When I was about eight years old, I was alone in the den watching Jacques Cousteau filming elephant seals on a crowded island. A baby seal was being crushed by an overfed bull and as the baby screamed in distress and agony, the colossal bull looked on in the distance with a bit of haughty indifference. Perhaps the bull didn’t know he was crushing a baby seal. Perhaps he knew but didn’t care. Or perhaps he knew very well that his prodigious blubber was suffocating the infant and enjoyed the feeling of his power against a creature so powerless. Apparently, the mother elephant seal had been separated from her baby. I was rooting for the mother and baby to be reunited but I fear they never were.
Watching this wildlife tableau, I grasped the brutality of nature, lost my innocence, and became incurably melancholy, all in one swoop.
Thanks, Jacques Cousteau. I suppose I could say you ruined my life, but inevitably I would have been witness to some other horror, which would have had equal effect.
Future TV viewings would include even more brutal visions, including a zebra being eaten alive by monster-sized crocodiles.
What’s really hard to digest is the sympathy I feel for the bovine creatures being fed upon by carnivorous brutes seems to contradict my appetite for barbecued meats.
Watching carnivores hunt the fruited plain on TV perhaps gives me a vision, not of The Other, but of my prehistoric, carnivorous self.
Repeated attempts at vegetarianism have failed. I'm not alone. The majority of vegetarian aspirants resort to their carnivore ways.
Interesting and I agree ...
http://rethinkingchildhood.com/2013/01/22/neighbourhood-america-mother/
Some comments on this article from hacker news:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5097256
"As a foreigner the one thing that strikes me the most as alienating is that in too many places it's the exact same pattern that is applied. Same roads. Same neighborhoods. Same places with restaurants and shops and a big parking in the middle of the square lot. Same toilets.
It's alienating because it feels "fake" nearly anywhere you go. Nature, in a lot of places, doesn't have its rights (just look at how some states are "divided" by a straight line:
terrifying).
Probably one of the worst place for that is Irvine in southern California.
Even if it's not "cookie cutter" everywhere, all the neighborhoods still look identical.
These decisions may look pragmatic but to many foreigners it feels alienating."
"It feels alienating to many of us Americans, too. Having visited a few foreign countries, I've seen beautiful public spaces, and its disappointing to come home and see how ugly our cities look now that I've seen better. I desperately want to live in a cosmopolitan urban center that is practical, something I have yet to find here."
Posted by: Paul | January 22, 2013 at 08:38 AM
I have a friend who lives in Laguna Niguel, not too far from Irvine. Nice weather, nice houses, but there is a prefab quality that seems like Stepford Wives, very scary.
My brother lives in Albany, near Berkeley. Seems like a nice place to live. You can walk to all these great shops and restaurants along Solano Ave.
Posted by: herculodge | January 22, 2013 at 10:25 AM
I read your post shortly after reading this tweet from The Onion:
TheOnion: Commentary | We Raise All Our Beef Humanely On Open Pasture And Then We Hang Them Upside Down And Slash Their Throats http://t.co/RH598gPK
They somehow seem related.
Posted by: Emmett Salberg | January 22, 2013 at 01:31 PM
Yeah, organic means a better life but that blade is sharp.
Posted by: herculodge | January 22, 2013 at 01:37 PM