Meat-Eater's Dilemma

I am not now and have never been a vegetarian. I eat meat often enough with relish (the attitudinal kind) such that I might justifiably be called a "meat-lover", especially of well-prepared pig and duck. Of steak I can only say "if well marbled and excellently prepared" it may represent a gustatory slice of that locus of eternal reward Christians call "heaven". Chicken rates pretty low for me, and lamb belongs grilled and sliced on pita with hummus and hot sauce.

That said, and since I am already deploying Christian metaphor, it is a near certainty that if there is a place in hell reserved for those who partake in the suffering of other creatures, then all of us who, at the very least, eat meat that comes from factory farms (and probably all meat no matter its provenance)will be at best getting stung continually by bees and buffeted by harsh wind in Dante's outer circle.

I say this because I have, courtesy of an unremembered string of internet search references, watched videos of what happens in a factory farm for pigs and also what happens in a factory dairy farm (get ready for hellfire, milk-drinkers!).

Not desiring to tout the lurid, let me say that if the Universe is aware of suffering, then the Universe is very, very aware of, and its wave motions deeply disturbed by, the sheer dumb suffering that takes place in these awful factory farms.

Pigs, as we know, are rather intelligent. Much worse their fate that they are also fat and worse still, tasty to those more intelligent raptors called human beings that are so like unto gods that they can produce the occasional Shakespeare and Jimi Hendrix. For these humans hold pigs captive in crowded, filthy, diseased, cruel, violent, bloody, absolutely hellacious conditions the only merciful escape from which is their inevitable murder to suit the godlike palates of the raptor captors. One can safely assert that there in that living hell, but for an opposable thumb and a few extra cells of gray matter, go you or I.

Cows fare no better of course, and I have only watched a video about cows that give milk. Safe to say, based on my narrow observation, that the notion of the dairy cow in a field of green with a bell around its neck ruminating sweet grass and daisies, is entirely a marketer's concoction for the milk-drinker's fancy. These cows too are held captive in crowded, filthy, diseased, cruel, violent, bloody, absolutely hellacious conditions from which they have no escape as they are forced to provide milk on a regular basis, even if they have to be cruelly prodded to stand from weakness and gross physical malfunctions in order to do so.

Does this mean I have the moral strength to stop eating meat? It does not. Do I find justification in the notion that I did not make myself, and that my body seems to require meat? I do. Would I much rather find, at least, non-factory meat and dairy not to assuage my guilt but to actually promote some reduction of pain among the creatures who find their way, cut into pieces or as sucked from their teats, on our plates and in our cereal bowls? Yes.

I have no links to offer, as this is not a screed nor call to action. It is simply a record of the operation of my personal conscience which finds itself torn between a love of roasted flesh and compassion for sentient beings. That it is a dilemma at all--and it is a genuine one, no matter what beliefs vegetarians seem to hold dear--may prove simply that all is vanity.

Fifty Nights of Science Fiction Thrills

Recently I purchased fifty grade B 1950s-era science fiction movies for fifteen dollars. I also recently bought forty 50s era Time magazines for a hundred dollars. But let's talk about the DVDs--in a package called "Sci-Fi Classics" by Mill Creek Entertainment.

Having watched just four of the fifty, I can already recommend this collection to anyone who wants to laugh, become baffled at trying to figure out how anyone could conspire to make anything so bad, wonder at how these trifles ever got shown in a theater, marvel at the unrepentant and continuing fatuousness, try to decipher a connection between the chilling titles (like "The Incredible Petrified World") to the dull doings on screen, and watch, in a historiographic, postmodern manner, the effects of sexism, racism and lousy cinematography at work in a culture struggling with such newfangled phenomena as radiation and the possibility of outer-space travel.

I have laughed out loud at certain moments in these movies: as when a random, large lizard that has nothing to do with the movie puts in a brief, pointless appearance; or when scantily-clad women wrangle in a prurient cat-fight. My wife, a vocal critic of anything that emits even a whiff of sexism, has vowed the films are a disgrace and beneath one's intelligence. Of course she is correct.

But I cannot forego the pleasure of marveling at the wide gap between what is promised (chills, thrills and earthshaking revelations) and what is actually in the movie, usually a tawdry mash-up of tepid acting, embarrassingly poor special effects (no Ray Harryhausen here), nonsensical plot-twists and what appears to be a general heedlessness to the notion that one might actually ask another human to pay money to view the resulting dreck.

Perhaps the most strking example of this canyon-wide gap (at least so far) has been "The Monster that Challenged the World". The monster turned out to be a species of mollusk that grew (because of radiation, as appears to be the rule) to the size of an old gumdrop-shaped Fiat in an inland lake and then tried to escape through an irrigation system. Sure, there were a couple dozen of them. And they could walk on land! And they actually killed some folks. But they were slow, and not that big, and for heaven's sake they were mollusks after all. Besides scaring people to death and strangling a poor doddering old man at a guardpost, the monsters' worst offense was to leave behind a white slime that looked like toothpaste in outsized volume (and was not harmful except to one's sense of aesthetics). This, I submit, is hardly a challenge to the world as much as to the State Agricultural Commission.

But that is all part of the fun.

After a hard day trying to get other people to do what you want them to do (at work or business), or being made to do what other people want you to do (at work or business), why not mix yourself a toddy and sit back to enjoy fifty of these wonderfully idiotic movies guaranteed not to inspire or frighten or connect one to "what's really going on out there" but that may, after the effects of the toddy sets in, cause you to chuckle and smile and knit your brows in wonderment at the cinematic genuine silliness of which our so-called advanced race of creatures is capable.