Stupid Green Elitism and Stupid Southern Pride

So I've just watched the most recent episode of 30 Days, Morgan Spurlock's FX program. In this episode, a hunter from North Carolina (George) moves in with a family in Los Angeles--one of whom works for PeTA. It was an interesting episode, and George for the first few days recited the counterarguments that I've heard a lot in my classes. For years now, I've taught segments from Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place" in my classes--and the shit really hits the fan when we talk about Singer. Freshmen tend to respond very negatively when someone says that animals have (or ought to have) the same rights that humans have.

So as I watched George spend 30 days with the LA people, I was reminded of my experiences with these students. You hear these things over and over again:

• animals are made to feed us
• we evolved/were meant to eat meat
• God put us above all other animals: it's in the Bible (that one especially bothers me when they don't capitalize "Bible")
• we are more advanced than all other animals, so we can do anything with them we want
• the world could not support us if we all became vegans
• if we didn't animal test, lots of humans would die as a result
• animals raised in CAFOs don't know any better, so it's not really a problem

All of these have a multitude of of responses, but often they tend toward the shrill and dogmatic--when they make any sense at all. Now, I am personally sympathetic with the animal rights movement, and I agree with most all of their core tenets. I do not think that animals are meant to feed us or that we, by virtue of our more powerful place in the food chain, have a right to test on, abuse, or industrialize animals.

But I do eat animals. I eat bacon (or "meat candy" as it is known in our home), beef, chicken, etc. But I do a lot of research on where my food comes from. I don't buy meat from anywhere but the butcher and a local family ranch, and our bacon comes from Beeler's, a natural pork-producer from Iowa. The point is that I don't have a problem eating a cow or a pig or a chicken--as long as they got to live the lives they were supposed to live. I won't eat a chicken that's been raised in a cage its entire life, and I won't eat anything raised in a CAFO.

What was missing in the first part of the 30 Days episode was the animal rights folk putting themselves in the place of someone else whose cultural experience isn't the same as someone from LA. We got the indignant suburbanites who are disgusted that someone could go out and "murder and animal in cold blood." That pissed me off. Because North Carolina is viewed as stupid and backward (and...Southern...), that way of thinking and cultural experience isn't valued at all.

It was actually George who (eventually) made the good faith effort to understand where these people are coming from; they made no attempt to understand him and his life. All he got from a lot of the people was hard-core, unrelenting rhetoric: "I don't think we have a right to kill any animal for any reason."

Maybe I'm going to sound like Carl Rogers here, but beating someone who disagrees with you about the head and neck with your own ideas seems to further entrench those ideas with which you disagree. Maybe George isn't ready to become a vegan. Why not start with the basics: make him understand that animal suffering is just as wrong as killing animals--for good or bad reasons. The worst that happens is that he listens, because he sure as hell wasn't listening when people were telling him how he should stop eating meat. So you maybe have one more person who is making informed choices about where his meat comes from; he is, as Wendell Berry has pointed out in The Unsettling of America, becoming an informed consumer and voting with his purchases. That will hurt KFC or Carl's Jr. much more than standing out there in a chicken costume pretending to butcher Col. Sanders!

It just bothers me that people who are so certain they have the moral or intellectual high ground--the Moral Majority, PeTA, Pro-Lifers and Pro-Choicers, The Sierra Club, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the other screechers on conservative talk radio, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and the other screechers in liberal media outlets, etc.--cannot really talk to people who disagree. Well, it's not that they can't talk to them; it's that they can't listen. They are unwilling or unable to place themselves in another's shoes, to take a moment to imagine why someone might think something different.

That's the real problem here. No North-Carolina-born-and-raised-hunting-man is going to listen to a bunch of white-bread-upper-crust types lecture him about how he's going to live his life. The most fruitful approach would have been to bond over a mutual respect for animals (even if they can't see the respect for animals in hunting, it's there...usually). Then once that common ground has been established, they could move on to other ideas about which they disagreed. OK. Not a big deal. Everyone learns something, and hopefully the better idea wins out in the end.

Honestly, I'm not sure that any of this made a helluva lot of sense. But that's what bloggin's for, apparently.

The Beard and the Board

So I was very entertained last night by the frustration of CNN reporters Wolf Blitzer and John King--or the "Beard and Board," as I like to call them. Lake Co., Indiana didn't report very quickly, which was a legitimate problem that Jeffrey Toobin (whom I like more and more every time he speaks) pointed out early in the broadcast.

The Board was getting irritated because he was running out of ways to dramatically zoom in on Lake Co. and finally took to electronic finger-painting (which he rather sheepishly erased when they cut back to him). The Beard was likely getting cranky because he wanted to get home to the real Situation Room--a 180-degree home theater that plays looped episodes of Grizzly Adams with an IV hookup for mainlining the tears of Katie Couric.

They finally got the mayor of Gary, IN on the phone and asked him what was going on. He gave a non-answer, so the Beard and even the Board repeatedly asked again and again. As the exasperated mayor kept giving the same non-answer, the undercurrent of these questions quickly became clear: "we are trying to make good TV out of this, and your slow vote-counting is making us look bad."

CBS called Indiana for Clinton very early (about 6.30pm here on the west coast), and CNN didn't call it until much later (about 10pm here). That certainly made CNN look bad compared to all-but-defunct CBS News, and you could hear the panic in the questioning of that poor bastard. The Beard and the Board were raking this guy over the coals in their frustration, as if it were his fault they ran out of stuff to talk about and only had cornbread to eat (and, of course, the Beard couldn't eat the cornbread for fear of getting crumbs in his lush swath of meticulously-groomed, virile, ivory face-mane).

At the end of the night, Clinton won and Obama lost; there's only so much "news" in that--especially since CNN et al. were telling us for the last week that was what was going to happen. There are only so many graphical representations of that we can care about and only so many mayors we can listen to. I will let Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers tell me who to vote for; I only need CNN to tell me who everyone else voted for. If they can't do that in a timely manner, it devolves into masturbatory theater loosely based on a political race. (Theater that I'll still watch because I have a man-crush on David Gergen).

Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Bill Moyers

So I'm watching Bill Moyers Journal right now and listening to Rev. Wright talk about his church and the function of Christianity in general. So far, so good. He's extremely well read. He just alluded to Edward Albee, Albert Camus, and the theater of the absurd--saying that church services are not to be separated from "reality" but should be always contextualized. The church services should be rooted in current events, so Darfur, Iraq, poverty, starvation, etc. should be a part of the sermon and the experience since it is often a part of the congregation's everyday experience.

But to have a minister reference Camus (and say his name correctly) is killer. There's no way that Hagee would have or could have done that. So if nothing else, Obama's bigot is smarter than McCain's bigot, and he wears cooler robes when he preaches.

Of course, only one of them is a bigot in my estimation...and I think that only because I haven't seen Hagee's statements in context; those statements may not be as vitriolic as they sound if we look at the entire picture. I have not seen anything but the media snippets, and we all know how distorted that can be. If we--as I have done--give Wright a chance to contextualize and explain his ideas, then we owe the same to Hagee. It doesn't matter with what candidate and/or party the person is associated with.

Equal time and equal consideration for all.

We must Declare War on Gravity. Now!!

Some old numbers and a (possibly) new interpretation.

Back in August of 2006, Reason Magazine ran a story about the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack, and what they concluded was that I have a .0781% chance of being killed by a terrorist of any stripe--and that's "if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity." I also have a .4761% chance of being killed by falling down. That means gravity is 6 times more likely to kill me than a terrorist is.

Gravity, of course, has long been a bane of human freedom. Since Aristotle we've known that gravity was against everything free humans stand for, but it wasn't until Sir Isaac Newton that we were able to more clearly identify the threat--a threat that Albert Einstein has enabled us to fully understand. What we know now about gravity's inner-workings and motivations has, unfortunately, not slowed its machinations against human freedoms. Gravity is a killer that respects no gender, ethnic, or national boundaries; it will strike anyone--the nine-year-old Ukrainian gymnast, the poor Hispanic window-washer, the drunk fraternity boy, or the New Zealand mountain climber. In short, it is a force that will not stop unless we stop it.

Although there is an argument about whether or not the War on Terror is making terrorism more likely there is absolutely no question that fighting an unsuccessful War on Gravity will not worsen its effects. That, coupled with the significantly higher threat that gravity poses, leads us to the logical conclusion that we should be spending a lot more money attempting to destroy gravity as opposed to trying to destroy a less perilous threat like terrorism.

In that vein, I submit a proposal for your consideration. Last year, President Bush requested a budget of $72,400,000,000 to continue fighting the War on Terror. Since gravity is much more dangerous and causes many more fatalities, I propose funding the War on Gravity at $434,400,000,000. Since the threat is 6 times greater, the funding should be 6 times higher than the War on Terror, and this estimate is conservative since the dollar is not worth what it was in February of 2006 when President Bush made his request and since we do not yet have a plan of attack for ridding all free peoples from the specter of gravity.

If we work together on this, I am confident that we will rid the world of this insidious threat and breaker of old people's hips.

Allow me to Hate on the Newly-Resurrected "Daily Show"

So The Daily Show is back. I am thankful; don't get me wrong. But I was watching the 10 January episode (guest: John Zogby), and Stewart was making fun of the arabesque, overly ornate figurative language that the pundits tend to use when talking about the primary season. He was poking fun at the pop culture references that Chris Matthews, Lou Dobb, Bill Bennett, etc. use to describe the Democratic primary--Lawrence of Arabia, Friday the 13th, A Perfect Storm, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and The Abyss.

Jon Stewart is a very smart man, and he has some very smart people writing for him. But the writer's strike has exposed some weaknesses in the show. They show some pundit--with whom I am not familiar--saying of Hillary Clinton: "she is looking into the abyss and the abyss is looking back." Stewart assumes that this talking head is referencing the James Cameron and Ed Harris flick The Abyss.

Except--hard as it may be to believe--the pundit was referencing Friedrich Nietzsche not a 1989 Hollywood project. It's taken from an 1886 book, Beyond Good and Evil: "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks at you."

I would have expected Stewart--or at least his staff--to know this. Very disappointing.

A Reaction to Zizek that Will Likely Mean Absolutely Nothing

Just finished watching Zizek!, the documentary on Savloj Zizek. I like some of what he says, but the bit in which he applauds himself rubbed me the wrong way. It made me put down the Kool-Aid and think about aspects of Zizek a bit more. He claims he does so because like a good Stalinist, he is just a part of history--no higher up than the members of the audience. He points up the spindly but strong strands of the web of ideology, but...

• in his tour of his apartment, he often repeats "this is my..."
• he wears Levi's like a good Eastern European, so he can have shaggy-assed hair and sweat through his shirt all he wants, but he's still Americanized
• he messes with his nose enough that I think he's a coke head (since he looks like he's tweaking most of the time)
  

In his book, he tells the joke about the German in Siberia who has no red ink (I'm not going to repeat the joke), and he associates that with a Western idea of freedom. We are totally free--except we don't have any red ink. The ink here is the language with which we may express our lack of freedom, but I would respond (as I'm sure many, many before me have) that if we don't have the language to express our lack of freedom, then we cannot conceive our lack of freedom, and if we cannot conceive it, in some ways it cannot exist. At the very least, we cannot know of it. So what I suspect Zizek is asking of us to do is to take his word for it, to have faith in his giant IQ and just assent. No thanks.

Zizek evokes quantam theory, so I will bring it up, too. If there is some sort of lack of freedom extant outside our experience, it is just as likely that there is not a lack of freedom outside our experience (see Schrodinger's cat and--to a lesser extent--Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). Until we can observe and/or measure that lack of freedom, it cannot truly exist. But since it is beyond our linguistic ability to capture or express, then how can we know it exists?

Language--and here I am closely following Lacanian ideas-- structures the mind and thought itself; so how in the world can there be a lack of freedom that we cannot express, that is beyond language? That would necessitate a return from the Symbolic to the Real and would in turn necessitate a dissolution of the self and (mistaken) identity. Is the lack of self (or a facade that we mistakenly represent as the self) preferable to a lack of freedom?

I guess Lacan would say yes to that question since the whole point of the psychic narrative arc is a frustrated return to the womb, to the Real.

Happy Christmas to All

An editorial from the Washington Post whose sentiment struck me as quite beautiful:

ON AND AROUND Dec. 25, 1914, many of the men fighting in the recently inaugurated war in Europe stopped for a short time to observe what came to be known as the "Christmas Truce." They sang carols back and forth, then came out of the trenches to meet, play a bit of soccer, share some food. "Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans," a British soldier wrote in a letter home. "[A] party of them came 1/2 way over to us so several of us went out to them. I exchanged one of my balaclavas for a hat. I've also got a button off one of their tunics. We also exchanged smokes etc. and had a decent chat. . . . We can hardly believe that we've been firing at them for the last week or two -- it all seems so strange."
Normality was not long in returning. The Great War resumed in earnest, further spontaneous truces were discouraged in the interest of good military order, and by Christmas Day 1918 nearly 10 million men had died at war, along with some 10 million civilians. And of course it was still early in the century, the 20th since the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, an event whose significance had been proclaimed in the Book of Luke in words that resonated among people of every faith and following: "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men." Literally uncounted millions more were yet to perish in the wars, pogroms, purges, ethnic relocations and other acts of organized violence that culminated in the Second World War, which was in turn followed by a long "peace" in which uncounted millions more were killed.

The odd thing is that so much of the horror has been so mindless -- not part of a struggle for food, land or dominance or even of long-simmering discord between one group of people and another, but rather a puzzling eruption of hatred toward entire categories of people suddenly found, for no good reason, to be threatening, deviant, dangerously different -- the cause of all problems real and imagined.

Some students of the subject voice cautious optimism that the impulse to such violence is gradually declining or is being reined in. But then, of course, they thought that a hundred years ago, too. There was confidence then that the forces of education and technological and economic advancement would move civilization forward into an era of prosperity and understanding in which peoples would no longer wage war on one another. Perhaps by now we comprehend that while there is some truth in this, what is far more important than all the engines of progress is simply to understand and truly feel what it was that moved the hearts of the men who put down their guns and walked across a blasted field toward their enemies on Christmas Day 1914.