Enough with manatees.

I hate manatees.

If a manatee were a human, it would be a morbidly obese trailer park woman in a stained floral muumuu. A lifetime of indolence and a steady diet of McDonalds would have rendered this woman nearly immobile and profoundly unattractive. The manatee regards me with the placid gaze of the dullard doing 50 mph in the left lane. The propeller of my cigarette boat hacks it into morsels the approximate size of pizza toppings.

Do not tell me the manatee is cute or peaceful, as I will proceed to jeer at you and shove a thumb into your eye. And then spit at you, because the manatee fetish in Florida is symptomatic of many, many things that are wrong with this state. Of course, not everything wrong with this state is explicable by the Cult of Manatee. Just many.

Of course the manatee is �peaceful�; its lack of intelligence and inability to pursue anything more agile than swamp cabbage renders it incapable of predation. It is not �cute� either, looking remarkably similar to a hippopotamus turned inside-out, with the eyes moved towards the now-everted anus and the beast can now locomote backwards. Throw a few bristles around the front of this monstrosity and you have the most eloquent argument against creationism going, as Intelligent Design could never have generated a creature this poorly conceived. It is mischaracterized as a sea cow; a cow is at least useful as a source of veal calves and milk and leather and beef. The manatee is useless and unsightly. Moss and crap grows all over it.

My friends, I would not go out of my way to hunt the manatee to extinction, as it is scarcely worth the effort. I am perfectly willing to live and let live. But really, can you explain to me why anybody would put this friggin� thing on a vanity license plate or create a fiberglass manatee mailbox for their Marco Island bungalow?