Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Man is the Bastard’s “Tyke.” Buy the mp3 and read about it after the jump.
Man is the Bastard, “Tyke”
Last week, after the first presidential debate, Fox News showed a townhall-style group of undecided decided voters talking about their preferences and opinions after watching Barack Obama and John McCain jostle for an hour and a half. More people said they now favored Obama, but it was not a landslide majority. They were split, fifty-fifty, between people who had voted for Bush and Kerry last election. I have, after some great thought, no idea what these people have been thinking about for the last four years. I think a similar thing about all of the congresspeople who voted against the bailout plan yesterday. I am no great thinker but I do understand a pressing need for something to occur. Representative Darrell Issa likened voting for the bill passage as placing “a coffin on top of Ronald Reagan’s coffin.” This is despicable, if only for the primary reason that Ronald Reagan is already dead and will not suffer or benefit from the economy’s fall out, only the living people of the United States, and, as this crisis ripples out, of the world. There is no excitement about transferring copious monies into an ailing system that has failed both itself and the people invested in it. It is unfortunate that one effect of a bailout is to rescue irresponsible financial institutions, but the primary need and motivating drive is to help re-inflate a wheezing economy and hopefully give some people back their savings. I will not profess to have a crucial grasp of all of the nooks of the crash and its subsequent proposed bailout, but this morning when I read in the New York Times questions about individuals and their money and the financial guru recommended seriously rethinking any immediate retirement plans for those who have just seen much of their savings dwindle, it made me sad. Because I don’t want that to happen to me and I don’t want it to happen to anyone and I don’t want it to get worse. Maybe that is bland and shallow thinking, but the basic premise of people versus principles is being ignored by both Democrats and Republicans, and it is my wallet that is suffering as a result of lawmakers’ stubbornness, stupidity and what looks like a great lack of consideration.
Or perhaps it’s not thought at all and just a fallback on instinct. Though we, as humans, are able to involve our emotions in our decision-making, that apparently works only to complicate. You know, I watched Ronald Reagan’s body in a hearse driven down Pennsylvania Avenue in the rain when he died. I was working as an intern at a corporate law firm two blocks from the White House. People were stunned, but no one was sad. He was dead enough in 1988, deader in 1992. This real passing was symbolic and painless; let the living take care of the living.
David Foster Wallace, who died much more recently than Reagan, had much less effect on me when he was alive than either this (lack of) bailout will, or Reagan for that matter. Until Saturday I had never read anything he had written and only thought about him to find a general distaste for people endeavoring to read Infinite Jest on the subway. But as the memorials were published over and over I began to read about him from friends and admirers, all who seemed monstrously heartbroken. His family was not surprised, though, and only praised his ability to continue to hold on in the face of unfathomable depression as long as he did. AO Scott, in a remembrance, wrote that, “Again and again, he returned to a basic, perhaps the basic, philosophical question facing anyone with a blank screen and a story to tell. What am I going to say? How am I going to say it?” This could be posited as a willingness to spend time, to consider (something entirely lacking in the kneejerk principled reactions of those voting against the bailout), but what it truly reflects on is a greater sense of humility. Because no one has all of the answers and very few of us even have any. To assume you have none is inevitably the best place to start.
It appears at this newborn state was where Wallace began when he was assigned to cover the Maine Lobster Festival for Gourmet magazine. While I knew that he had a book called Consider the Lobster, I did not know until I read the piece this weekend that he meant it quite so literally. If you have not read it, “Consider the Lobster,” is an essay where Wallace goes to Maine, goes to the lobster festival and then finds himself unable to not think about the moral implications of boiling lobsters. I am a vegetarian (which, in my definition, includes fish) and have been so for ten years. I have never considered lobsters with such great detail and care as Wallace does, but his unkind answers to questions about cruel pain being done to animals is the reason why I do not eat meat. I read an interview with the editor of the piece, who remembered that Gourmet’s editor-in-chief did not want to run the essay as it had what she viewed as a sympathetic depiction of animal activists (mostly, it seems, PETA), which Wallace toned down into a sensible and scientific portrait of what happens to a lobster, from when it is caught to when it is boiled. It is not an argument for or against the continuation of cooking lobster in this manner and then eating them, but just a pithy, unemotional investigation of actions entailed and decisions made. It seems he spent more time learning about the neurological systems of lobsters than Issa did about a $700 billion plan. As far as I can tell, too, Wallace kept eating meat. But he understood as his options, accepted the smartest one, sucked up the crummy fallout of that and moved ahead. It is disappointing, in some ways, that such deep and lengthy thought cannot be within the realm of those making decisions for us in government and is instead left to academics, depressed people and students. Because an emotional response is never going to hold.
I have many friends who used to be vegetarian or vegan and now eat meat. I do not fault them for anything, nor do I find discomfort with anyone at all who chooses to eat meat, but it seems that a quick and righteous move to change your diet (and subsequently, naturally, your life) is destined to be short lived. Many of these people were motivated by music, as so many hardcore and punk bands sang about animal rights. Man is the Bastard were a strange Californian group who taught me about a lot of things. One of their songs on Thoughtless used lines from the “Moloch” section of Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” for lyrics. I did not know they were Allen Ginsburg’s words and was quite taken aback. Two of the other songs addressed animal rights issues. “Tyke” is a song in praise of Tyke the circus elephant who crushed her inhumane trainer to death. “Puppy Mill” is about puppy mills. When you are fourteen and the chorus to an especially brutal guitarless song that you listen to over and over is “this should be a fucking crime/ puppy breeders doing time/ concrete socks for all you swine,” it makes you pay attention to the issue at hand. As someone with a great affinity for cute animals, it made me want to do my small part to protest their inhumane treatment. It took a few years of consideration, but I stopped eating meat.
Tonight is Rosh Hashanah and I will celebrate with family and friends. I know there will be brisket, but my mother and her friend were thoughtful enough to ask me about a vegetarian option. They have sweetly cooked the matzo ball soup without chicken stock. I don’t know to what degree religion will play into the dinner tonight, but the gist of Rosh Hashanah is that it is the Jewish New Year. In Hebrew school during the holiday, after the service they would announce a meeting on a nearby bridge where you could write your sins and unwanted ephemera from the previous year on a small piece of paper and throw it in the river to be washed away. As the stocks pick back up today, Jew’s January One, perhaps it is indeed a revival. But an absolving cannot be confused with a progression. A vote on Thursday allows the misguided to come back to the table, a square one restart. But it does not assure the bailout’s passage, does not move it forward. It is up to the individuals to look upon the past, study the facts and make a decision. Hopefully it will be the right one.
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- posted on Sep 30, 2008 in SLEPT ON
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