UPDATE!!: Wherein I direct you to Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Excellent in large part because it manages to remain levelheaded in that New Yorker sort of way, which as I mentioned previously is not something that people writing or speaking either on the subjects of pets or vegetarianism manage to do very often.
For example, she manages to succinctly sum up the crux of the problem when she writes:
How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” Unlike Foer’s two previous books, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” his latest is nonfiction. The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,” Foer writes.
Like I said in my fairly recent post on the subject, while there are certain ethical issues at stake in my view towards animals, it is more interesting for me to think how 'we' and various other cultures imagine humans relation to (various kinds of) animals or more generally how 'humaness' and 'animality' is variously constructed and understood. The fact that most people I know and meet alternatively fawn over their pets and dismiss or even mock any sympathetic sentiment for any other kind of animal is thus interesting to consider, though only facilitates the most defensive kind of intellectual engagement on the topic of animals, if that. Which is ok, because I get the feeling that most people would rather not be so engaged.
UPDATE!!: The economy still sucks. Last week's employment numbers made me more anxious about a right wing populist resurgence than I had been in, well, little over a year. My previous posts on economic topics suggested that the initial decisions to save the economy (in Warren Buffett's analogy, the patient on the table) were not ideologically neutral, but in fact shaped considerably by political and ideological concerns. Turns out the most pragmatic and effective option would have been to pass through a much bigger stimulus, and a policy towards banks (nationalization, for example) that actually increased lending, stopped foreclosures, and discouraged risky activity (perhaps by forcibly modifying executive compensation schemes), and dealt with the 'too big to fail' dynamic that necessitated the bailouts in the first place. Of course none of this happened, evidently because the advice of many leading economists including former IMF chiefs was too left wing and anti-capitalist for a newly elected, supposedly progressive president with a strong democratic majority and a mandate to reimagine this country's economic structures. We'll see if the upcoming financial regulation bills do something close to this.
The one thing that hasn't changed between my initial post and now is that I still don't have a degree in economics. I'm just another libtard that agrees with everything Paul Krugman writes. That being said, I'd rather side with him than the technocratic, Goldman-Sachs "pragmatists" currently in office. For them, I'll direct you to another of my previous posts in saying that all of them must go.
Inspired by Mikey-Mike (as always) here is my top 20 of the decade. Plus a few more. Per his rules no repeat artists (though I cheat in one case...). I think a top 20 albums list will be much harder, because, were there really 20 great albums released this decade? I don't know.
Radiohead - Morning Bell Animal Collective - Leaf House Lightning Bolt - Assassins Dirty Three - I really should've gone out last night Bonnie Prince Billy - Bed is for sleeping Arab Strap - Screaming in the trees Sonic Youth - Rain on tin Yo La Tengo - Madeline Gillian Welch - I dream a highway Vladislav Delay - Pietola Clipse - Keys open doors Songs: Ohia - Didn't it rain Fugazi - Life and Limb The Libertines - Horror show Pulp - Trees Cat Power - Good Woman Arcade fire - Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) Iron and wine - upward over the mountain Nas - One mic Tim Hecker - The work of art in the age of cultural overproduction
++ ...and you will know us by the trail of dead - Another morning stoner Sparklehorse - apple bed Camera Obscura - Knee Deep at the Npl Kings of Convenience - Homesick Stars - reunion MIA - Galang The streets - has it come to this Air - Surfing on a Rocket Kid 606 - Never Underestimate the Value of a Holler Daedelus - Elegy (at last) Luomo - Synkro Broadcast - before we begin My Morning Jacket - the way that he sings The books - take time
As my friends know, I have what is considered to be a somewhat idiosyncratic view towards animals. On the one hand, I am fairly uncomfortable around pets. This is especially true of large, jumpy dogs which I find frightening, but also other animals. I don't understand the point of petting, playing with, holding, or talking to cats, for example, or observing the behavior of fish swimming around in a tank. On the other hand, I'm vegetarian, and more sympathetic to militant veganism than most people. For all practical purposes, I'm ok with speaking in moral terms about the animal industry: it's wrong (it's also nearly impossible to live an animal-free lifestyle, even if you think you're being vegan). I even marched with PETA in last year's pride parade in SF, pictured above (I needed to get more near-naked girls in this blog...I don't have many readers right now, ok?!).
If I've found it at times difficult to gently convince people to examine the material and social conditions behind animal consumption, then I would have to say prompting any sort of critical reflection from anyone on the subject of pets is basically impossible. People love their pets, their pets love them, and that's the end of it. So instead of attempting to write an opus on the subject, I'd like to instead get at the subject by presenting incongruities in views towards animals which confuse me but seemingly not many people I meet.
Take the case of Michael Vick, who despite spending two years in jail for dog fighting, is still being vigorously protested as he attempts his comeback ("what Vick did was mild compared to child molestation," says one such protester). Even putting aside the fact that Vick's case had probably as much to do with the fact that he was a flashy, African-American athlete in the south, a sport in which animals tear each other apart and then are electrocuted is quite obviously cruel and should be banned.
Even given this, the fury unleashed by the Vick case bewilders me. As Earl Hutchinson writes:
"Countless numbers of pro football players have committed rape, physical assaults, and armed robberies. They have been inveterate spouse and girlfriend abusers and have even been accused of double murder. Yet none of them have ever had an airplane fly over their training camp with a banner that read abuser, killer, robber, assailant, or thug. None have ever been taunted, jeered, and harangued by packs of sign-waving demonstrators screaming for their blood when they showed up at the courthouse. None of them have ever brought the wrath of the entire sports world -- sportswriters, fans, league officials, advertisers, sports talk jocks, and bloggers down on their heads. None have ever had senators, congresspersons, and packs of advocacy groups publicly demand that they be drummed out of their profession."
I don't get this. If it is cruel to mercilessly kill a dog when it can no longer fight (and it is), isn't also cruel to put down a racing horse that has a broken leg? Shouldn't horse racing also be banned? And if we need to euthanize that horse because the life it would live with a likely-infected broken leg - sedentary, full of antibiotics, prone to disease - then shouldn't we also be concerned about the 10 Billion cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys that spend their lives in worse fashion and die every year in this country? And yet the same sportscasters, so full of bile for Vick, were tripping over themselves a year earlier to mock PETA for advocating for microfiber NBA basketballs over traditional leather ones. And, when some NFL players can commit manslaughter and get 30 days, was Michael Vick such a danger to society that he had to spend two years in prison during the prime of his career? What am I missing here?
Of course I'm skipping over a lot: the insanity of our justice system, the aforementioned issue of race as well as that of celebrity, the inherently condescending nature of sports "journalism." Sports shock-jocks and peta protesters occupy extremes of media sensationalism. Yet given the many fast food commercials one sees during football games, it is inevitable that there are many people who judge Vick harshly for his cruelty to animals while at the same time engaging in such cruelty at an industrial scale. This, much in the same way that their are "animal lovers" and pet owners who would abhor any cruelty toward one type of animal but are extremely comfortable with cruelty towards another kind of animal.
While there may be a moral hypocrisy involved here, in general it is not interesting to look at this cultural phenomenon in moralistic terms. More likely, the terms 'animal' and 'human' need to be qualified instead of naturalized, as they are not categories which consistently and accurately describe the myriad of relationships we have to other living beings. Clearly the first-world dog would seem to us in this country to be more 'human' the the third-world child who makes the dog toy (or at least we act that way). Instead, I might suggest that pets, like other objects of consumption, have a certain use-value; in their case, anthropomorphsized affection and entertainment. So, the disparity in our cultural relationship to dogs, for example, compared to our relationship to pigs means that it is somewhat meaningless to speak them both as 'animals' in the same way.
There is a historical aspect to this provisional thesis, but it's not of the disingenuous, man's-best-friend kind. Rather it's this: that the tendency to construct and broadly conceive of 'nature' in terms of its usefulness for human endeavors, mostly exploitative, is fairly longstanding and not necessarily in opposition to the romantic pretensions of environmentalists and "animal lovers" alike. I realize that this involves a somewhat tricky semi-universalism, wherein dogs and pigs are not both 'animals' in the same way, but both are part of some vaguely biological 'nature'. I'll have to think about this.
But again, avoiding the opus here...
I'll leave you with Jim Rome in an oddly self-aware clip:
I haven't had the chance to post in a little while, being as I was preoccupied with finding and now moving into a new apartment (in the city!), and also a lingering incomplete for class that I had to finish.
In the meantime, I'll rely, as usual, on the craziness of the American right, now seemingly undergoing either a renaissance (did someone say 'birth'?!) or a last gasp (because their demographic was rationed?) or maybe neither. I might try to devote a future post to the nonsensical contradictions that infuse this movement, but maybe I shouldn't waste anyone's time with what's obvious.
In any case, here's a week's worth of conspiracy theories. Enjoy.
ps. favorite moments 3:23 - to the chalkboard! 4:45 - pointillism! 5:52 - "all it will take is an event, or an emergency." indeed. 7:41 - things getting "scrubbed" from the internet 7:49 - "I've said before I think they're building something. I don't know what it is...I have my thoughts but there are many things that I believe that I shall not say...it's a machine of some sort, it's an exoskeleton." 8:30 - thugocracy 9:15 - "is it unreasonable...to think that this government would ask you to spy on your neighbors." why, that's not unreasonable at all... 11:45 - "I ain't gonna be a victim anymore"
oh, that was fun. btw, those are water guns people are carrying around, right?
Wherein I direct you to a well-written and seemingly reasonable article about the imminent death of a public option in the health reform bill.
I also wonder about the details about moving a bill through on "reconciliation." That means something that can pass the senate with a simple majority of votes, but as I understand it, under current rules you can't create something new - like a public option - through reconciliation but instead must modify something that already exists. But I've also heard that the vice-president is in charge of making these rules so Biden could theoretically change them to allow for health care to pass the senate in its entirety. So I don't really know. It does raise the question as to whether passing a weak public option that can later be modified and strengthened through reconciliation might be a way to go, or if we should stay strong, whatever that means.
This feels like something of a tangent (from what?), but I thought of it today so I thought I would post it. It might be edifying. One of my long standing pet-peeves is the word 'curry'. 'Curry', as will be shown, is a colonial neologism that is as vague as it is inauthentic. Currently it seems to refer to any 'soupy' Indian dish, or more generally any dish that uses a mix of spices, and so, practically, to all of "Indian" cuisine (by which most people mean Punjabi cuisine). And also to Thai food, for some reason.
Let us look into the history of the word, shall we:
Most people in the world today know what a curry is - or at least think they do. In Britain the term ‘curry’ has come to mean almost any Indian dish, whilst most people from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they use, but if they did it would mean a meat, vegetable or fish dish with spicy sauce and rice or bread...
The origin of the word itself is the stuff of legends, but most pundits have settled on the origins being the Tamil word ‘kari’ meaning spiced sauce. In his excellent Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveler in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘Carriel’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha, with chilli-based curry powder called ‘caril’...
The one thing all the experts seem to agree on is that the word originates from India and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj. On closer inspection, however, there is just as much evidence to suggest the word was English all along...
In Richard II’s reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others including philosophers, produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390 called ‘The Forme of Cury’. ‘Cury’ was the Old English word for cooking derived from the French ‘cuire’ - to cook, boil, grill - hence cuisine...
The development of the curry industry in Britain has been peculiarly Anglo-Asian such that many people brandish ‘authenticity’ as if it were the Holy Grail. According to Camellia Panjabi “Ninety nine per cent of Indians do not have a tandoor and so neither Tandoori Chicken nor Naan are part of India’s middle class cuisine. This is even so in the Punjab, although some villages have communal tandoors where rotis can be baked. Ninety five per cent of Indians don’t know what a vindaloo, jhal farezi or, for that matter, a Madras curry is”.
The notion of a curry is what the British during their rule in India referred to when eating spicy food. Indians in India would never have used the word curry to describe all sorts of dishes. They would use individual names reflecting the regional variations of countless curry dishes. The British in India created their own spicy dishes which were diluted versions of original recipes that the cooks were ordered to make to suit European tastes...
Every social event paid special attention to the food and the British Memsahibs ran households that included chefs and cooks. Many of them were highly trained to cater for the western palate...
Also with more and more people from the sub-continent coming to live in the UK, there was a surge in popularity for spicy cuisine. There was an influx of people from the Indian sub-continent coming to live in the UK who were Commonwealth immigrants welcomed into Europe to deal with the labour shortages that were then faced by several industries. Many Asians brought with them the exotic flavours of home. It was during this birth of multiculturalism in Britain that post war curry became a phenomenon. It is now part of the fabric of British tradition and culture and looks like it is here to stay in some form or another, be it formica topped or fine dining...
In sum, at best the word 'curry' derives from a Tamil (ie, south Indian) word referring to a specific or specific set of dishes which was taken up by colonialists and used rather liberally in general reference to any number of specific dishes throughout India, and is now used to refer is such a vague fashion to north Indian hybrid dishes made by immigrants in England. Or, interestingly, it has its origin in Britain or Europe itself.
So, given that I don't consider myself very Indian and am certainly not interested in recuperating (read: reinventing) Indian 'authenticity (read: nationalism) from the diaspora, why does the misuse or at least ignorant use of this word get under my skin so much? Part of it has to do with my annoyance (to say the least) with the failure of people in the west to understand the cultures which they appropriate. In this case it has to do with the inability of people, starting with Dutch and British, to distinguish between the many types of cuisine and the specific dishes in those cuisines. Indeed this was even extended to Thai cuisine, and made even more ridiculous by adding color prefixes ( 'red curry,' 'green curry,' etc.) Maybe I see this 'indifference' analogous to the inability of these same soldiers and traders to distinguish among the people of India (the first state-organized fingerprinting identification systems arose in India for this reason). Maybe this also reminds me, affectivly if not analytically, of the all too frequent confusion of me with almost any other person of Indian descent (I could relate many memorable incidents here, but I'll choose the time when someone in my freshmen dorm to whom I had spoken with many times came up to me one day and for some reason started a conversation about the student government, of which I was not apart. It took about 5 minutes for me to realize he thought he was speaking to a different person).
Even if I have no stake in Indian authenticity, I am still annoyed by the pretension of authenticity. I'm also uncomfortable in assigning this refusal of specificity and pretension of authenticity only to 'westerners,' more frequently known as 'white people,' which would be unfair. On the other hand, there is a colonial history here, and one aspect of these articles I find interesting is the way in which food produced in the colonies and then by colonial immigrants was developed in an imperial history spanning several hundred years. Not an innocent history, mind you, not a simple 'fusion,' but one part of a broader cultural assimilation, and now perhaps a more global assimilation. Food and cuisine is always evolving, but it is also interesting to think of it as stamped with certain power relations (now manifested by the global food industry, Monsanto and the like); this is something I'll have to research more.
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