SuperWeed

Whenever I’m in an independent bookstore, I always make sure to buy something. So, while I was at Arise! bookstore in Minneapolis, I picked up a copy of Evasion (CrimetInc), which I’d been wanting to read anyway and because I always like reading travelogues while traveling.

In the course of that travelogue of train hopping, dumpster diving, and shoplifting, the anonymous author often talks about the books and zines that inspired him to seize his own life and instructed him on the fine art of seizing sustenance without participating in capitalism. That got me thinking about something I’ve wanted to write about here for a while: The ways that texts work their way into our thinking and our lives.

A couple of months ago, I reread Kurt Vonnegut’s Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, which I originally read as a teenager shortly after its publication in 1974 and had not revisited since. I have a very clear memory of sitting on the couch of the single mother for whom I frequently baby-sat, mortified by what Vonnegut was telling me about Biafra, trying to make sense of it despite my sketchy knowledge of geography and history, knowing that somewhere between the lines of this story of states and starvation was something very important that I needed to understand about the origins and extent of human heartlessness.

I still can’t quite put that “something” into words but I do know that I learned important things about governments, land, and the violence inherent in socially constructed identities. Of course, I was already very skeptical about property and the governments that exist to protect it. But certainly, given the vividness of my recollection of reading his reportage from Biafra, Kurt Vonnegut helped me to remain the kind of person who knows the amorality with which masters fight back when you try to take away their unjust power and also knows for sure that just changing bosses doesn’t change anything if the rules of the game stay the same.

Evidently, that’s not the only way that Vonnegut affected me. Rereading that anthology this year, my eyes popped out cartoonishly when I came to the essay on space, in which Vonnegut rails against the hubris and expense of space travel. “Hey! Those are my ideas! I’ve been annoying friends and strangers alike with my crankiness about NASA for years.” Ooops. Guess I got it from Vonnegut, forgetting the source as we so often do with lessons deeply learned.

Vonnegut got the connections too. Here’s he’s responding to a book that celebrates space travel as the latest example of human “mastery” of new environments:

I think of Germany in the First World War, learning to fight under water. I think of Germany’s amazing rockets in World War Two…. I think of the Spaniards’ mastery of the New World, with several million other earthlings already here…. I think of their masterful torture of Indians — to make the Indians tell where they had hidden gold.

Gold.

I think of white America’s mastery of the South by the imaginative use of kidnapped Africans. I think of DDT.

Most of the true tales of masterfulness in new environments with new technologies have been cruel or greedy, it seems to me. The concepts of reality held by the masterful people have customarily been stupid or solipsistic in retrospect. Nobody has been remarkably secure, the masters have often ceased to be masters quickly. There have been tremendous messes to be cleaned up, ravaged landscapes dotted by shattered earthlings and their machines.

So it seems I also have my early reading of Vonnegut to thank, in part, for the easy linkage of political and environmental issues in my own thinking.

I found myself thinking something new in response to Vonnegut’s musings on Hermann Hess’s novel, Steppenwolf (which disaffected teenagers of the 70s were required by law to read, or at least carry around meaningfully):

Nobody in Steppenwolf has a telephone, although the cast is in a rich city after the war, where people do shimmy to jazz. The hero has no radio in his room, despite his swooning loneliness, but there are radios around, because he dreams of listening to one in the company of Mozart. The Concerto Grosso in F major, by Handel, is being broadcast from Munich. The hero says this about it, marvelously: “The devilish tin trumpet spat out, without more ado, a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber; that noise that owners of gramophones and radios have agreed to call music.”

I have said that Hesse was abut the same age as my father. My father wasn’t a European, but part of his education took place in Strasbourg — before the First World War. And when I got to know him, when Hesse was writing Steppenwolf, my father, too, was cursing radios and films, was dreaming of Mozart and Goethe, was itching to pot-shot automobiles.

That got me thinking about the acclimation of our senses to deprivation. If you’ve only ever heard a symphony orchestra via radio or CD or iPod, I thought, then you really cannot imagine what it feels like to be fully surrounded by that particular variety of sound, how the high notes seem to float while the the bass notes vibrate the very air that you breathe.

And, by one of those inexplicable mental flippages (yes, I know I just made that word up), that got me thinking about pornography. What does it do to your evolving sexuality, I wondered, when your first orgasm is in response to an object rather than a living person (or the breathing memory of a real, known, person)?

Once hard to come by, pornography is now so readily available that it’s probably safe to say that adolescent males in this country interact sexually earlier and more frequently with pieces of paper (or pixels on screens) than they do with real, live girls or boys their own age. How has that shift in what psychologists call cathexis (I didn’t make that word up — it means attachment by means of investment of emotional energy) from people to objects shaped their sexuality? Their relationship to their own bodies? Their ability to be fully intimate with a real person when the chance comes along? Their felt sense of what is “normal” or what it’s reasonable to expect from a partner?

These aren’t answerable questions, I know, at least not without research that would be awfully unwieldy. But they represent, for me, a useful and empathic extension of a question I’ve asked many times before: How could it possibly be pornography is uniquely exempt from the principle that people are shaped, emotionally and intellectually, by the images and ideas they encounter while reading? If anything, it seems to me, pornography (which is typically perused while masturbating and which is designed specifically to evoke physiological reactions) is more rather than less likely to shape us than other kinds of reading matter. I say that this is an “empathic” extension of the question because, rather than thinking (as I usually do) about how ideas about women and the commodification of bodies implicit in pornography are acted out on other people by consumers of pornography, this time I found myself thinking “poor dears!” about the young consumers of pornography, settling for cheap imitations of sex, never knowing that, in doing so repeatedly, they might be distorting their own future physiological response to the real thing.

Now, I know from experience that by merely mentioning any doubts about the harmless fabulousness of pornography, I am opening the door to a flood of pro-porn comments. Here are the rules this time: I want everybody, whether they agree with me or not, to list one or two books or other texts that have shaped you in some way — led you to feel, think, or act differently. If you want to say something pro-porn, you also have to tell me whether and why you think the ideas transmitted by means of sexually-charged imagery in pornography are less likely to shape attitudes and behavior than the ideas found in other kinds of literature.

Let’s close with another Vonnegut quote from way back in 1974: “The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased by 15 percent since the start of the Industrial Revolution… further increases would turn the planet into a vast greenhouse in which we would roast.” Nobody can say we weren’t warned.

Here’s the bonus question, which brings us back to my very first post on the subject of pornography: If our reading shapes our response to the world, what have we been reading that keeps us from responding with due alarm and alacrity to the escalating emergency of climate change? Does the tendency of pornography to dissociate people from their own bodies and the living bodies of other people play any role in our apparent inability to sense the danger that looms more closely every day?

Speaking of being what you read and reclaiming your own body, CrimetInc has a truly fabulous online reading library that can help you become the anarchist I know you want to be.

Often, it can be hard to see the connections among issues and even harder to figure out how to take action in a way that takes those connections into account. But sometimes the stars align and we are suddenly able to see a certain intersection much more clearly and act much more decisively. That’s what’s happening right now. The current acute food crisis in the context of the ongoing climate change emergency illuminates a shared source of human, animal, and biospheric distress while at the same time offering opportunities for effective collective action. If we — and I mean “we” pretty diversely — seize the day, we could actually have a chance of substantially reducing human hunger, animal suffering, and global warming all at the same time.

The crux of the current acute crisis is the food-feed-fuel conflict, in which different purposes compete for finite agricultural resources such as corn and land. The food-feed conflict also figures prominently in the chronic food crisis, which holds millions in hunger even in years when no climatic or economic anomalies disrupt food production and distribution. The “feed” side of the conflict also helps to drive escalating climate change which in turn drives up demand for biofuel, exacerbating the food-fuel conflict.

Confused? Have a look at this handy chart:

Let’s break it down:

Biofuels like ethanol use plants like corn in lieu of fossil fuels. Sounds good until you realize that demand for biofuel drives up corn prices and leads to food scarcity both by pulling corn out of the food chain and by motivating farmers to grow corn for biofuel instead of growing wheat, soy, or other edible crops. Thus biofuels lead rather directly to a worsening of the world food crisis, as we have seen in recent days with food riots rocking places as far flung as Egypt, Haiti, and Bangladesh and the World Food Program reporting “the most aggressive pattern of global increases perhaps ever recorded” in the number of people requiring food aid.

Why were so many people hungry to begin with? One reason is the inherent inefficiency of feeding plants to animals and then eating the animals (or their products) rather than eating plants directly. Farmers grow more than enough food to feed everybody many more than the number of calories needed to survive. But in this world of globalized for-profit food production, countries where children are starving export grain and soy to feed the calves and chickens who will be slaughtered and made into unhealthy snacks for affluent adults in wealthy countries.

This is the food-feed conflict. The majority of the world’s corn, for example, is used as feed rather than food, with many pounds of feed needed to produce just one pound of meat. Much of the land now used to grow massive quantities of animal feed by means of vast monocultural acres of genetically modified crops would be more efficiently and ecologically used to grow diverse, locally-adapted plant crops for direct human consumption. So, meat-milk-egg production wastes both food and arable land. (Go here for more details, including plenty of back-up facts.)

It doesn’t stop there. As recently reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, animal agriculture generates more greenhouse gas emissions than any other sector of the economy — including transport. Animal agriculture also involves lots of transport for all of the hauling of feed and animals and body parts from place to place and thus uses lots of fuel. Thus, animal agriculture significantly contributes to the demand for biofuels which, in turn, drives up food prices.

And still it doesn’t stop! Not included in my handy chart of current crises is the emerging worldwide water crisis. There, too, the first-world appetite for animal flesh places everybody else on the planet at risk. Animal agriculture uses more water than all other human purposes combined and is the number one cause of water pollution.

What do we do? Seize the day.

The only upside of the ethanol-fueled upsurge in food prices is that this also represents a significant surge in feed prices. This has two implications that ought to hearten any animal advocate.

Here’s another chart:

Feed is the highest cost of meat-milk-egg production. Producers have two choices in response to the significantly higher costs they are facing: (1) raise prices and face the possibility of reduced demand leading to lower profits; (2) keep prices the same, accepted a reduced rate of profit. Either way, return on investment goes down. That means now is a particularly good time to use any and all nonviolent means to further drive down profits by either reducing demand (e.g. by means of vegan education) or further raising costs of production (e.g. by means of costly welfare or environmental regulations or other, more direct, methods).

Speaking of vegan education, higher meat-milk-egg prices make consumers more likely to want to listen to the whys and — especially — hows of reducing or eliminating consumption of those items. So, all out to the grocery stores, now, with recipes, facts about milk and breast cancer, pictures of battery cages, and anything else that might make consumers already balking at high prices even less likely to reach for the non-vegan items. Handouts touting the cost-efficiency of vegan eating would be especially handy right about now.

And let’s quit arguing about animal welfare regulations that, whatever else they do or don’t do, surely will increase production costs, thus making the exploitation of animals a less profitable endeavor. We don’t have time for any more mean-spirited attacks on each other: It’s time to seize the day in a multifaceted, strategic way.

There’s more that those of us working at the international level need to do to seize opportunities to fight the spread of factory farming and promote sustainable cultivation of locally-adapted, culturally-appropriate food crops worldwide but this post is already over long so I’ll save that for another — but still soon — day.

And let me send you out with a tune. You can go over to LastFM to listen to Charlie “Bird” Parker’s Now’s the Time.

The current issue of the New Yorker has got a must-read article by Elizabeth Kolbert on the carbon-neutral Danish island of Samsø. Luckily for everybody, the free full text is online.

The article details exactly how the residents of this island came together, over time, to produce sufficient renewable energy to both power all of their home/business lighting, heating, electricity, etc. and offset the fossil fuel they continue to use in some of their vehicles.

Apart from being an inspiring story, Kolbert’s narrative constitutes a case study for community organizers wondering how to bring about substantial collective efforts against climate change. Kolbert details community member Søren Hermansen’s effort, over a number of years, to guide the island from the static state in which everybody’s waiting for everybody else to take action to the current state of affairs, in which everybody’s invested in a truly collective creative venture.

He did it by recognizing, early on, that relationships are the key to community:

Rather than working against the islanders’ tendency to look to one another, Hermansen tried to work with it.

“One reason to live here can be social relations,” he said. “This renewable-energy project could be a new kind of social relation, and we used that.” Whenever there was a meeting to discuss a local issue—any local issue—Hermansen attended and made his pitch. He asked Samsingers to think about what it would be like to work together on something they could all be proud of. Occasionally, he brought free beer along to the discussions.

(Please note that the “free beer” is in accordance with my theory of the importance of showing up with sandwiches.)

Here’s another important point: Kolbert notes that all of the efforts of the islanders of Samsø are canceled out by just a few of the new coal-fired power plants going up every week. But this doesn’t deter them, as it ought not deter any of us from taking the small steps that in-and-of-themselves seem not to make a dent in huge problems.

So many huge human-generated problem are the result of an accumulation of choices by individuals. Contrary choices (going vegan, recycling, withholding war taxes, etc.) also accumulate. You can’t not choose and you can’t choose for your choices not to count. Whatever you do or don’t do factors into the aggregate, thereby helping to create the world in which others live.

Thus all of our personal choices turn out also to be social acts. When we recognize this, we can more easily envision the kinds of social strategies that create real change.

Now that I’m boycotting irony, I’m not sure how to respond to the festive polar bears lighting up these long winter nights.

I can’t be only one who wonders how many actual polar bears will drown as a result of the planet-warming waste of CO2-producing electricity used to light up their synthetic substitutes. And, surely, the people who put up these cheery decorations don’t intend to send the message “Drown, bears, drown!”

I guess I really have lost the appetite for irony because I can’t even bring myself to joke about it.

Please read the title of this post in big, swirly, cursive letters that implicitly mock my pretensions.

In recent years, it’s been my habit to devote holidays to writing one-off essays on whatever I happen to be brooding about that day. I’m not going to do that today. I’ve got too much to do for the sanctuary and I’m also in the middle of working on a couple of long and certain-to-be controversial essays on topics that are (in my view) of potentially greater import than whatever pattrice happens to be thinking about today.

But I’ve still got the impulse to spout off about holiday-related issues. So, here are links to some of my “deep thoughts” of previous holidays:

Thanksgiving 2006
Throwing the homosexuals to the hounds sounds like a metaphor for the Republican Party’s electoral strategy of recent years, but it actually happened back in 1513 in what is now Panama. Then, governor Vasco Nunez de Balboa condemned 50 homosexual Indians to be torn apart by dogs.

Seen by both Catholic Conquistadors and Protestant Pilgrims as a sign of godless animality, same-sex pleasure was ruthlessly suppressed throughout the process of the subjugation of the Americas. Today, the conquest of the senses continues, as billions of people and animals are forced to forgo all kinds of natural happiness so that a privileged few can enjoy the empty gluttony that has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe.

   Read more…

Christmas 2005
Grey rain hangs in the sky. Translucent drops splash on the blacktop, sluicing like a summer thunderstorm on this Christmas Day. I gaze with glazed eyes at the glassy surface of the water until the blare of a car horn blasts me back into my body. Heart pumping, I wave weakly. I’m cold and wet.

Six of us stand in a line with picket signs. One of the signs says HONK FOR PEACE.

   Read more…

Thanksgiving 2004
“Body parts are everywhere!” That’s what one US soldier had to say about the saddest city in Iraq, according to an AFP report. It’s also an apt description of the state of US dinner tables during the festival of gloating and gluttony known as Thanksgiving.

This year, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving in the wake of the taking of Falluja. Waving “drumsticks” and fighting for “wishbones,” complacent Christians will gorge themselves without fear, safe from the threats of gay marriage and Iraqi self-determination. Stuffing themselves beyond satiation, they and their children will partake of the proud Puritanical tradition of ruthless, reckless expansion.

   Read more…

Christmas 2002
As the Christians gather to celebrate the birth of the founder of their religion, I find myself asking a question that I wish Christians would ask themselves: Who would Jesus kill?

   Read more…

And, don’t forget not to go shopping tomorrow!

In “Nuggets and Hummers and fish sticks, oh my!”, recently published in the online environmental magazine Grist, Bruce Friedrich accessibly summarizes the environmental reasons for going vegan. Now a Veep at PETA, my pal Bruce was a longtime social justice activist with radical Catholic peace and anti-poverty projects when he first went vegan for environmental and social justice reasons.

This article is required reading for anyone who doesn’t know all of the ways that the production and consumption of animal products deplete and pollute the planet that is our only source of sustenance. If you’re an environmentalist — or even if you believe that global warming is a real threat — and you’re not (yet) vegan, read this article to make sure that you’re making an informed choice. Follow the links in the article if you mistrust his facts. (I’ve researched the issue thoroughly myself and can vouch for them too.) If, after reading the article, you don’t plan to eliminate or at least sharply reduce your consumption of animal products, please come back here and tell me why. Seriously, I need to understand your reasoning.

Vegans, you’re not off the hook. Read the article as a model of how to talk about this issue in an accessible yet informed manner. More importantly, pass the link along to any meat-eating environmentalists you know. Ask them to come and tell me about their thinking if, after reading the article, they still don’t intend to embrace or at least move toward veganism. I’m at the beginning of a research project about this and I need to understand the thinking of environmentalists who know why they ought to be vegan but don’t make that choice. Also, remember that being vegan isn’t the be-all and end-all of environmental responsibility. If we want folks to change their diets to save the planet, we ought to be willing to make similarly significant changes in our own consumption patterns by, for example, sharply reducing fuel use and purchases of new consumer goods. Check out other articles on the Grist site if you’re not yet hip to environmental issues other than those involving animals.