(no subject)
Published on Friday, August 19, 2005 by
CommonDreams.org
PETA Throws Bomb in New Haven
Shall I Compare Thee to a
Freaking Cow?
by Andrew Christie
Leaving its trademark trail of
outrage, People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals has been touring a national exhibit asking
"Are Animals the New Slaves?" The outdoor display,
in the words of the New Haven Register, consists
of "photographs of people, mostly black
Americans, being tortured, sold and killed, next to
photographs of animals, including cattle and sheep,
being tortured, sold and killed."
Pictures of Jews in
concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms are
juxtaposed with monkeys subjected to medical
experiments, tattooed likewise. Children working
their lives away in 19th-century factories are seen
next to pigs and chickens exploited in present-day
factory farms.
So, naturally, outrage ensues.
When the exhibit came to a Connecticut street
corner one day in early August, the New Haven
Register editorialized, "If you care about animals more
than people, the comparison may seem apt....
There is little common ground for agreement if PETA
sees the slaughter of livestock for food as the
same as the lynching of blacks or the extermination
of millions of people in Europe."
Passers-by apparently agreed.
The head of the state chapter of the NAACP showed
up on the scene, said "black people are being
pimped," and told organizers to take down the
exhibit. A brother shouted in the face of a PETA
volunteer "You can't compare me to a freaking cow!"
Two years ago, the
Anti-Defamation League was likewise livid when a PETA display
drew parallels between mass animal slaughter and
the Holocaust (including the uncomfortable fact
that the design of Auschwitz was based on the
Chicago slaughterhouse system), though Isaac Bashevis
Singer had long ago made the same observation
with no fear of inappropriate equivalencies.
The exhibit has now been pulled
and PETA is "evaluating feedback."
Is PETA right?
Before pondering that, let us
turn to the entity that is currently crafting the
most incisive, devastating media critique of our
cultural moment currently on view, one almost too
painful to watch. I refer, of course, to Carl's
Jr. -- or, more precisely, to Carl's Jr.'s ad
agency, Mendelsohn Zien.
Last July, the Santa Barbara
News-Press asked Carl's Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder about
complaints concerning his company's "edgy" ads --
including "soft-porn images of a sexy babe
gyrating on a mechanical bull or Paris Hilton washing a
Bentley while barely dressed" -- and his
company's current campaign encouraging viewers to think
of animals as too dumb to live ("There's only one
thing chickens are good for"). Puzder's reply,
that the ads are "not intended to insult or demean
anybody," would not seem to merit response, but
it's worth noting that these ads are all of a
piece and in fact insult and demean one more group
beyond the obvious: The 18-to-34-year-old male
demographic they're aimed at. They all send an
unmistakable message: We know what level to reach you
on. Women and animals are here for your pleasure.
Use them.
PETA got it wrong in New Haven
in only one respect: Animals are not "the new
slaves." They're the first ones. They're the ones
who got the worst a dominator culture had to offer,
and the worst has lately gotten much worse, as a
quick tour through a Confined Animal Feeding
Operation will demonstrate to anyone in possession of
two or three of his senses and lacking a vested
interest in the company's quarterly profit
statement.
The larger lesson of Darwin
(there are no superior species, only differently
adapted ones) has not yet sunk in; instead, we are
still ruled in every way that matters by the
medieval Great Chain of Being, on which we placed
ourselves one rung below the angels and far above all
other manner of beaste, most low, foule and
uncleane. When a black man in New Haven sees images of
his ancestors and a cow side by side, equally
mistreated and commodified, he is conditioned to see
only the comparative sullying of his godliness,
not the cruelty that is the lot of sentient beings
who have no rights. He fears he will be cast down
by the implication that the lot of the oppressed
should be raised up.
Historically, he is not alone.
That was the deepest fear of his ancestors'
owners in the ante-bellum South. It was the fear of
men confronted by women's suffrage. It was the fear
of our founding fathers, the white male land
owners who, in drafting the Constitution, struggled
to find a way to exclude the rabble from too much
participation in the democratic experiment, the
better to keep the levers in the hands of the
right sort of people while giving the others just
enough by way of social rewards to keep them
controllable.
Changing those paradigms were
(and are) hard fights, but the animal rights
movement is fighting 10,000 years of cultural
conditioning (memo to the 18-to-34-year-old male
demographic: it's like The Matrix, dudes) and the
tendency of the disenfranchised, in the words of Howard
Zinn, to fall upon each other "with such
vehemence and violence as to obscure their common
position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy
country."
Thus the good people of New
Haven recoil, the NAACP shouts at PETA, and the
pundits trot out safe, predictable outrage, using
generations of conditioning to studiously miss the
point. It's a fight amongst ourselves on a deeper
level than usual. It misses not only the fact of
our increasing disenfranchisement but the
dysfunctional ways in which the disproportionately
distributed wealth is produced by a system that is
impoverishing the Earth and our ethical sense alike.
One of that system's most fundamental control
measures persuades people that in their visceral
rejection of the truth PETA is laying down, they are
standing up for their dignity and humanity, when,
in reality, they are defending a system in which
commonality of suffering is not on the agenda,
the members of only a single species have any right
to life, liberty and freedom from harm, a chicken
is of value only as a sandwich, and the idea that
a chicken might be of value to the chicken is an
idea that must not be thought.
Andrew Christie is an
environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, CA.
###
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the use of which has not always been specifically
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rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and
social justice issues, etc. We believe this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, the material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior
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research and educational purposes. For more
information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this
site for purposes of your own that go beyond
'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.
Common Dreams NewsCenter
A non-profit news service providing
breaking news & views for the progressive community.
Home | Newswire | Contacting Us | About Us
| Donate | Sign-Up | Archives
© Copyrighted 1997-2005
www.commondreams.org
CommonDreams.org
PETA Throws Bomb in New Haven
Shall I Compare Thee to a
Freaking Cow?
by Andrew Christie
Leaving its trademark trail of
outrage, People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals has been touring a national exhibit asking
"Are Animals the New Slaves?" The outdoor display,
in the words of the New Haven Register, consists
of "photographs of people, mostly black
Americans, being tortured, sold and killed, next to
photographs of animals, including cattle and sheep,
being tortured, sold and killed."
Pictures of Jews in
concentration camps with numbers tattooed on their arms are
juxtaposed with monkeys subjected to medical
experiments, tattooed likewise. Children working
their lives away in 19th-century factories are seen
next to pigs and chickens exploited in present-day
factory farms.
So, naturally, outrage ensues.
When the exhibit came to a Connecticut street
corner one day in early August, the New Haven
Register editorialized, "If you care about animals more
than people, the comparison may seem apt....
There is little common ground for agreement if PETA
sees the slaughter of livestock for food as the
same as the lynching of blacks or the extermination
of millions of people in Europe."
Passers-by apparently agreed.
The head of the state chapter of the NAACP showed
up on the scene, said "black people are being
pimped," and told organizers to take down the
exhibit. A brother shouted in the face of a PETA
volunteer "You can't compare me to a freaking cow!"
Two years ago, the
Anti-Defamation League was likewise livid when a PETA display
drew parallels between mass animal slaughter and
the Holocaust (including the uncomfortable fact
that the design of Auschwitz was based on the
Chicago slaughterhouse system), though Isaac Bashevis
Singer had long ago made the same observation
with no fear of inappropriate equivalencies.
The exhibit has now been pulled
and PETA is "evaluating feedback."
Is PETA right?
Before pondering that, let us
turn to the entity that is currently crafting the
most incisive, devastating media critique of our
cultural moment currently on view, one almost too
painful to watch. I refer, of course, to Carl's
Jr. -- or, more precisely, to Carl's Jr.'s ad
agency, Mendelsohn Zien.
Last July, the Santa Barbara
News-Press asked Carl's Jr. CEO Andrew Puzder about
complaints concerning his company's "edgy" ads --
including "soft-porn images of a sexy babe
gyrating on a mechanical bull or Paris Hilton washing a
Bentley while barely dressed" -- and his
company's current campaign encouraging viewers to think
of animals as too dumb to live ("There's only one
thing chickens are good for"). Puzder's reply,
that the ads are "not intended to insult or demean
anybody," would not seem to merit response, but
it's worth noting that these ads are all of a
piece and in fact insult and demean one more group
beyond the obvious: The 18-to-34-year-old male
demographic they're aimed at. They all send an
unmistakable message: We know what level to reach you
on. Women and animals are here for your pleasure.
Use them.
PETA got it wrong in New Haven
in only one respect: Animals are not "the new
slaves." They're the first ones. They're the ones
who got the worst a dominator culture had to offer,
and the worst has lately gotten much worse, as a
quick tour through a Confined Animal Feeding
Operation will demonstrate to anyone in possession of
two or three of his senses and lacking a vested
interest in the company's quarterly profit
statement.
The larger lesson of Darwin
(there are no superior species, only differently
adapted ones) has not yet sunk in; instead, we are
still ruled in every way that matters by the
medieval Great Chain of Being, on which we placed
ourselves one rung below the angels and far above all
other manner of beaste, most low, foule and
uncleane. When a black man in New Haven sees images of
his ancestors and a cow side by side, equally
mistreated and commodified, he is conditioned to see
only the comparative sullying of his godliness,
not the cruelty that is the lot of sentient beings
who have no rights. He fears he will be cast down
by the implication that the lot of the oppressed
should be raised up.
Historically, he is not alone.
That was the deepest fear of his ancestors'
owners in the ante-bellum South. It was the fear of
men confronted by women's suffrage. It was the fear
of our founding fathers, the white male land
owners who, in drafting the Constitution, struggled
to find a way to exclude the rabble from too much
participation in the democratic experiment, the
better to keep the levers in the hands of the
right sort of people while giving the others just
enough by way of social rewards to keep them
controllable.
Changing those paradigms were
(and are) hard fights, but the animal rights
movement is fighting 10,000 years of cultural
conditioning (memo to the 18-to-34-year-old male
demographic: it's like The Matrix, dudes) and the
tendency of the disenfranchised, in the words of Howard
Zinn, to fall upon each other "with such
vehemence and violence as to obscure their common
position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy
country."
Thus the good people of New
Haven recoil, the NAACP shouts at PETA, and the
pundits trot out safe, predictable outrage, using
generations of conditioning to studiously miss the
point. It's a fight amongst ourselves on a deeper
level than usual. It misses not only the fact of
our increasing disenfranchisement but the
dysfunctional ways in which the disproportionately
distributed wealth is produced by a system that is
impoverishing the Earth and our ethical sense alike.
One of that system's most fundamental control
measures persuades people that in their visceral
rejection of the truth PETA is laying down, they are
standing up for their dignity and humanity, when,
in reality, they are defending a system in which
commonality of suffering is not on the agenda,
the members of only a single species have any right
to life, liberty and freedom from harm, a chicken
is of value only as a sandwich, and the idea that
a chicken might be of value to the chicken is an
idea that must not be thought.
Andrew Christie is an
environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, CA.
###
Printer Friendly Version E-Mail This
Article
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site contains copyrighted material
the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making
such material available in our efforts to advance
understanding of environmental, political, human
rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and
social justice issues, etc. We believe this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the US
Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, the material on this site is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included information for
research and educational purposes. For more
information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this
site for purposes of your own that go beyond
'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.
Common Dreams NewsCenter
A non-profit news service providing
breaking news & views for the progressive community.
Home | Newswire | Contacting Us | About Us
| Donate | Sign-Up | Archives
© Copyrighted 1997-2005
www.commondreams.org