Conspiracy Fact

THIS PAST weekend, one of my vegetarian pals advanced Answer A as to his mania, which is the undoubt-edly cruel and terrible ways animals are treated BEFORE they are cruelly slaughtered and unnaturally packaged to be sent to our local grocery chain. As he was holding his diet up as universal palliative-- if we refuse to eat the results of these sadomasochists' efforts to soil God's Eden, they will eventually relent and take to embracing all the furry creatures of the fertile green earth as their spiritual brothers-- I fell into one of my more basic defensive positions, which is that I cannot, intellectually, convince myself that the entire world will change as the result of my own actions or inactions. "It's a big world," I informed him. And then I had to back off, change the subject. It's just too soul-crushing.

For him. Not for me. The fact of the matter is that human beings have been slaughtering animals in some very bizarre and cruel ways going back to the beginning of history, and not always with the intent of eating them. And even if we were to collectively stop eating animal flesh in this country to the extent that all the feed lots and slaughterhouses were to be forced to declare bankruptcy and go out of business overnight, they'd still be hacking oxen apart in the Philippines in a manner so brutal an inefficient that the animals die a slow, agonizing death of blood loss shock before their bodies are discarded into the surf.

It's also a fact that animals are being treated with far more dignity in these modern times than they have been since the dawn of the industrial age, and we know this to be true because their treatment and processing is being monitored by armies of inspectors, and you have to dig really deep to find something demonstrably wrong with the system. I mean, really, it's fine to claim that the animals being treated with antibiotics have diseases because they are being treated with antibiotics, but pardon me if I find the argument less than convincing, given that you'd have to have been autopsying every animal in a brood for ten generations in order to prove that the evolutionary change had taken place wherein every animal were genetically predisposed to disease because their natural immunities had been wiped out by a dependence on antibiotics.

Might be they're being given the antibiotics because animals get sick. Naaaaaaah. Fuck that.


Which brings us to the film of the day. The film of the day is a ham and cheese with bacon on rye with mustard, along with totletts and Ketchupo! and a Saranac Pale Ale followed by a Harpoon IPA. Nah. I didn't buy it either.

Sorry. The flick of the day was something I knew I was going to come across before too long, although I actually had figured I would get it from Netflix and spend the better part of a day bracing myself before venturing into it. Instead it turned up on one of the movie channels deep into the line-up. We get forty-seven million movie channels, including at least six permutations each of HBO, Cinemax, Starz and so on. The channel this turned up on is so far up the tier that it makes me think it's programmed for people who would be asking for some particularly strange fare. (Not the same channel the movie Twilight has been showing up on, but not far from it.)

Initially I thought I was going to have problems with this based on what I know about military research into mind control and behavior modification, which is actually kind of astounding for a civilian. Most of what I know came from military sources, and all of it indicates what, to me, is a rather mundane and logical conclusion: methods of mind control and behavior modification, from a military standpoint, are unreliable at best and offer neither a tactical nor a strategic application in intelligence gathering or in actual warfare. In other words, the best way to control the mind of your adversary is to point a big, big gun at him.

Not that I am advocating that. I am fond of saying that I am against the bombing because someone has to be against the bombing, but the fact of the matter is, and this is a fact, war is stupid. As a famous idiot once said, war is about killing people and breaking their things. What part of that sounds appealing to you? Killing people and breaking their things has never won hearts and minds. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a liar.

Anyways.

So based on the first viewing, I am undecided about this. I kind of liked parts of it, and there were a good number of laugh-out-loud moments, at least for me. And the things that were patently untrue were very clear-- the US military has never had an ex-hippie guru who tried all paths to enlightenment for the sole purpose of discovering methods of psychic warfare. (I could be wrong, but I expect I'm not.) The things that were reasonable bore close enough resemblance to actual events. There were a few moments of ham-fisted morality and baconny exegesis, but nothing that really sank it. On the other hand, it wasn't, I don't think, the down-and-dirty military satire it meant to be, and the plot's redemption arcs were a tad on the broad side. Still, it wasn't bad.

So I dunno. I can't recommend having ham and bacon on Jewish rye, because, karmically, the stakes are just too high. Especially putting bacon on anything purporting to be even remotely kosher. I mean, bacon is the porkiest pork of all, so that's just kind of asking for it. If you do, though, follow the pale ale with an IPA. It's just common sense. Oh, and never research the military's attempts to research anything besides really big guns. It turns out they're really interested in doing really mean shit to people, and not only are they neither bright enough or weird enough to make any of it very interesting, they are perversely convinced that it's all for our own good.

And they're wrong.