Al Jolson in Blackface

So Google is apparently having trouble keeping up with our exact location as they keep barreling past various jerkwater junctions. Didn’t anybody tell them what the deal was supposed to be? This crazy train we are on stops for no man, and yet today Google tried to honor — I can barely type for wheezing — Nettie Stevens. She, together with Edmund Beecher Wilson, claimed that they had discovered what we now know to be the meaningless hetero-normative concept of sex differentiation based on XX and XY chromosomal bigotries. They pulled this stunt — get this, people — back in 1905. And people are still buying it! Google bought it!

In sexual liberation terms, we were scarcely out of the 1800’s, still in our nonage. We have progressed more than a century since then, and so we are plainly 111 solar-based knowledge units past all those prejudiceries.

Get a load of this picture of Nettie off to the right. That is correct, fellow revolutionaries! She clearly made up that XX/XY micro-aggression (the kind of aggression you can see with a microscope) because she was all bundled up in gender stereotypes. I mean, look at that hat. And her dress is buttoned up to the neck, as though Queen Victoria herself had just died a few years before this, which she had. Google is in thrall to a Victorian scientist.

Not at all like the sexy scientists in the realistic movies of today. You know, the kind that . . . not that sexy actually means anything anymore. Actually, never mind this line of argument. False alarm. Getting free of this XY foolishness requires constant vigilance. None of us are immune.

Still, for the most part we have liberated ourselves well past all that antiquated nonsense, and so it is past time for Google to get a grip. I propose heavy fines, at a level that Google would notice. I can scarcely believe they need to be instructed in this. Google most likely has an HR department the size of Rhode Island, and they should be every bit as progressive. Who let this get by them? Who was asleep at the switch? Don’t they have internal review processes?

Ignore what’s under the microscope. Ignore those people, like Nettie Stevens, who refused to ignore what was under the microscope. Relegate them to the disgraced position of those who first discovered the influence of the four humors. Particularly phlegm.

This is a new day. We turn away from our old bigoted benightedness, and turn our faces to the new dawn. We should expect that — within our lifetimes — Bruce Jenner will be seen as the same kind of sexual pioneer, doing for her kind the same kind of service that Al Jolson in blackface did for his fellow African-Americans.