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This Week:
- Timeline: January 2003
- Places & Culture
- For Rent: 'The Good Girl'
- Calvin College's January Series
- Weekly Digest
Although January marked the end of the palindromic year 2002—whose latter two numerals are a mirrored reflection of the first two—it soon became clear we were not done seeing double. Clonaid, the company created by a cult that believes human life came from space aliens, heralded the birth of its second supposedly cloned baby just three days into 2003. By the end of the month, it announced the birth of a third baby, and testified in court to the arrival of the first, "Eve," in Israel—despite skepticism that the group was just a bunch of space cadets.
No sooner than one minute after midnight on New Year's Eve, we could see that January 2003 would be about seeing double. In Virginia, where the much-celebrated first baby of the new year was born to a lesbian couple, one of the mothers fielded a request from the media circus to get a picture of mother and child: "Sure, which mother would you like?" One minute before that, my wife and I, celebrating our first New Year's Eve outside the Eastern time zone, awkwardly clinked glasses and wished each other Happy New Year when the ball dropped in Times Square at 11 p.m. Chicago time, then repeated the gesture an hour later at midnight.
Replication started to take shape as the theme for the month. No sooner had the United States committed 150,000 troops to battle one dictator, in Iraq, than a second one, in North Korea, threatened civilization by pulling out of a global nuclear weapons treaty and appearing to retrieve nuclear ingredients from storage. Meanwhile, a German pilot attempted to reproduce the terror of September 11, veering his small plane around Frankfurt's skyscrapers before being coaxed down with no harm done. Popular culture also displayed a fascination with facsimilies, reincarnating once-upon-a-time sensations like MC Hammer and "Star Search", and pledging the duplication of the surprise hit movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding." Similarly proliferating in January were Harry Potter books (as J.K. Rowling finally turned in the manuscript for her fifth book), Neptune's moons (as three new ones were discovered) and Democratic presidential candidates (Gephardt, Edwards, Lieberman, and Sharpton threw their hats into the ring; Daschle kept his on). Only the Supreme Court sought to stem the tide of unfettered reproduction, upholding an extension of existing copyrights, thus preventing copycats from touching Mickey Mouse.
Clonaid critics were not the only ones worried about playing God in January. Two days before leaving office, Illinois governor George Ryan announced he was commuting the death sentences of all 167 people on his state's death row to life in prison. Given Illinois' notoriously error-prone justice system, Ryan told reporters afterward, having to choose who lived and who died would amount to "playing God."
But cloning, we gathered, may soon be necessary to perpetuate the species, because to hear the January issues of popular periodicals tell it, we're not doing it the old fashioned way as much anymore. Splashing the word "sex" across their magazines' covers is presumably a contractual requirement for the editors at Cosmo and Maxim, but publications no less austere than The Atlantic and Harper's, as well as New York, all got into the act with cover stories on the s-word—in particular, the lack of it in modern marriages. Now the nation stands to lose what little inspiration it had, after "Sex and the City" announced its upcoming season will be its last.
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