SOMEWHERE IN THE FUTURE - Genetic engineers did not introduce anterior cranial optic nerves until 2015, so those primitive, randomly assembled humans in the late 20th Century did not have the benefit of our superior hindsight. Still, even without eyes in the back of their heads, you'd think they would have seen that this cloning stuff was a big mistake for mankind.
You'd think even an ignorant serf from the Dark Ages would have been just a little bit suspicious of the wizards who invented that cloned sheep Dolly. Didn't anyone get the creeps about following something so ... well, sheepish into the Brave New World of Xeroxed taxpayers? Wasn't the species a major clue?
The Almighty Cloner couldn't have made His warning any more head-slapping obvious if he bought us all the vowels and made Dolly solve the puzzle by bleating, ''Turn ba-a-a-a-ck before it's too late!''
And all that garbledegook about passing puny laws to regulate and ban the cloning of humans - ridiculous. Humans have been trying to put Flintstone foot-brakes on science since they tried to outlaw crossbows. How could the same ''civilized society'' that tried out the first atomic bombs on cities possibly dream they could keep a tamper-proof lid on the cloning jar?
As soon as the CIA obtained photos of miniature Saddam Husseins, mankind ran headlong down the mudslide slope of cloning catastrophe. The rest is history.
They cloned a dozen versions of Boris Yeltsin, and still couldn't build one that would stay sober long enough to be Russia's designated driver. No wonder Russia swerved and crashed into Iran and wound up with a double-vision dictator like the Ayatollah Adolph Stalin.
Meanwhile, President Clinton was building a whole Motel 6 of Lincoln Bedrooms just to hold all his cloned fat-cat donors. And Americans were so busy going out to ''get cloned'' they hardly noticed when it leaked out that secret government labs in Mena, Ark. had cloned Bill Clinton in 1972, so he could stay on both sides of every promise, including his marriage.
Sure, there have been benefits. Now that everyone is perfect, we save a lot on health clubs, orthodontia, elevator shoes and liposuction. We've wiped out every disease except (cough, hack) the common cold. Everyone can marry the perfect mate and have perfect children in a perfect community - but who could have predicted that all that perfection would be so boring and annoying?
You can't swing a dead hound dog without hitting an Elvis clone singing ''Don' t Be Cruel'' in a hotel cocktail lounge. And now that everyone has seen the Beatles five or six times (drugged and drug-free versions), we're all singing the blues with B.B. King's clone: ''The thrill is gone, baby - it's gone for good.''
Every city has its own All-Star team in every sport, and somehow our teams still lose, no matter how loud coach Marge Huggins curses and throws ashtrays.
And who wants to tune in the ''All John Madden All the Time'' network, ESPN XXXL, to watch Deion Sanders compete in every sport? Yes, he was surprisingly good at hockey and outran Secretariat, but that championship fight against Muhammed Ali #2 should have been stopped before they needed a Shopvac to pick him up.
Cloning solved all those problems that turned our co-ed military into ''Love Connection in Uniform,'' with a gender-blender of Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Congressperson Patsy Schroeder. So now we have Marines who can singlehandedly annihilate entire Third World nations without using insensitive language or leaving the seat up.
But that opened the deadly door to cloning combos, which created the biggest disaster of all: President Lyndon Roosevelt Kennedy Jefferson. How could we have been stupid enough to let lefty-throwback historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Jr. choose the ''Greatest Presidents'' for that DNA boilermaker?
President Jefferson II may talk poetically about liberty - but his ''New Frontier Deal Society'' has made sheep-like slaves of us all.
And now House Speaker Tip O'Gingrich has introduced a bill to allow using clones for spare parts - if they can be taxed to reduce our $839 trizillion deficit.
I suppose this was inevitable from a society that said in 1997, ''Mankind has too much respect for human life to ever allow cloning of people'' - while their abortion clinics were snuffing 1.5 million human lives each year.
Well, don't come crawling on your bad knees to beg for body parts from this clone. It's bad enough ghost writing columns and editorials for that fossil Peter Bronson while he plays golf in Florida with his Greg Norman clone. I'm not lending a hand - or anything else.
Peter Bronson is editorial page editor of The Enquirer. If you have questions or comments, call 768-8301, or write to 312 Elm Street, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202.
