least that’s what I told my son, Son of Godzilla, when he came out. “Son of Godzilla,” I told him, as he cried radioactive tears and told me about the ‘funny feelings’ he’d been having towards King Ghidorah (honestly, who can blame him?), “You can still destroy Tokyo no matter whom you love.” With this new found confidence, Manilla (his birth name) was able to sufficiently master the Atomic Ray in time to help me defeat Kumonga, and is now a suitable playwright living in a subterranean loft beneath New York’s Upper East Side. It’s a known fact that some species of amphibian actually switch sexes when there aren’t enough suitable mates, and other animals, such as deer, dolphins, etc, practice homosexuality when faced with overpopulation. Sorry to say that humans aren’t at all different. Personally speaking, I’m a combination of an ape and a whale, which you know took some kink to get kicking. Yes, as long as there’s no foul play involved, love is as universal, and should be as legally protected, as my trademark roar.

GLOBAL WARMING:

Personally, I’d be just fine if the polar ice caps melted. But that’s mostly because I’m a 40,000 ton mutant that can survive pretty much anywhere, including inside a volcano or sixteen thousand feet below sea level. But the world would be mighty lonely without human cities to decimate. I shed a gigantic tear just thinking about a world without hubs of civilian activity, a world without the thrill of Bay Bridges to rip to shreds, or mountain tunnels to collapse. Global Warming would eventually ensure an existence similar to Kevin Costner’s Waterworld, where humans grow gills and drink their own pee. And once things get that bad, this dinosaur’s going to have to find a new planet to terrorize. For civilization can’t be destroyed if it’s already destroyed itself, am I right?

E-BOOKS:

The principal reason behind my love of paper is that I can burn it instantaneously. But I have to admit that novels provide an excellent alternative outlet for the destruction of trees. Reading Lolita one particular boring night trapped inside an ice glacier in Antarctica, the only comfort I had was the feel of Nabokov’s verse under my claws. I swore I could see the words simply jump off the page, making me momentarily deconstruct my own want for destruction, and the other extreme characteristics of my personhood so engendered by the Second World War through the lens of Humbert Humbert and his sinister obsession. But at the same time, with the 21^st century in full swing I realize desperate times call for desperate measures. Although I find a paper book more rewarding, if I want to have more trees to burn in a fiery show of apocalypse, then migrating words to Kindles or Nooks is the next logical step. Therefore, Godzilla endorses the e-book as the future of literature, and the preferred reading conduit of radioactive monsters the galaxy over.

You’re welcome.