There can rarely have been a better allegory for the melancholic misery of American electoral politics than California's Proposition Two:
The proposition would add a chapter to Division 20 of the California Health and Safety Code to prohibit the confinement of certain farm animals in a manner that does not allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs.I spent a bit of time weeping over this proposition, though the source of my despair concerns empathy for animals only in some fractional degree.
I am just a bit leery of the category of empathy for animals, not because I think it's misbegotten but because the imagination that animals have "thoughts" or "feelings" which are analogous to those of humans leads to all kinds of mistakes; every time someone tells me why it's okay to train animals to do stuff, or to sit on top of horses, they make some kind of appeal to the animal's inner nature, and what it wants and what its idea of a good life is, that isn't finally persuasive. That said, if you are determined to vote, vote yes on 2 (and no on 8).
Then weep, if you have any empathy at all. What you will have just voted for is this: that animals, which have no real protection from the power of humans, should be granted some nominal degree of "freedom" and "dignity" which involves, in short, a few inches of mobility in the relatively brief period before they and/or their offspring are destroyed and consumed by profit. No debate on the latter point. What their lives are for, we shall not consider, for that has been long ago decided. Salve your conscience thusly: that the strong should by all means continue to prey on the weak, but that certain relatively minuscule palliatives should be proffered during the productive process. Palliatives which are surely real, and which just as surely sanctify the larger process, and the predation of the owners upon the caged and the crated.
And then vote for a president. For better cages and crates. Call this "progressive," even call it "left." Sanctify, sanctify.
Posted by jane at November 2, 2008 06:33 PM | TrackBack