Has it come to pass that it is deemed morally uplifting to make potatoes `gender fluid'?

Overhead in the produce section at the local supermarket:

“Spud? Spud!!

I beg your pardon. We may be in the back of the truck, garden-wise, with the snooty asparagus and broccoli and arugula class looking down on us from their 24-hour sprinkler beds, but we have our dignity. We have a name, and `spud' doesn't cut it. It's offensive and inflammatory.

And yet here's The Associated Press, an American news corporation, slinging the word “spud” around, careless of the trigger and trauma the word inflicts on more tender tubers.

And so, may I tell you, Mister AP (get it? — Mister?) once and for all that `spud' is classist and vegetabalist in their worst form.

We are `potatoes' lad, and don't you forget it.”

No surprise there's turmoil in the potato patch, weeping in the vegetable cellar.

It's all in the wake of that Hasbro crowd sucking up to the woke crowd and trying to knock the most famous potato in the world, one of the toy company's top-sellers for almost 70 years, off his — deservedly earned — Patriarch-of-all-the-Starches Throne, the venerable Mr. Potato Head.

They have decided to denature Mr. Potato Head in their branding, chopping off his Mister, all in the service of the identity politics that has occupied the leftist puritans of our day with unrelenting feverishness.

In addition to dropping the “Mr.” from the Mr. Potato Head brand, Hasbro also announced it is introducing a “Create Your Own Potato Head Family” kit that will come with two large genderless potato bodies and one small genderless potato body plus myriad accessories, so that children can create their own families of gendered or non-gendered characters in line with what the company says are “changing societal roles.”

Three-year-olds everywhere went, “Yay, finally we can make our own gender-neutral characters. Wanted to do that since we left diapers.”

(“Mr.” and “Mrs.” Potato Heads will still be available for those opting to not go genderless.)

The ineffable idiocy of the effort comes out in the reporting that Hasbro said it was dropping the “Mr.” from the brand in an effort to make sure “all feel welcome in the Potato Head world.”

And this world that Hasbro kept invoking — the Potato Head world? Can there be adults in a corporation who talk about people's needs “to feel welcome” in a … I stagger as I type it … Potato Head world?

Let's face it, until we get the whole farm and gardening industries out of the cis-heteronormative-patriarchal-sexist-misogynist hegemony, root and branch, leaf and seed, flower and flax, who, really, is safe?

While I think of it, the farmyard and crop country could be the next terrain for Justin Trudeau's genderequity analysts to apply their laser talents.

And cucumbers. Cucumbers? I really don't want to go there. Should they even be allowed in any garden of the woke? The very rednecks of farmland, cowboy hats, country music and blatant sexism in a green rind. They are the `ph' word — and I'm not talking phosphorus — of veggies. They terrify the turnips, and intimidate the distaff side of the domestic fowl. “Down, wantons, down.” All I feel I can safely say about the cucumber class is that they remind me of Sean Penn, that is to say, they're aggressive in form and function.

De profundis clamavi. Out of the depths, I cry. Western civilization has its libraries tossing out books, and desexing plastic bobbleheads in the name of social enlightenment.

Has it come to pass that it is deemed morally uplifting to make potatoes (which are actually plastic knock-offs of potatoes, with moustaches or lipstick and ponytails) “gender fluid”?

Just days after the Perseverance rover made a pinpoint landing on planet Mars, here on the one we inhabit, there are messages of homage to a toy manufacturer for “shielding children from the pressures of traditional gender norms.”

This comes less than a week after Coca-Cola was offering “diversity training” (which is actively blossoming into an oxymoron) instructing people who are white to become “less white.”

Sigh. Was it for this that Plato taught, da Vinci painted, Shakespeare wrote, Beethoven composed, and peerless Einstein turned his genius to probing the essential nature of things?

Perhaps there's a real question here? Are we so deep in folly and triviality, so spared from real challenge that, self-absorbed, some are driven to invent social mischiefs which, properly looked at, expand the limits of absurdity and narcissism?

Does evolution have a turning point, when it sharply reverses course? Have we passed that point? Are we well launched on a downward and implacable slope?