Pulling the Trigger on Trigger
The chief function of American presidents is to “break” unruly working class resistance to American capital whether in Middle Eastern deserts, Latin American jungles or the streets of Oakland and Cincinnati. Eight years of Bush/Cheney fear-training gave way to the current horse shit whisperer-in-chief whose vague soaring Rorschach rhetoric encourages his followers to believe they’re getting their own personal nods and winks about what he believes and what he’ll do if he just gets a “chance.” And, often, when he gets the chance, he’s worse than Bush. To wit:
Just in case my liberal Democrat animal-lovin’ friends missed it: last week Barack Humane Obama signed a bill legalizing horse slaughter for human consumption in the United States after it was outlawed six years ago, thus betraying his 2008 campaign pledge (yawn) to keep it illegal. With the stroke of a pen, Obama is responsible for killing more animals each year than Dick Cheney has killed in a lifetime.
Seventy percent of Americans wanted to keep horses off the menu but, in a flowering of demockracy -- genus venus americanus flytrapus -- the POTUS and the Congrossest kept their bipartisan unbeaten streak alive: the working class majority must never, ever get anything we want, no matter how tiny. Obama’s favorite movie is said to be “The Godfather” and, figuratively, he just put 200,000 horses’ heads each year into the beds and nightmares of anyone who cares about them. Hope and change you can tuck into. The particulars of this merciless outrage, including our old friend: private profit/socialized cost, can be found at Our Compass.
(Here’s some free advice for you Republican presidential yahoos: if you can put a pole ax in Obama’s hand and a thoroughbred horse on the other end of it, you’ll win the election. Poster: “Uncle Tom Obama wants YOU to go the knackers!” Remember all the letters congress received several decades ago when the military was gassing beagles? Give it a try, Mitt and Newt -- it only requires that, for once, you refrain from out-gooning Obama. You can’t excoriate Obama because he didn’t waterboard the horses before he killed them.)
Vegan nags like me point out that horses shouldn’t be eaten any more than cows, chickens, pigs, fish, deer, whales or humans. Others correctly say that American capitalism’s current Death-Mask-In-Chief murders Pakistani, Yemeni and Afghan children on a regular basis so why be surprised when he pulls the trigger on Trigger.
So why is Obama’s marching of Mr. Ed into the terror and cruelty of the slaughterhouse any more irritating than numerous other things he does? It probably has to do with how hard it is to get minimal protections for non-human animals enacted and the fact that he keeps pretending, just like his liberal supporters keep pretending, that he and they are some kind of superior enlightened humane beings wholly unlike their barbarous right wing opponents who we’re supposed to be petrified of. It’s the liberals who shop around for both “humane meat” and “humanitarian” “good wars” and other oxymorons -- and that grates. The lack of revolutionary class/vegan-conciousness among people on the left -- revealing their cowardice, shallowness, hypocrisy and stupidity, and the attachment they have to failure -- is one of the biggest impediments to anything positive happening in America. What’s true of health is also true of ethics and revolution: you can’t buy it, you have to live it.
And now I have a special treat for you, an exclusive draft of a screenplay I’m sending to Pixar called “Barack O’Celery.”
White liberal child: Mommy, come quick and look in the refrigerator! The organic Barack O’Celery is spoiled! He’s all slimy.
White liberal mom: Oh I know, honey, and we paid so much for him -- what a waste. He was so fresh and healthy-looking when we bought him four years ago at the Whole Fools election market.
Child: Can we throw him out?
Mom: No, we’ll probably just keep him for another four years.
Child: Mommy, there’s some cockroaches having a sit-in on the lower shelf, protesting the Barack O’Celery and he just pepper sprayed them! Everything in the refrigerator is ruined.
Barack O’Celery: Will you two shut up and close the door! This doesn’t concern you! I’m trying to build a coalition of carrots, radishes and kohlrabi to attack some bok choy -- the security of this entire refrigerator depends on it!
Child (coughing): Mommy, he’s making a mess in there and the longer he hangs around, the whiter he gets.
Mom (coughing): God only knows what he’ll be like four years from now.
Child: Mommy, can we go riding today?
Mom: No, Barack O’Celery just killed your pony. I don’t know how he did it from inside the refrigerator -- he had to really go out of his way -- but he did it. Sorry, pumpkin.
Child (horrified): Liberal mommy, is that my dead pony wrapped up in the refrigerator?! I don’t think I can take four more years of Barack O’Celery! And you need to get the hell up out of here too!
published 12/9/2011 at counterpunch.org