.
The maze of livestock pens and walkways at the Union Stockyards, Chicago: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
The June air of the South Side of the enormous City of Big Shoulders, Killing Floor of the Plains, Butcher to the World, welled up hot and humid, thick with a sharp acrid aroma of adrenalin panic cut by the charged mean stench of animal blood.
The cattle, having been herded and packed into the big prison-like trucks in Kansas, offloaded after the long two-day road transit across the searing summertime prairies and now packed again into the tight plywood rectangles of the Union Stockyard pens, lowed dolorously, their great thirsty pink tongues drooping from their mouths, flags of open submission. The animals now visibly too exhausted to react in any way save by rubbing numbly up against one another, to what was coming -- that thing, in anticipation of which how could they but have been receiving ancient instinctive neural signals -- clouded warnings useless against the encroaching inevitability of the thing -- all this but dimly sensed from outside the pens, yet somehow eerily perceptible all the same, even, or perhaps especially, to the sensitive spiritual receptors of a child.
Assembly-line animal sacrifice may be the sort of transgression against which nature creates and projects its own helplessly protesting fore-echo, a vibrational field signalling imminent violation, released ahead of mechanized murder to fan out upon the windless air in an unseen inaudible fear-plume. No archives exist to help us understand the dark intimacies of the final stages of these routine ceremonies. The tremendous blood-spurting, groaning, eye-rolling climactic moment of the ritual was not kept on film, never described by secretarial accountants in the kind of detailed notation that historical suffering requires, if it is to be acknowledged.
But the dread-emanations of the doomed beasts in their cells, supposing these emanations in fact existed, could not but have been picked up by the men in the hired crews of the factory execution squad; to whom, realistically, such emanations, if they existed, would have been old news long ago. So let's get on with it. These handlers were hardened-looking cowboys, and in their tending not given to great shows of gentleness or kindness toward the frightened milling animals in the fenced communal waiting-stalls. There seemed, too, curiously -- again from the innocent perspective of a child's widening eyes -- a kind of cowboy heroism involved; as though the workings of this vast animal-death factory represented, not unlike the heroic labours of men at war, a form of brave world-saving activity, bringing meat to the tables of hungry people as far away as, for example, Germany.
And thus it was that, visiting this infernal station on a school expedition, one experienced one's original informative vision of the process of large-scale animal sacrifice in actu. The smell, impossible ever to forget that smell. One surmises a Swift (not the corporate slaughterer, but the earlier modest proposer) might conjure impressions of a similar sort of fateful odour arising to invade the senses, to linger in the hidden grey recesses of the brain, had the yards and pens and ramps and walkways been jammed not with frightened beasts en route to the killing chambers, but with people, while cows and pigs and horses and sheep and even perhaps the occasional helpful dog chivvied and herded them along the same baleful courses. But in that latter hypothetical case, one must speculate that the people, having souls, and being sensitive creatures, would at least have kept some brief but memorable notes, so that scholars of the future would be able to remember, and commemorate with reverence, their last feelings, as they went off terrified to die in puddles of their own spilt blood and viscera.
Not of course that gawking kids with goony crewcuts on school field trips were ever going to be conducted by the floor managers, the matter-of-fact priest cult of this infernal temple, into the inner sanctum of the killing-factory buildings -- where, one imagined or indeed knew with a deep certainty that had no rational explanation, the metallic secret heart of the Yards was kept, in the ark of the covenant, a weapon, an instrument, that hung, poised in the air, for a long terrible instant before the final falling of the blow. Over and over and over. There seemed no end to the numbers of animals, there among the waiting-stalls, that awful sultry summer's day.
Ramps, pens and railway track at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Truck full of cattle waiting to be unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle being unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle being unloaded at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Trucks parked after delivering a load of cattle, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Removing dead cow from pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Man on horseback and boy looking over cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Handler with cattle in pen at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Owner looking over cattle in pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Workman with prod starting to unload pigs from truck at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Workman with prod unloading pigs down ramp from truck at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Pigs in holding pens at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Pigs in walkway moving toward factory at Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Pigs in walkway entering factory building, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Owners, handlers and guests inspecting pens, with transit ramp overhead, Union Stockyards, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Union Stockyards at mid-day, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Stockyard workers smoking and talking during lunchtime, Chicago, Illinois: photo by John Vachon, July 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
23 comments:
Tom, we're really on the same wavelength lately. Just today we started looking at these folks
http://cowprotection.com/
We came across them and they're local, New England local, anyway.
In film class in college during the screening of a classic example of early documentary, a French one called The Slaughterhouse, I fainted dead away at the depiction of an early bolt action stunning technique and subsequent live skinning, woke up on the ground with bumps on three sides of my head where it had bounced on the floor
When I was a kid I remember laughing at an account of Indian monks who cover their mouths so as to never accidentally kill a bug by inhaling it, but now I avoid stepping on them too.
Yes -- and to think that that obscene pornographic Cormac McCarthy novel and subsequent film have actually made the captive bolt gun brain scrambler a chic device among the sick circles of pretend Hollywood violence wannabes all the world round. Anton Chigurh, a hero for our times.
But it is confession time not accusation time. I was such a great stepper upon bugs in my protein laden porky salad days on the West Side of Butchertown, Vincent, that I finally, about age seven, began to have a sense the bugs were diving for the weedy cracks in the broken pavement when they saw/heard me coming. Which was easy because I had that heavy thump of Infant Protein Foot; I suppose this was the sort of thing incipient midwestern white folk easily confused with real power, back in those bygone (thank gods) beef salad days.
Now, however, if I inadvertently inconvenience a ladybug I am plunged into fits of shame and remorse for hours. These emotions are real and usually well earned and richly deserved at that. In fact that actually did happen yesterday. Half blind (hopefully from animal protein lack, blindness would be a small cost to pay), I thought I was doing my first helpful domestic task of the year when I pinched what I took to be a small pellet of dirt skating across one of the household mould platforms. But when the pellet skittered away upon my touch I realized to my horror it was a ladybug. I could not conceive that in this new ice age we're having, something as tender and delicate as a ladybug could have been born. I fear I damaged its little ladybug wings. But by then it was too late for anything but a seizure of that old familiar animalkiller's agenbite of inwit.
And Vincent, you may not have heard this but just now in the royal ballcourt of Madrid in an uncannily well timed and emphatic statement on behalf of the world of bugs, the tiny winged genius Lionel La Pulga (The Flea) Messi has with the usual exuberant smile on his undoubtedly vegetable eating little face stamped what amounts to an elephant size boot (though actually a size 3 babyshoe) upon the animal-fat-bloated neck of Jose (The Perfect One) Mourinho and all the assembled historical power structure of the great animalkilling Spanish Empire. I took this as a sign of change, Vincent. Seen as through a glass darkly, a glimmer, but still.
Rafael Nadal never touched meat either, by the way. Salmon is as far as he will go. And his father wore the Catalan colours of Barcelona. All other big teams have corporate megadeath sponsor shirt logos, but Barca shirts say Unicef. Cormac McCarthy is just another careerist punk American exploiter of violence and and killing, really I believe all writers "of note" ought to be rolled up into an enchilada and fed to the hogs.
I truly despised that movie, didn't see a shred of a point, I sat there and tried and tried to squeeze some worth out of it and just got sick. Porn.
I knew not of the Barca loungers and the triumph of the flea, thanks, I have to figure it out now.
But confession-wise, we all did some childish bug torture. And there was no one around telling us not to. Saw a depiction once of a child being brought up by a monk who was urged not to torture animals, that if they die the boy will have to carry it with him for a lifetime. I think of this in regard to our heightened concern for things like ladybug wings, it's the very real rebound from our earlier actions.
this assembly line crap was invented by Henry Ford!
I will NEVER buy a Ford. even if it's free.
meanwhile,
every-time I slice a yellow squash
I make sure that it is already dead!
http://www.jbscarriers.com/images/swift_history.pdf
what's the alternative? Contaminated soy beans? and farm raised cat fish and lobster? & oil-fed Gulf shrimp?
I just don't know.. the purest meat just might be those Fig Rats in my back yard!
or those dogs in Asia?
or those monkeys in India?
Buffalo meat, these days, costs about $13 per pound
while a McDonald dollar double cheeseburger only costs costs a buck thirty-four !
Vincent,
Don't worry about The Flea, he's just a sweet and happy and very gifted little unstepped-on (so far, though many have tried) 23-year old kid from the Pampas (Rosario, as it happens) who has a talent for making people smile and feel delighted by the natural sublimity the human race is capable of possessing when it throws its copy of the Atkins Diet off a bridge to nowhere. He comes from a land of cattle ranchers and beef farmers, but I refuse to hold that against the lad; like us, he couldn't help where he was born any more than we can and that bit of flippancy on my part was merely a typically idiotic ad-hominem attempt to make light of the terrible fact that we were brought up among a race of killers and couldn't and maybe didn't and probably will never get over it.
"...we all did some childish bug torture. And there was no one around telling us not to. Saw a depiction once of a child being brought up by a monk who was urged not to torture animals, that if they die the boy will have to carry it with him for a lifetime."
That monk may well have had a point.
The last time I was ever or will ever be in my home town of Chicago, sometime around 1968, I rudely declined the offer of the last steak meal that has been or ever will be offered to me, and I regard that as a tiny turning point in the dim-bulb enlightenment path of a predictably monstrous son of a mechanical killing culture -- the fossil hulk of a being who was thus, by being hatched-out on the very doorstep of the blood-lapped killing floor, doomed thenceforward to spend the brief remainder of its miserable life unsuccessfully and pathetically attempting to make atonement for the deep sin of having been born in what can only be described as a karmic hell, so to speak.
Vincent, I am emboldened to make these embarrassing and regretful admissions only by your bravery and honesty in admitting you too are perhaps a trifle whacko (as the meat devouring normals would have it) in this regard. Each of us has her/his own reparations to make. It is only when we begin to see this, I think, that we begin to approach the state of humility in which it might be possible to look the universe in the eye at last, upon mercifully being permitted to depart from it forever, having well and truly resigned at last.
For me that moment seems not far off and as I stand before the bleak ungetoverable wall of it, I still have no answers other than such useless expressions remorse as I have here made.
But to hell with all that, I believe it is now time for us to utter a heartfelt Morituri and once and for all leave those bugs alone.
Of course in karmic terms merely getting the animal protein out of our personal "systems" won't be good enough, but at least it's a too-little too-late start.
Ed,
This is not about finding and intaking the purest and cheapest form of meat, but about emerging from the Stone Age.
I wouldn't care if buffalo meat cost a penny a ton, I'm 6'1", weight 128.5 pounds, having trouble these days digesting anything at all much less the stunned and slaughtered remains of my fellow creatures, but were I starving and someone offered me a freezer full of buffalo burgers, hamburgers, or any other kind of animal-meatburgers I'd suggest it be dropped instead upon the heads of the Coen Brothers, who turned that disgusting McCarthy novel into that even more repulsive movie glorifying the lethal human-to-human possibilities of the captive bolt gun and (where's the surprise) got the tacky little golden statuette from the Academy of America Deception for it.
Anyhow, whatever. This and the preceding posts were meant not as rants, but as provocations to thought. They have been successful in that respect, in that I can hear and feel Vincent's thoughts, which I believe almost amounts to, dare I say it, a dialogue. I realize there are those who don't want to waste time dropping their profile badge, moon poems, stone age epic haikus etc on a secondary, tertiary, quaternary post, or for that matter to even spend five seconds looking closely at any post at all before unzipping the self-repeating pie hole (this is not a haiku moment) and then rotary-dialing off to the next open-door-policy blog on somebody important's link list. But that doesn't mean the posts are not there, lurking away in The Cloud like helpless forlorn abandoned little Platonic Ideas; and taken in sequence as they were intended, they represent my thoughts, of a sort. I know, I know, this is not the medium for that sort of thing, but... just saying.
So as far as I am concerned anybody who's reading this over their morning plate of bacon and grits with suet gravy (the diet that made Dolly Parton into... was it Dolly the Sheep?) ought to go ahead, dip and slobber, enjoy, enjoy (but please -- a napkin, at least). After all, eating animals is the American way, the thing that makes us greater than any other nation of humanoids -- and too we have responsibilities here, our ideals to protect, our value systems to prop up, not to mention a generation of future killers to guard, with their shining, if slightly glazed and indeed terribly sad, glistening little blue, brown and grey eyes.
Ah, though the night is cold, I am beginning to feel this now, warming to the patriotic spirit of inter-species murder. Yes, we have our own grand traditions, our own heroic role-model cultural icons. Just remember, beef and pork can fortify our national defenses; intake enough animal protein, and in the event of rising waters in the 2012 apocalypse tsunami season, you can become a human sandbag, an inert passive mass of what the present epoch has to match the example of Audie Murphy. And let us never forget that The Duke went to the happy hunting ground with forty pounds of undigested animal matter lodged in his intestines. You've got to feel for the unfortunate underworld condition of the man, irradiated, nicotine-stuffed, and unable even to loosen his belt because he is made of wax.
Well thank you very much for that, Ed. We are now a triumvirate of Not-Normals. How can this be? Three actual almost-Americans who are able to grasp that all this disgusting meat-eating is just a cultural construction, no matter how you cut it, round, braised, baked, fried or skewered on the gleaming tines of a cute little gourmet fork?
As for the Duke, in my humble view everything he was, represented, or stood for, is just so much additional evidence to support the position that this particular mayfly Empire was not only the briefest and most brazen in history, but that it really had no culture at all -- just a Lot of Guts.
Alas, I spoke too soon. Ed Baker has now once again brainlessly bombed in, paid no attention to what anybody was saying, left another rotary-blog comment, then read what was above, and deleted his comment, and hastened off to whatever stop comes after this one on Silliman's link list.
But, unfortunately, I don't really care to be made the victim of that sort of thing any more, so, just for the sake of history, as in the Wikileaks, here's Ed's contribution.
I loved it, but I guess it was just too good to be true:
___
Ed Baker has left a new comment on your post "Stockyard Fundamentals: John Vachon, Union Stockya...":
WHEW! and 'dig' this a John Wayne type guy is now head of the CIA!
a by-gosh real General what's his name Patrey-us...
a tin-can of SPAM now running THE CIA! ???
and
another over-weight meat-eating 'yes man' of the Stratus Quo is now running the Pentagon
did you know
that the mostly used restaurant in the Pentagon is a McDonald's?
and you should just see what they feed people via the food court at The Navy Medical Center up there in Bethesda (where our "leaders" go for ..service)
even the Seventh day Adventist Hospital down the street now serves meat ... in order to bring in more sick people who are sick (obese. hart attacks, diabetes) from the food that they now are serving
a vegetarian diet is really easier to deal with
and healthier
mentally, physically, morally, religiously and politically
Posted by Ed Baker to TOM CLARK at 28 April 2011 05:24
I dropped my previous comment which was 110% all ME
and found this in today's Was Post which says it betterly:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/study-ranks-food-pathogens-by-cost-to-society/2011/04/27/AFPLWK2E_story.html?hpid=z3
so
if you don't think that my previous comment won't ruin my chances to become a Famous Poet/Artist
you can re-post it...
mean-whille am off to the 7 th day adventist grocery store to buy a box of veggie burgers
a box contains 4 packs of twelve patties each pack
last price for the box was $36 which brings it to about $1.38 purr pattie !
smothered in $4.00 per pound onions and $2.99 per pound green peppers sauteed in $27.99 per gallon Virgin Olive oil
a real deal!
Ed, I love each comment you make incrementally more than the last one, in fact I am keeping a running compilation and am planning to pirate as many of them as soon as possible. No really, but seriously, all in good fun & c.
I too am all over the Virgin... Olive oil that is. Yesterday I indulged in a double dose in fact. And then later came an episode of vivid carmine hematuria. Oh, well. Win a few... lose everything.
"Famous poet", come on -- everybody knows you are the # 1 most famous poet on the internet, and rightfully so. I mean, who's ever heard of ---- or ---- or ----?
And who's ever NOT heard of Ed Baker?
I esk ya.
So let's do salad.
But meanwhile back at the ranch... this particular taboo-ish area of subject matter is, I realize, a bit, er, delicate, for most people, who think they love their pets but still... well, a chicken sandwich... I mean it's not Lent, is it?
So... why kid around?
The captive bolt brain-scramble prior to slaughter may understandably be represented for public relations reasons as a mercy to the animal, but guess what? The results aren't in yet on that.
Very few people who have experienced the forebrain blast of a hand-held Schlachtshussapparat (modified) appear to have returned to sing of its (relative) mercies.
And of course dead cattle don't talk.
But in case there's anybody who's actually interested and can't figure out what the oblique movie references are about, or just when and where it was that that Hollywood sweetie Anton Chigurh anointed this charming device with its present media chic...
What the heck, I know nobody clicks on these links, who's got the time, but yo -- just stop for ten seconds and imagine somebody did this to what you are about to have for lunch.
"I don't know doctor, I've been having these strange headaches, I must be undreaming again."
Oh, and I almost forgot to explain the obvious, the captive bolt pistol brain-missile-injection does indeed have a serious purpose, which is why it's required by law. It reduces exsanguination upon slaughter. That way, more juice in your meat.
I mean, that's where it, the juice, all of it, belongs, by force majeure (law of nature), right?
And the funny thing about the "mercy" of the captive bolt stunning technique, is that most of the living people I've interviewed on the subject (well, in my mind of course, where else would one dare ask), have been pretty much in agreement with the YouTube commenter Turbo9987. And I quote verbatim.
___
now that's a FUCKED UP way to die
Turbo9987 8 months ago 17
just one more ... point
those antibiotics that they inject non-stop into ALL
those animals that are "processed" (according to FDA guidless lines well
the antibiotics ain't to keep the cows, chickens, pigs, fish .... uhhh ... Healthy
IT S TO MAKE THEM GET FAT ! and the Whoremoans wowow!
well now I gotta get into the bath tub latest tornado possibly about to his here... within 60 milses mostly a bit south and north west of me so far 100 tornado sitings confirmed
ED OH NO!!!
NEVER TAKE A BATH DURING A TORNADO!!
well
maybe we can find me a publisher?
The Collected Blog Comments of Eddie Baker
I used to print out all of my emails when it got up to 35,000 I stopped
as for the blog comments jeesh I never save or keep track of them
luckily the 425 (1998-2004) letters aereogrammes & etc that I sent to ( ...) I got copies of from The Lilly Library
thanks.... our agents ( the cute ones) should "do lunch" sometime
First, thank you for this. The text, the memories the text conveys, the photographs and the comments are all provocations to thought, which should be precursors to constructive action, I would hope, and not despair (he said, despairing). Second, I deeply appreciate the comments about the noxious Coen brothers, whose work I've always found it practically impossible to endure and about whom I have occasionally been forced to sit in respectful silence in order to avoid what would have been confrontation that would have needlessly prolonged the Coen brothers moment. Curtis
Curtis, thank you so much for bringing this back to the point from which it began, and to which, in the end, everything must finally go.
Such idyllic views in the previous posts, especially in light of the next set of pictures... it's sad to see what lengths we will go to in order to satisfy our desires for cheap food. So little regard for the suffering of others and the real costs.
It seems that out of sight truly is out of mind for most of us... and that saying "if I don't someone else will" provides the rest of the justification needed to allow feedlots & stockyards.
Yes, E, "out of sight out of mind" is plainly the modus operandi of everyone who pretends to care about animals, and then eats them. Well, they would perhaps not eat their own dogs or cats or parakeets, but...
In any case, one supposes such folk comfortably imagine that cows and pigs and sheep (et al.) simply slip off into a cozy and comfortable food heaven, rather than being made to undergo the terrible trauma which is what really happens.
the worst "stuff" out there are chickens
from egg to a harvested chicken takes three weeks they are literally pumped up with antibiotics
the most difficult thing that chicken farmers have to deal with here on the Eastern Shore is what to do with the chicken shit... they just wash it down stream and into the Bay .. now the bay is polluted, too
and
those Thanksgiving Day Turkeys ? their grown so fat they can't even walk...they grow them big so that 2/3 of their body is breast just what everybody who wants to eat healthy wants !
all the uneadable stuff of what people eat ... pork, beaf, chicken, fish
the feet, the guts, the etcs well this stuff is processed and made into a slurry and you can buy it as Chicken McNuggets .... or it is put into dog/cat food and fed to your precious pets ...
or
some of it maybe most of the cow/chicken/pig shit is used as fertilizer to nourish our soy-bean crops
that is then fed to our pigs and chickens and cattle
like 5 pounds of soy makes us 1 pound of Pig meat "the 'other white meat"
check out how Perdue or Swift or Swanson or Tyson grows our PROTEIN !
I'll google something see if I can find a video of...
Post a Comment