You may have noticed that I took a break from keeping you informed these past few weeks. It wasn’t a respite, but part of the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) strike.
Although I’m not one of the 12,000 who are members or annual due-payers, I do spend a considerable amount of time trapped in my room writing teleplays, reading “Variety,” and making gay jokes. The strike has shut down all non-realitarded television programming and has put every late night show on hiatus except for the one directly across from my window (normally airing from 1 to 1:07 a.m.). I retain my ideological allegiance, but the stalemate between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has driven me to cross the imaginary picket line outside of the Argus office and write this column with the hopes that you will read it, get something out of it, get drunk, and then offer yourself to me…so that I, too, may get something out of it.
When I returned to campus late last week I was further reminded that I’m not a professional film or television writer as a tumbleweed drifted down Fountain Avenue like they do on lots in Studio City—I’m merely an athletic and temporarily celibate college student who has big dreams, a big ego, and a corresponding set of genitalia.
Now that I provided the loud and proud gays, latent homosexuals, and women who don’t puke when they hear my name with food for thought, allow me to welcome you back to campus from the week-long break that Native Americans reluctantly call Thanksgiving. While many Freeman Scholars remained on campus, most Wesleyan students returned home where they either came out, unveiled a butch or stupid haircut, or aligned with an aesthetically anti-establishment uncle around the dining room table. And after such a liberating weekend, I notice that people are visibly happy, relishing in their return to campus as they know that a longer, more agony-filled break looms on the horizon, commonly referred to as Christmas vacation.
As I was watching the socially awkward citizens of the future smiling, laughing, and savoring their temporal happiness at Usdan, Delmar Crim approached me and diverted my attention. Under the impression that I gave a shit, Delmar began telling me about Bon Appétit’s plan to change the current lunch program to “all you care to eat” or, as I word it, “all an undisciplined student can fit in his, her, or ze’s stomach.” I was no longer busy thinking about how weird it was to see people overjoyed on this campus that normally breeds misery, but how this initiative will affect people’s putting on winter weight. I mentioned to Delmar that this was the last thing that any picky, heterosexual male at Wesleyan could wish for, but he was entranced by the cha-chings of eleven-dollar lunches replacing seven-dollar snacks; I was seeing Wespuss waddle through the serving area with overloaded trays and Nalgene bottles full of chocolate milk.
After refusing to call my congressman about climate change, karma kicked in as I was nearly struck by a passing Prius with a bumper sticker reading, “Love Animals. Don’t Eat Them.” And I got back to doing that thing alcohol impedes: thinking.
Responding to the bumper sticker and seeing that Thanksgiving just passed…if I don’t eat that turkey, who will? Maybe a lion, tiger, or bear. But here in New England it would probably be a wolf or a Boston-bound Ford Explorer. And what’s going to happen to that mean old wolf? He’ll probably get eaten by a bear or maybe by a pack of cannibalistic wolves; and what those fratricidal canines don’t eat will then be eaten by scavengers, and the remnants will help to fertilize the ground, which will in turn help vegetation grow.
And just like the cooked corpses on your plates and in the dumpster behind Usdan once were, plants are also living things. Although they don’t have ribs, wings, breasts, or genitalia, they’re still alive. And I would bet that a carrot, like a lobster, doesn’t look forward to being plucked from its natural habitat and dropped into a pot of scalding hot water so that some 9½ can puke it up while her boyfriend pays the check.
If the sexually repressed puritans didn’t conceive Thanksgiving when they landed on the foreign planet that became the U.S, imagine the overpopulation figures for turkeys! Try to fathom how many gizzards, livers, and claws would be strewn throughout New England if the black-capped codgers didn’t de-feather the birds and throw them into the fire. Overpopulation is still an issue in today’s society, but it’s not nearly as prominent as it would be if not for tobacco and the idiots who depend on it; alcohol and high speed autos; the networks of state and federal courts and penitentiaries; and the Army reserves.
I know we’re at a place of higher learning, but the point of my mini-rant is to remind you that a food chain exists, and we (Homo erectus) are part of it—and for those who don’t wear glasses or contacts, at the top.
I can accept that some refuse to eat certain animal products on account of unhealthy habitats and sketchy slaughtering methods, but eating animals is in your blood. The duck that costs 100 euro at the Ritz in Paris didn’t come down from his suite and into the oven when I ordered him—he came out of the freezer. Animals are killed inhumanely. Who cares?! They’re not humans. “Yeah, but they’re noble creatures,” some high-pitched harlot might say. The lion is the king of the jungle, and a Jack Russel terrier named Harvey is the princess of my uncle the queen’s apartment, but none is a noble creature. Animals don’t throw dinner parties, they don’t have conversations about politics, and they don’t watch porn: they’re not people. Animals are just like babies: they eat, sleep, shit, and piss. So, if it’s socially acceptable to abort a pregnancy, what’s so taboo about eating veal chops?
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