Trick or teat?

No badgers were mangled in the production of this post.

The much coveted and fiercely contested Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ‘Award for Hollywood’s Dumbest-ass Liberal’ must be a shoo-in for Natalie Portman come next February’s Oscars.

Here she is: Natalie Portman on becoming a Vegan in The Huffington Post (which is as perfect a conservative sentence as my poor wit can conceive.)

Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist.

Sigh. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned American water fluoridation and rock ‘n roll music for corrupting youth?

How I miss the old days.

I've always been shy about being critical of others' choices…

Voting’s a kind of choice, isn’t it? In America, I mean: not here of course.

….because I hate when people do that to me. I'm often interrogated about being vegetarian (e.g., "What if you find out that carrots feel pain, too? Then what'll you eat?").

I believe that.

No, really.

I’m utterly certain that in Hollywood they really do ask you stuff like What if you find out that carrots feel pain?

Also they probably ask stuff like: ‘Why don’t we make the heroine too stupid to notice that her abduction and abuse by the secret police are in fact indoctrination undertaken by the Resistance to change her political consciousness, because they don’t rape her which is what genuine torturers would surely do?’

I've also been afraid to feel as if I know better than someone else…

And that, luvvies, is how to do great comedy: play it absolutely straight.

-- a historically dangerous stance (I'm often reminded that "Hitler was a vegetarian, too, you know").

Well, me too. Mrs. Northwester is a vegetarian for animal welfare reasons, and so I am for her sake. Of course, I’m also authoritarian Right-wing, non-smoking, and kind to animals nationalist. I’m also a lousy draughtsman but a dab hand with a paint brush.

Say. You don’t think?...

I mean, you never see us together in photos, do you?

But this book reminded me that some things are just wrong.

Newsflash! Famous Hollywood liberal in unequivocal assertion of absolute morality: pictures at ten; 10.20 White House rebuttal; 10.30 Portman volunteers to work unpaid for a year in The Carter Institute to atone for her ‘thoughtless remark.’

We now return you to the Elvis/Bigfoot interview.

Perhaps others disagree with me that animals have personalities,…

Not at all: many animals have personalities (or at least characters) - unlike many of the cast of Hollywood
rom-coms, but I may disagree with Portman that many A-listers have brains. I mean, I’ve know of folk musicians who never did anything as idiotic as walking through a country that lost 70,000 victims to Maoist terrorism carrying a Maoist-slogan handbag.

…but the highly documented torture of animals is unacceptable, and the human cost Foer describes in his book, of which I was previously unaware, is universally compelling.

The human cost of factory farming -- both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals -- is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air…

‘It’s Christmas in heaven, all the angels sing…’

… that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.

I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends –

Hooray for Hollywood! Forget about the breaking probation and the child sodomy and celebrity killings and robbery and assault and kidnappings – if it’s a good time you want then get into your Prius, tighten your organic hemp seatbelt and head over to the Portman place for an evening of fountaining porcine scatology.

…one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn't eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.

Hey lass, have you heard what they’ve got now? They’re called ‘laws.’

Laws are really cool: they’re almost identical to every single liberal belief in t euniverse apart from the one tiny difference which is that - like - they can actually be made too work in this particular space-time continuum where we’re all living right now. Laws are awesome! Say there’s something that you don’t like - whether it’s ‘just wrong’ as you put it with adamantine lack of relativity or even something that’s merely utterly wacky but not actually so abhorrent that it ought to be punished; such as reading the Washington Post instead of the New York Times. It could also be spraying - you know, stuff, into the air or letting other stuff leak into the rivers to poison the ichthyovores, or publicly encouraging people to kill Jews or sticking cutlery into peoples’ bodies. Then what you do, see, is to make a ‘law’ that forbids anyone doing just such things and if people or organisations do the bad thing after that, then the police are allowed to stop them doing it and the courts are allowed to put them in prison and/or take money from them to try to make the people who suffered from the bad thing feel a bit better, if possible. We used to have Laws in Britain and they kinda worked for years and years until our very own cute li’l British liberals came up with something better.

Take the cutlery thing for example. For millions of years, human beings and their predecessors only had one or two kinds of technology: cutlery being the principal one. They got hold of sharp-edged or pointed stones and sticks and bones and antlers and stuff and stuck them into animals to slow them down so they could eat them; that being the main way they could avoid starving before agriculture was invented and with it a high-calorie vegetarian option. Please don’t take my use of the word ‘calorie’ to heart, dear starlet: in some primitive cultures beyond Los Angeles it is still commonly held by otherwise rational people that it’s necessary to eat a thousand or more calories every single day to protect against a medical condition known outside California as death.

Now, human beings all over the world have over the millennia survived only thanks to this cutting technology and, later on - say for the past eight or nine thousand - years occasionally stuck cutlery into each others’ bodies for a number of motivations, possibly even including the promotion of liberal ideas. Who knows? However, except for special stabathons known to your pals as wars, this kind of killing was mostly held to be wrong and so laws were passed to punish those who informally (that is, without the permission of their traditional line managers or certain religious texts) stab each other. And you know what? Stabbing didn’t stop altogether, but lotsa crazy folks never did it any more after the laws and their enforcers found them out. What you need is a bunch of folks to make laws against spilling stuff into food and water and darn well punish them if they still do it, because the alternative might well be worse than dungy fish. Imagine that! Now, imagine a prehistoric world in which people like you felt afraid of the harmful side effects of food technology such as stabbing. Say that they had then banned the use of cutlery for fear of harm to human beings, yeah? How many of our primitive ancestors could have survived to reproduce and hence to produce modern humanity if cutting technology had been taken away and all they had left to hunt with were rudimentary accordions?

So, maybe a law against polluting food and water would be better than banning or severely limiting those technologies that feed almost everyone on the planet apart from those who maintain their clear complexions and perfect figures with a handful of raw leaves, fruit, nuts and roots each day.

But what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion -- in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves' bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth -- how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.

It’s important to remember at this point that before the Columbian colonization of the western hemisphere by witch-hunting Spaniards and Englishmen and rack-hunting Italians and Japanese, the native Americans lived at peace with the plains bison, turkeys, and whatever Orioles are made from. The woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, terror birds and giant cave bears died out on the very day that Columbus landed at Bel Air and shot them all with his Uzi.

Sorry, his Luger.

Sorry, his Colt 45.

And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?

How about; “There’s a little kid in Africa who’d love to eat that chopped liver, but unfortunately they’ve got something like a vegan diet over there thanks to all that land reform their governments got into when the colonial left, so eat up kiddo because Granny Weismann nearly starved to death and both her parents did starve thanks to 1930s-style ‘anti-war protesters’ and, frankly, it sucks.”

I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents' world.

I think I know the kind of college professor she’s talking about, don’t you? He never remembers the millions of ordinary Americans and others who uprooted themselves and faced death and intolerable hardship against the genuinely genocidal Axis Powers and later to underwrite his freedom from the multi-million murderous Soviet world so that college professors such as him can sit and sneer without fearing a single round sent his way unless some crackpot breaks and come loaded for disarmed students…

He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.

Fair point. We do know how to farm intensively and without great cruelty to livestock, and many farmers do indeed farm that way. Also vegetarianism is an option with a wide variety of commercial suppliers, so if you feel it’s morally wrong to kill to eat, then they don’t have to do so. But by the same logic now that almost no-one outside the Greater Los Angeles Area believes that The Great Goddess sends babies to the world, and most people are aware that it takes an activity a little like that most reminiscent of liberal politicians but with at least one more adult human being involved to bring children into the existence, then if people can refrain from eating meat every single day in favour of something less harmful then they might be justly held responsible for their sexual actions without any killing involved, yeah?

I say that Foer's ethical charge against animal eating is brave because not only is it unpopular, it has also been characterized as unmanly, inconsiderate, and juvenile.

“Brave?” I wonder how many ranches, steak houses, biker bars, US Marine Corps barracks and taxi ranks he hangs about at, handing out vegan screeds to their unfriendly denizens? Matrix-like, I suspect that he’s the other kind of brave: the one where you only say stuff to extremely like-minded people in carefully controlled environments where no-one seriously has a chance of disagreeing in any sustained or acceptable manner.

But he reminds us that being a man, and a human, takes more thought than just "This is tasty, and that's why I do it." He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don't believe in rape, but if it's what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).

Liberal rationalism; “That’s a silly superstition that wouldn’t work anywhere outside its particular cultural context.”

English translation – morals are historical constructs derived from centuries or millennia of experience and the competition between voluntary behaviours. Liberals just make them up to suit the itch or appetite of the day.

But Foer makes his most impactful gesture as a peacemaker, when he unites the two sides of the animal eating debate in their reasoning. Both sides argue: We are not them. Those who refrain from eating animals argue: We don't have to go through what they go through -- we are not them. We are capable of making distinctions between what to eat and what not to eat (Americans eat cow but not dog, Hindus eat chicken but not cow, etc.). We are capable of considering others' minds and others' pain. We are not them. Whereas those who justify eating animals say the same thing: We are not them. They do not merit the same value of being as us. They are not us.

Look for The Silent Scream on the Movie Channel tonight, huh Nat? Will you and your pro-choice Democrat friends be watching and supporting its message of protecting the weak and the notion that human beings have moral agency and aren’t merely big bags of glands that just want to do stuff, huh?

And so Foer shows us, through Eating Animals, that we are all thinking along the same lines: We are not them. But, he urges, how will we define who we are?

And just what kind of a chump is it who thinks it’s okay to portray a supposedly feisty and heroic individual who just gives up the ghost and dies in childbirth just because her husband turns out to be a jerk in the end?

She’s small and sweet and so’s a humbug and I wouldn’t want either in charge of the human race’s food supply.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you sall. I want to thank Big Hollywood, Michelle Malkin, my agent, my hairdresser, Ms. Portman’s dressmaker…

The impotence of being earnest

I hate being right sometimes. I hate it. Hate it.

Almost everyone in the intelligentsia (you know: those brilliant people who’ve been in charge of the unprecedented successes of our glittering education, welfare and criminal justice systems over the past forty years) believes that traditionalist conservatives such as me are unimaginative, petty and petit-bourgeois: joyless souls slavishly dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil and whose chief concern is the vindictive suppression of spontaneity, sexuality, personal flair and freedom of expression (especially when freedom of speech takes the form of the sexual taunting of the non-intelligentsia, republicanism, or blasphemy). They imagine that our idea of an evening’s entertainment is staying at home and listening to a recording of Winston Churchill’s collected speeches over a background track of Elgar - all the while obsessively polishing our porcelain farmyard animal figurines on tables covered with pages from The Daily Mail. This is absurd; I never do anything like that. Why, last night it was Enoch Powell, Holst and horse-brasses. And I loosened my tie later on when it got especially exciting. The Daily Mail; natch.

Dreamy is a nice woman and a good person.

She’s a loyal friend and a loving mother to her fatherless children; both of whom are growing up to be well-behaved, imaginative, polite, patient and intelligent people. Our kids played together when our friends and neighbours got together socially or for tree hugging or picnics, and after my divorce we had continued till quite recently to babysit for the other or to ride shotgun on a gaggle of children including our own. I trusted her with my offspring and she would trust me with hers, and I would trust her again without question. But this is not about easy divorce: and especially not mine.

Dreamy moved heaven and earth for her kids’ pretty useless fathers to visit and spend time with them, and she made every effort to make such occasions compatible with their limited paternal instincts. They weren’t much interested, and as far as I’m aware they never paid their offspring much heed in the past. But this isn’t about perennially absentee fathers.

We’d lost touch until recently but at the time we last met she’d been doing part-time self-employed work whilst maintaining her home (which she was buying with help from her family). Tax Credits and Income Support and Child Benefit would make this lifestyle make sense. Till very recently, she could scarcely expect to work much as her children were pre-school age. A husband might have changed that, but somehow the thought never seems to have come up. Why not? Who knows? But this isn’t about welfare benefits.

I met her on the very day that I posted this intemperate and more-in-apoplectic-outrage-than-in-anger rant and learned that she is now A) married, and B) expecting another baby. Her children; named after a mediaeval noblewoman and a fashionable mass-murderer played politely around us in that dreary public space, and took part from time to time in the Mummy’s having a baby conversation with only the younger one moderately eager to point out especially attractive consumer goods to her that her straitened circumstances might never permit her to buy. But this isn’t about material poverty.

Dreamy and her new man did it right this time. First came the marriage and then came the baby. She was very proud of that and I was able to cheer her and her husband in the great Dance of Life and Generating and Connubial Conviviality and all that stuff.

There’s a snag about the marriage and baby thing, though: Mister Dreamy isn’t allowed into Britain.

He was born, and dwells to this day in a non-EU country: one furthermore with no historic ties with Britain. The sun never set on anything jolly, ripping or stalwart there; the colonial power’s troops and missionaries never taught his ancestors to play cricket or sing passages from The Gondoliers, and there was never (even during the customary pre- coup month of Independence celebrations) anything like a Westminster Parliament presiding over the land’s newfound statehood and sovereignty. But this is not about the retreat of the West and the subsequent corruption of its former colonies and provinces.

Dreamy thinks that the Immigration people are being naughty in that they won’t let Mister D come to join her amid fair Alba’s green pastures and join her in her multicultural travels and lifestyle experiments. Despite having a job already lined up - and for a countryman of his, at that, who will therefore be able to speak truth to power for him – the ‘crats are concerned that he speaks no English yet. Dreamy points out that he doesn’t need any English for the job on offer which is of the transporting hot, cheese-covered snack food products around Castle City late at night variety. But this isn’t about any value to the economy of adult human beings being able to speak to each other.

Little Duchess and tiny Hermann are chattering excitedly about Christmas by now and I’m able to hide my inner bigot’s frothy-mouthed psychic tarantella at the importation of tainted DNA into the innocent wombs and wholesome bloodlines of my dear countrywomen. I swap perfectly heartfelt smiles and banter with the children about the appearance or otherwise of Santa. But this is not about what the United Left accuses the cultural Right of secretly believing in our pedigree-obsessed, pitch black and whiter-than-white hearts.

Dreamy suggests that in a world suddenly without borders Mister D would be able to join her in domestic bliss; albeit on a shift system - she looking after the children between conventional and hippy schools and their bedtimes, and then he’d perform his nocturnal duties to our economy using native wit and high-fat semaphore. Melted mozzarella: the international language of the soul. She doesn’t seem to care that if he does come to live with her in her family-subsidised home, that if Mister D ever loses his job, everybody else in the country will foot the benefits bill including the locals who might have wished (or should have been strongly invited) to move certain margheritas around the North West themselves. There’s no question that he’ll fit right in and go along with the way we do things here, and it’s axiomatic that he’ll be a perfect gentlemen to all and sundry whom he meets in this our very different land. He probably will be gentle to her: I’m reasonably sure that she’s lost the will to breed with men unwilling to take part in her and her children’s lives by now. Someone who names her children after a mediaeval aristocrat on the one hand and a well-known and equally foreign but republican brutal killer on the other isn’t going to be all that on the ball where national cohesion is concerned. But this isn’t about patriotism or any other sense of loyalty to familiar people, culture and institutions.

Dreamy is, I should say, in many ways a model citizen. She’s gentle and friendly and willing to help her fellow creatures and she quite literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. She seeks to support herself to some degree within the bounds of New Labour’s Britain, and once the kids are properly at mainstream schools I have little doubt that she’ll find work of some sort. She’ll be picky : it’ll have to be ‘ethical,’ so don’t spend your lower taxes yet. Of course that’ll be six or so years off now, assuming that she puts the Expected D into part-day sessions at the local hippy school for a couple of years. This is to protect the child from what she considers to be excessively early development of literacy. It could be worse: it’s all too easy to live off others nearly lifelong, and she has pride and integrity in spades. She’s a good person, I repeat; and treats other folk and indeed the rest of the world as worthy of respect and consideration. Her day-to-day morality is of a very high order. In an honestly governed country she’d be - bar some of the welfare costs - pretty much the sort of person for whose protection we traditionalist conservatives do our thing. The squawk of alarm that is The Daily Mail concerns itself mostly with the threats to safety and peace – conditions in which women and children should live safe from acts of violence and other crimes. Quite why she thought it was okay to hitch up with and have a child by someone who was not assured an entry to Britain, I don’t know. I’ve done some fairly daft things for love myself, and you’d have to be pretty heartless to actually say it to her face that a more careful choice of husband might have been more sensible for almost all concerned. It’s blasphemy these days to point out too that a wiser decision would be much, much better for the strangers who she’ll never meet but who’ll be obliged to fund Mister D’s medical care and possibly his subsistence for many years to come if Pisa Express goes bust and there’s nothing to replace it. She’s sweet and friendly, and doesn’t need to listen to any preaching of obviously imperfect me on how to live her life. But this isn’t about personal morality and its effects of self and others.

Is Dreamy the vanguard of the invading Marxist counter-culture or its victim? Does her casual acceptance of the system’s function of exporting the consequences of individuals’ choices to everyone else mean that she’s knowingly subverting what remains of a culture that once extolled free will to such an extent that it actually held individuals themselves to be responsible for those choices, and which held folk to account for them? Or is she a robotic slave: trapped between the exclusive tramlines of strictly limited imagination that consider that the original ‘Hermann’ was ‘inspirational’ - rather than the blood-soaked kill-crazy pervert that he in fact was? (You never really believed that his name was anything at all like Hermann, did you, Dear Reader?)

So: subversive agent or collateral damage?

I don’t think she’s either. I think she’s the product.

You can’t hurt Dreamy. You wouldn’t want to: she’s sweet and nice, and now in my second (and actually happy) middle-aged marriage I feel mostly avuncular about her gamine though currently bulging good looks. I don’t think that she ever dreamed that Duchess and Hermann were disposable inconveniences, and so they made it out alive; cute as buttons and adding to the fun and colour of life. I’m grateful for that.

But as she goes about her life spreading the warmth that most people feel in her company and gracing Castle CityBritain. I hope she’s not on the Tube when their faith goes expansively physical. And she’ll regard any restraint on who dwells here or how they get their kicks with as much fear as previous generations dreaded having their lives changed by invading armies. And she’s never, ever going to desire the reduction of corporation tax or the higher personal rate, because she knows in her heart of hearts that the rich in general and the corporations in particular put mercury into tuna and want to melt the Arctic. So scratch many of the jobs that her kids might otherwise be able to get. with her smile and happiness she will, through other choices, take part in the further burial of Christendom. The very Christendom that taught much humanity - eventually - to treat individuals as children of God, and therefore worthy of respect and decent treatment irrespective of their status or nationality or sex. She’ll elect politicians who’ll encourage judges to put vicious hooligans onto the streets, and some of them back into the mainstream schools, where they will bully and assault little Duchess and tiny Hermann as they grow up. Somehow, someone else will get the blame as they come crying home from school, because punishment is cruel; as much an abomination as sodomy was once held to be. She won’t even think that people survive together in polities by living according to long-established rules and by sharing common expectations about life, and so can understand and recognise their neighbours’ rights to do quite a lot of things as they please without asking for permission. She’s never heard such notions articulated by anyone she hasn’t bee n taught to distrust. Thus, Dreamy will let every neophile crackpot wreck any and every remaining traditional right in the name of abstract Freedom. She’ll recoil aghast from any suggestion that Mister D’s compatriots should not settle here in droves for fear of their bringing their folksy, traditional, and sometimes barbaric customs into

Many of her major decisions in life would have sent family and friends in earlier generations into angry tirades and eventually (perhaps) gentler offers of help in getting back onto the strait and narrow. Should anyone try to offer such advice now then she’d view such suggestions as somehow obscene and unnatural. So she won’t be providing quite the comfort for her children as many of their classmates enjoy; certain as she is in the belief that her love for them is more valuable than material things (which is true), and also sure that living without selling out to ‘the system’ - by which she means recognizing that the economy runs according to rules which it is almost always bloody and disastrous to break - is worth nearly as much as her love (which is not true.) Our earnest attempts to persuade her that there are other, better ways to understand and protect the good life than hers won’t get past her carefully nurtured lack of historical knowledge. Thus she’ll never know how we got here from a Europe where Duchess’s namesakes were savage and remorseless killers who conquered the continent on horseback and who ruled it at sword point for centuries - because her ears can only hear what she’s allowed to hear, which is that those of us with the different ideas from hers want to kill all the polar bears and concrete over every field and forest in these islands for a few quid. We are powerless in the short term to persuade her and millions like her that, for example, human rights grow out of specific historical circumstances and institutions, and that if they are to survive if at all it is likely to be only amongst the remains or continuance of those circumstances and institutions. Dreamy is what you get when the culture war is all but won by the other side.

This, as much as the silence of the conservatives, is what Burke was alluding to when he said that evil needs good people to do nothing in order to triumph, because Dreamy is one of the good people.

But this isn’t about cultural beliefs and how their consequences effect the lives of people in outer, material world as well as the inner world of the imagination and emotions.

Well, I can’t sit here all night gossiping about my life. The new carriages for The Flying Scotsman have arrived, and my diamond-pattern knit tank tops won’t alphabetize themselves, you know. Rock and roll.