AYCE GUEST BLOGGER * DEREK FERGUSON "TV WASTELAND"

AYCE GUEST BLOGGER, GLOBE-TROTTER/HARVARD ALUM/U.S.+COSTA RICA RESIDENT DEREK FERGUSON WITH A VERY TELLING AND COMPELLING EXPRESSION * A REFLECTION OF HOW DESENSITIZED WE ALL MAY BE...READ, ENJOY AND RE-THINK!

 

TV Wasteland

Packing up my things here in CA, getting ready to head to Black Rock City for this year’s Burn, and had the tube on for some mindless background filler. It was some show featuring weapons, lots of weapons. There were a couple of youngish white guys going on about “stopping power” and “lethality” of the various automatic weapons they were fondling. Now, clearly, none of these guys had ever fired a shot in anger or felt a bullet whizz by their ear, but, like W. that only seemed to pump them up more. One particularly offensive exercise involved a black guy who looked like he had, in fact, seen some combat, floating down a river on a little skiff and firing an AK-47 at some red-goo filled mannequins about 50m away. The white squibs sat safely distant and marveled as homeboy delivered nice, tight circles in the kill zone of the dummies, making the goo spooj out everywhere. Then they sat around afterwards with big smiles saying shit like, “oh yeah, for sure, this guy’s dead! Look at that—right in the balls! GREAT shot!”

Now, I’m pretty sure this programming isn’t available in Afghanistan or Nigeria, or any of the many war torn parts of this dumb rock hurtling through space, and for good reason: War and violence viewed up close tend to lessen the appetite for such fictional recreations. Still, there must be American viewers who have lost children (say, in Afghanistan or Iraq, or even in Compton or Detroit) to automatic weapons fire. What a death blow to your psyche, to see this faux violence in celebration of real violence. What a statement about our macho posturing that we indulge in this crap, and that Spike TV pays these pricks (and in turn, reaps revenue) to recreate gory death for the benefit of a bunch of armchair, wannabe warriors in the suburbs. In the trial of America as the Great Satan, let me offer this as Exhibit A. We can’t even seem to grasp the offensiveness of it since most of us are so far removed from any real threat of violent, machine gunned death, and thus somebody’s grim reality gets presented as TV dinner fantasy, and eaten with gusto. It’s tantamount to having a show on slavery or human trafficking, and the hosts sitting around chortling over the shackles or simulated rape of (somebody else’s) daughter.

As if this wasn’t in enough bad taste, they pitted sharpshooters against each other and graded them on kills and how many times their guns jammed. So, death dealing as real life video game. And in a fitting coup d’grace (for me anyway, I couldn’t endure it past this scene) of tastelessness, they had a dude attack a pig carcass (head and feet removed, to make it, you know, less lifelike) with a grappling hook, and judged him based on the time it took to literally rip it to pieces (not sure if they awarded style points). The pig was a step up from the mannequins, because at some point, somebody had to kill it. Or, more likely, the pig was put through a processing plant, where the killing was done via automated machines, allowing further distance between the ultimate human consumer, and the eviscerated prey.

I raise pigs (and other livestock) on my farm in Costa. They are raised for slaughter or breeding, and there is a constant and necessary awareness that I’m the caretaker, and also ultimately responsible for life and death. The animals must be raised in a species appropriate manner, with fresh air, freedom, safety, cleanliness, and ultimately, dignity. This is not how the factory farms do it, of course, and the consumer in America never sees the grisly business of slaughter, nor usually do they see the pig in anything but a processed pork product that doesn’t make them think of Babe. This is the necessary separation of reality from fantasy, and what keeps most people obliviously eating meat. A chicken to them is some bird, but chicken breast is not.

I believe in eating meat, but I also believe in doing the slaughter, at least once, yourself. And I stridently oppose the factory farms that treat animals as units instead of individuals, and bend them to a ruthless, economy of scale mentality that holds no respect for life. Not just the animal’s life, but you, the end user’s life, is disregarded. You’re fed animals who ate other animals, chemicals, potions and pills meant to make profit, not health, the priority. With this detachment, we go on living in oblivion, our Earth scorched by the factory farms with their CAFOs, GMOs, organophosphates, runoff, and monoculture. The list of criminal offenses against animal, vegetable, and mineral is long. The verdict is guilty.

So when I saw the grappling hook rip the flesh, the real blood spill forth, the guy in the role of the game, completely in character as a “killing machine” who wasn’t killing anything because it was already dead, I had to turn it off. I had to weep for the blood of innocents, human and otherwise, and wonder at the wraiths of the industry who perpetuate the businesses of War and Agribusiness (because it damn sure isn’t agriculture). They shove shit down our throats, from lies of WMDs to frankenfoods, and we eat it up, unquestioning. We think we’re free, but really, the pen encircles us, and the masters sit outside, laughing as we consume what kills us, banking on our stupidity, as we bleat and bleed.