I just ran across this hilarious (and genuinely interesting) article by Laura Miller in Salon exploring the "sci-fi elements" that have been cropping up in El President's State of the Union speeches the last couple years--the (extremely long term) plans for sending people to Mars he announced last year, the "ban on human-animal hybrids" that he proposed this year (insert your own punch line here), and seguing from making fun of W. to wondering whether W. got the idea from all the sf shows on TV rght now which feature human-alien hybrids (Invasion, Battlestar Galactica, Surface...none of which I've actually seen, though I did used to watch the X-Files religiously every Sunday night, and the chain of influence isn't hard to see), and then from there to exploring the way that science-fictional fears of cross-species hybrids work as a metaphor for racism. All of this in a two page article, of course, so the ground isn't exactly exhaustively covered, but it's all really fun.

Personally, I'd like to, as a concerned citizen, suggest the following for the 2007 State of the Union speech, assuming that W. isn't too busy announcing the invasion of Canada or defending the constitutionality of hiring gansters to assassinate Hilary Clinton or something of that nature to work in the usual genre shout-out:

A constitutional amendment to ban time travel.

Why not? I mean, once we've taken care of human-animal hybrids, we can't stop there, and personally I find time travel to be even more disturbing than the whole hybrid thing. I mean, what if some one went back in time and assassinated Prescott Bush before he could sire George Sr.? What if, a la the Futurama epsiode "Roswell that Ends Well", people could go back in time and *become their own grandfather*?!? How weird would that be--surely at least as contrary to God's law as gay marraige, yes? Or what about the dangers to the fabric of reality, so terrifyingly laid out in the Back to the Future trilogy, of your present self meeting your past self?

I think this definitely calls for some Presidential leadership. While we're colonizing Mars and fighting the good fight against half-human hybrids, we can't be worrying about mad scientists interfering with the fabric of space-time.