On Human Speciation.

I have made, through my experiences at EBHS, an unprecedented discovery: there is an undocumented subspecies of humanity. While they poses a remarkable resemblance to normal people, these curiosities of nature have kleptomaniacally incorporated into their being the traits of organisms from throughout the animal kingdom. In physique, they imitate the unwieldy hippopotamus. In behavior, they paradoxically emulate both the worker bee and the sloth. Finally, in lifestyle, they have appropriated the characteristics of the lowly tapeworm and the ignoble leach. Amazingly, these creatures have so long bred among us that, without truly understanding the extent of their uniqueness, we have given them a name: bureaucrats.

To appreciate the subtle eloquence of a bureaucrat, one must first envision a three-legged, pregnant hippopotamus attempting in vain to struggle up a muddy embankment. It brings a tear to my eye to think of the many hard years these wondrous beasts must have spent developing the ability to so gracefully rest coffee mugs on their prodigious rolls of blubber. Perhaps I too, given the opportunity to waste endless hours of my life twiddling my thumbs in an easy chair, would develop both the physical and mental capacity necessary to perform this feat. I will, however, never know, for being a regular human, I cannot possibly match a bureaucrat’s transfiguration into a hippo.

Far more astounding than his physical grace is a bureaucrat’s ability to reflect a dichotomy of animalistic traits in his behavior; he is at once the diligent worker bee and the notoriously lazy sloth. Like the noble bee, a bureaucrat snaps to attention when approached by a superior; he then performs his unique “dance of obsequiousness”, in which he endlessly and shamelessly circles his boss, while spewing forth an incessant torrent of flattery. Finally, often with a bow, the bureaucrat vows to, as a bee obeys his queen, faithfully carry out his orders. However, once his leader is absent, our wondrous bureaucrat undergoes an amazing metamorphosis: he transforms at once from a bee into a sloth. As enthusiastically as he accepted his orders, the bureaucrat now refrains from carrying them out. When he is finally forced, by his hierarchical obligations, to complete his duties, he does so at the pace of the aforementioned sloth: painfully... mind-numbingly... nerve-rackingly slowly. Had I the God-given speed of a bureaucrat, I would just now be completing my first assignment of the year … from kindergarten.

Unsatisfied with merely being fat, subservient, and slow, the chimera-like bureaucrats deemed in necessary that, in order to survive, they must also be parasitical. Like leaches, they mechanistically latch onto suitable host, and stay attached unless they are forcefully torn off. Resembling tapeworms, they grow, uselessly, within otherwise healthy institutions, until they devour them from the inside out. With a grotesque beauty, they multiply and swell within the bowls of a school or a company, until they overwhelm it, and burst forth, a glistening bloody cyst, having contributed to nothing but the destruction of their host. Having had centuries to perfect their methods, the bureaucrats have surpassed even bacteria in parasitical efficiency, as there is no antibiotic to cure the bureaucratic infestation. It seems that the only entity whose underhanded approach to existence has yet to be bettered by the bureaucrats is the bureaucrats' perennial bedmate, the virus.

Like the mythical mermaid, the bureaucrat is unlikely amalgam of human and animal qualities. Unfortunately, like a satyr, the bureaucrat inherits the negative traits of both. Nevertheless, it is not our duty to play God; the bureaucrats deserve a share of the Earth, just as we do. My experiences with the fascinating creatures, however, lead me to believe that their share lies in the frozen desert of Antarctica.