An account of industrialized killing from a participant’s point of view. Distance and concealment operate as mechanisms of power in modern society. Mass killing is messy, but institutions existing for the purpose of lining up and killing innocent beings are kept behind walls far away from restaurants and grocery stores, and flesh comes to us antiseptically wrapped and visually and linguistically divorced (meat) from the animal it IS. Meat does not stench of filth and decay, does not look like rape and mutilation and brutality and violence and skinning and dismemberment, does not sound like desperate crying and fearful screaming. What we eat (which is in reality an altered who) retains no discernible trace of the violence that procured it, nor of the nonhuman person it used to BE. The corporations are so invested in keeping the public blind that their lobbyists have made it illegal (a FELONY if a second offense) to record (in any way) and publicize anything about the inside of a slaughterhouse. Our society already is averse to this violence. You already are averse to this violence. We must demand its end. You may find the descriptions in the pages ahead both physically and morally repugnant. Recognize however, that this reaction of disgust, this impulse to thumb through the pages so as to locate, separate and segregate the sterile, abstract arguments from the flat, ugly, day-in day-out minutiae of the work of killing, is the same impulse that isolates the slaughterhouse from society as a whole and, indeed, that sequesters and neutralizes the work of killing even for those who work within the slaughterhouse itself... Nothing in my imagination had prepared me for the utter invisibility of the slaughter, the banal insidiousness of what hides in plain sight.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Nov 2013 02:02:25 +0000
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