Planned Parenthood, Mark Meadows, and the false Rhetoric of "Life"

So I signed this petition the other day: Planned Parenthood

I did so, of course, in response to the smear campaign organized by the so-called "Center of Medical Progress" and championed by the most conservative faction of the Republican party in an attempt to de-fund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides invaluable health care to women.

When I signed the petition, the site generated an automatic letter to Mark Meadows, my right-wing, Tea Party congressman, known most recently for trying to get John Boehner fired.  Boehner, it seems, is too liberal for the likes of Meadows.  And that's terrifying.

Anyway, here's the form letter that I received from Meadows in response to the petition.  

August 6, 2015

Dear Dr. Laura Wright:

          Thank you for contacting my office with your concerns regarding Planned Parenthood. As your representative in Washington, I want to ensure that your opinion is heard.

          As you may know, on July 14, 2015, the pro-life organization Center for Medical Progress (CMP) released an undercover video of Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Senior Director for medical services at Planned Parenthood. The video showed Dr. Nucatola explaining the process of preserving fetal tissue and body parts of aborted children for sale. On July 21, the CMP released a second video showing former President of Planned Parenthood Medical Directors' Council, Dr. Mary Gatter, also discussing fetus tissue sales. 

          Please know that while I understand you have concerns with CMP's actions, I believe that human life is sacred and that our nation must protect it. Based on this principle, know that I am opposed to any policies that advocate abortion or use taxpayer dollars to fund abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. As a pro-life advocate, regardless of the politics, I will always fight to preserve and protect the life and health of both women and children.

          Again, thank you for taking the time to contact me. If you have additional concerns on this or any other issue, you are welcome to call my Washington D.C. office any time at (202) 225-6401. To keep you informed on what's happening in Washington, please sign up for my weekly newsletter at www.meadows.house.gov.

Sincerely,
Mark MeadowsMember of Congress

MM/bw

Meadows is a "pro-life" advocate who is an avid supporter of hunters and hunting rights; the respect he has for "life," as he makes clear, only extends to "human life," which he says he holds "sacred." 

Here's the ecofeminist vegan response (in which I say nothing about ecofeminism or veganism):

Dear Congressman Meadows,

Thank you for your form letter.  

I find it utterly impossible to believe that my opinion has been heard, and I find it even harder to believe — given your voting record with regard to the Violence Against Women Act, gun control, the environment, and the Affordable Care Act — that you "will always fight to preserve and protect the life and health of both women and children.”  You are interested in birth, not life.  You are a proponent of limiting women’s access to safe health care; you are not an advocate for the welfare of our country’s children, their mothers, or the environments in which they live.

Furthermore, I am extremely aware of the way that the so-called “Center for Medical Progress” is generating propaganda in tandem with the attack on women’s rights, security, and health care orchestrated by social conservatives in your party.  And I am also aware that your stance has nothing to do with this propaganda, as your position with regard to women’s health and safety was consistent and disappointing well in advance of the release of CMP’s videos.  

It's easier to read the text here.

The rhetoric of “life” that ideologues in your party spout is blatantly hypocritical — and paternalistically insulting — to those of us you have been chosen to represent.  It is an affront to those of us who actually value life, who work to care for and nurture it, who recognize in our respect for it that we owe future generations greater care and stewardship of our planet.  If you care about “human life,” which you claim to believe is “sacred,” then your support of human beings cannot stop with unborn children.  It must extend to those children after they are born — and to their families.  

Your record makes abundantly clear that your understanding of what constitutes “human life” is extremely limited.  And it makes clear that you hold the lives of the humans that you represent in great contempt.

Because I do hold life sacred, I will do everything in my power to work to get you out of office as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Laura Wright

On Walter Palmer, Cecil the Lion, and the History of the White Hunter in Africa

By now we've all read about Walter Palmer's killing of Cecil the lion in Zimbabwe.  We're all outraged; we're calling for the guy's head on a platter, for the destruction of his dental practice, for his financial and social ruin.  And he does seem like a real choice asshole.  I have to say that I feel complete hatred for this guy, but I think it might do us some good to check our outrage and to consider where it's coming from.   

Walter Palmer and some other white dude, dead cat, black man, hunting dogs

Yesterday, in the wake of the take down of Walter Palmer, I posted on Facebook that I was going to go stand outside of Whole Foods and post pictures and contact information for everyone I saw leaving with the dead carcass of an animal in their grocery bags.  I posted such a thing because to my mind -- and to the minds of many ethical vegans -- the suffering of the animals that become food in our culture is as unconscionable as the murder of Zimbabwe's beloved lion. But I'm in the minority, here, and here's my analysis of why that's the case.

In the west, we have mythologized lions and other "exotic" big game animals that exist in Africa.  The image of Africa that we have bought into is of a place devoid of human life (or filled with warring, starving, diseased human life) and instead populated with lions, elephants, and other large regal creatures that we feel should be preserved and conserved.  Never mind that actual Africans are often displaced from their homelands in the service of creating wildlife preserves.  And never mind that sport hunting -- sustained by white men from the U.S. -- provides substantial financial benefits to the economies of the countries that allow such hunts to continue.  And never mind that so-called ecotourist safaris result in much greater environmental destruction to ecosystems than hunting safaris.

Oh look, the circle of life that doesn't involve any humans or any animals eating one another.

The history of big game hunting safaris in Africa and such safaris’ current connections to contemporary notions of ecotourism, a model that promises, according to the Ecotourism Society, “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people” (qtd. in Duffy 6), are issues that are deeply implicated in an imperialist model of colonial exploitation, one that persisted after many African nations had gained independence from their former colonizers.  In fact, ecotourism in places like Kenya, South Africa, and Tanzania is based on a history of big game hunting that happened simultaneously alongside the establishment of colonial rule.  

According to Brian Herne in White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris, the term “White Hunter” originated in British East Africa after the turn of the twentieth-century, but “big game hunting was already popular in other parts of the ‘Dark Continent,’ notably in South Africa, where . . . [white] hunters . . . had been active long before Somaliland and East Africa came into vogue” (3).  Herne’s text examines the heyday of the White Hunter in Africa, beginning with the first safari business – started by R. J. Cunninghame, Bill Judd, George Outram, and Leslie Tarston around 1903 (7) – to the decades of the 1960s and 70s during which increased hunting regulations and conservation measures took hold. 

While Herne’s text focuses on, glorifies, and mythologizes the legacies of white hunters, Edward J. Steinhart’s Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya, focuses on the ways that indigenous African peoples’ hunting practices were literally and rhetorically criminalized in order for white safaris to thrive.  Steinhart asserts that “the struggles over the definition and control of hunting and the politics and revenues which it yielded may be key to understanding the contests of power that went on for seven decades between settlers, officials, and Africans” (18).  Furthermore, this Western demonstration of domination of nature paralleled “European racial and class domination over black Africans” (Duffy 294); therefore, colonized subjects and hunted animals occupy the same rhetorical space in the colonial milieu in which big game hunting came of age.

Equally problematic, at least in some cases, is what happens when animals are protected under the auspices of wilderness refuges, a more recent phenomenon that has occurred as a result of species decimation due to historically unchecked hunting practices.  In recent decades, photographic safaris have replaced most hunting safaris, and animals are often protected – at least in theory – in wildlife preserves.  But if the colonial mindset and project traditionally equated indigenous human life with animal life and valued neither, then the wildlife refuge system has often benefited animals and corporations at the expense of indigenous human populations.  

For example, according to Martha Honey in Ecotourism and Sustainable Development: Who Owns Paradise?, when the Ndumo Game Reserve was established in 1924, the Tonga people of South Africa were forced to leave the area and were denied access to water within the reserve (367).  In the late 1980s, when the Ndumo and Tembe reserves planned to merge so that the Tembe elephants could access water in Ndumo, the Tonga were once again threatened with the possibility of relocating, but “in the mid-1990s, the villagers, with the assistance of rural development workers, struck a deal whereby they agreed to move farther south” (367).  

Rosaleen Duffy, in her study A Trip Too Far: Ecotourism, Politics and Exploitation, comments that “in the developing world, there is an added layer to the politics of tourism because of memories of colonial control,” and in places like Kenya, “conservation and tourism schemes have replicated the colonial system of separating people and the environment” (101).  Furthermore, most of the income generated by such reserves benefits the private corporations that run the wilderness and photographic safaris, with minimal income being generated for indigenous populations that are often displaced and disenfranchised by these business ventures.[i]  

In the current moment, according to Honey, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa permit “trophy hunting only in designated ‘blocks’ in game controlled areas and reserves” (243).  According to Duffy, ecotourism in Africa, like hunting, is dependent upon the “politically laden image of the destination country” and, in the contemporary moment, “host societies are packaged and commodified for consumption by an external audience, promising the exotic, the unspoiled, the pristine and – even worse – the primitive” (xii).  

Many African countries have opted for a more conservationist form of tourism, given the rate at which indigenous species were being decimated by hunters.  For example, Kenya outlawed hunting in 1977 and that country’s tourism industry is now based primarily on (at least on the surface) a more environmentally conscious model.  Critics like Duffy, however, claim that “ecotourism is firmly locked into notions of ‘green capitalism,’ and thus it cannot provide radical sustainable development, contrary to its supporters’ claims.  Ecotourism is a business . . . and it focuses on profit rather than conservation” (x).  Furthermore, other African countries have banned hunting only to reopen the practice because of the financial benefits that it affords.  Tanzania banned hunting in 1973, but reallowed the practice in 1978, and despite the fact that the elephant population dropped from 600,000 in the 1960s to around 100,000 in the 1990s, Tanzania still allows the culling of elephants to continue (Honey 247).  Ecotourism has a problematic relationship with hunting, which is often seen as prohibition to poaching.  According to Honey, 

Sport hunting is . . . the ultimate paradox for ecotourism.  Although most of those involved in conservation and nature tourism find hunting distasteful, cruel, and ethically reprehensible, many admit that if properly managed, trophy hunting helps curb poaching and does less environmental damage and brings in much more foreign exchange than do photographic safaris. (244) 

Because fewer people hunt than take photos and because the cost of hunting expeditions is significantly higher than the cost of photographic safaris,[ii] environmentally “friendly” photographic tours often result in more environmentally destructive issues, including more pollution, more garbage, and more destruction of terrain as photographers often drive off roads to get shots of animals stalking their prey (Honey 245).

Unfortunately, that's not how it goes

In her fiction and nonfiction, Joy Williams is critical of both big game hunting and its seemingly ecofriendly counterpart, the photographic safari, because of the false images of animals and land that both practices sell to Westerners.  In her essay “Safariland,” Williams claims that the “desired illusion here is . . . Africa,” a place that allows those on safari to feel that they “have entered a portion of the earth that wild animals have retained possession of.  The illusion here is that wild animals exist” (27).  In this essay, Williams critiques the lies of the photographic safari, particularly the lie that there exist any animal populations that have not been marked, sold, placed, trapped, fragmented, scattered, and positioned within the perimeters of the safari.  

To make this point, she provides numerous examples from a photographic safari in Botswana, a place that has been marketed as “the Africa for this type of tourist” (28), and the ways that animal movement and life have been historically restricted as a consequence of the colonial division of territory.  She describes the 1,875 miles of fence that the government started erecting in 1954, “to segregate cattle from wild herds” (29).  This fence has been an environmental nightmare: “hundreds of thousands of wild animals have died against it in their futile trek toward water in time of drought.  The fence runs everywhere, and where the fence runs, the animals do not” (29), and this fence has caused the near extinction of zebra and buffalo populations in the most of Botswana.  

Williams’ analysis of the photographic safari is a critique of not only the historical treatment of wild animals in Africa but also of the idea that what one sees when one looks through the lens of a camera is legitimate and authentic, somehow the real Africa: “but this is Africa,” the safari goers think.  “This really feels like it could be Africa at last” (39).  The Africa that is presented to them is, as Duffy claims, a “politically laden image” (xii), a marketing ploy, a lie packaged to lure the environmentally conscious tourist to a pristine, precolonial facsimile of “Africa.”  Furthermore, Williams’s essay continually undercuts the illusion that people who go on such safaris are doing something positive for the environment by pointing out the ways that the animals that fill their photographic frames are positioned as they are because of a long history of environmental exploitation that persists into the present moment.

In another of the essays that appears in Ill Nature, “The Killing Game,” Williams also takes hunters to task, particularly the rhetoric of conservation and respect for the animal they employ to justify killing as sport.  She claims,

instead of monitoring animals . . . wildlife managers should start hanging telemetry gear around hunters’ necks to study their attitudes and record their conversations.  It would be grisly listening, but it would tune out for good the suffering as sacrament and spiritual experience nonsense that some hunting apologists employ. (49-50)

The tone in “The Killing Game” is decidedly harsher than that of “Safariland,” perhaps because Williams is more sympathetic to the photographers, at least as far as their good intentions are concerned.  But when it comes to hunters, she clearly has no patience; as for the subsistence arguments, she says, “please. . . .  The subsistence line in such a cynical one” (51).  For hunters, she asserts, “the animal becomes the property of the hunter.  Alive, the beast belongs only to itself.  This is unacceptable to the hunter” (51).  By the end of the essay, Williams’s tone is scathing.  Hunters’ arguments are “self-serving,” sport hunting “immoral;” the practice is “grotesque,” and it is time, she says, “to stop being conned and cowed by hunters.”  Killing animals in this fashion is unjustifiable, no matter what rhetoric is offered by the hunter; according to Williams, “hunters make wildlife dead, dead, dead” (70), and arguments about conservation, species population control, and subsistence are transparent excuses to justify the fact that hunters are sadists who enjoy both the infliction of pain and the annihilation of animals. 

And now for something completely different.

From where I'm sitting, the outrage over the murder of Cecil looks a lot like the familiar narrative of the Concerned White Person seeking to help Africa -- never mind that white people are the cause of what's wrong in the first place.  And, yes, we're all calling out the Even Worse Than Us White Guy, but our doing so lets us hang out in comfortable self-righteous indignation while simultaneously allowing us to feel good about championing the cause of a single African lion.

It's so much easier to do this than to consider our own roles with regard to the suffering of the animals that we murder in multitudes in our country everyday so that we can eat them.  They don't register, because we would never afford a chicken (or a cow, or a pig, or a fish) the same sort of misplaced reverence we've decided to ascribe to Cecil.  And this is in no way to suggest that Cecil doesn't deserve that reverence and that his death doesn't warrant our outrage.

It is, however, to suggest that we'd do well to recognize the hypocrisy of that outrage.

---

[i] Honey provides statistics for several such ventures that indicate that “the involvement of and benefits to the local community have so far been fairly minimal” (368).  For more information, see chapter 10, “South Africa: People and Parks under Majority Rule” in Honey.

[ii] Honey says that “a hunter brings in 100 times more revenue than a nonhunting tourist; the Wildlife Conservation Society of Tanzania estimates it is 55 times more.  Either way, the difference is enormous” (245).

On my 45th Birthday

So I went to Earth Fare the other day to buy some vitamins, and there were these, which I bought:

The whole "nutritional support for the mature woman" was the bit that got me.  I kept thinking, what the fuck does that mean?  Do mature women survive heart attacks? Do they run long distances (away from everything and towards nothing at all)?  Maybe they do!  Do they hold steady jobs?  Yes!

But then: would a mature woman have this particular grade of hangover (the one I had when I was in Earth Fare buying the vitamins) after drinking gin with her friend Will who was going to leave her and move to Pennsylvania?  Would a mature woman be no better capable of making adult decisions than she was at age 22 -- the point at which (I guess) I started making such decisions?

Maybe a mature woman would realize that there are no real adults.  That adulthood is a myth.  There are no adults (adulthood is a myth).

Would a mature woman continue to consult her tarot cards in the hope that they might guide her in her decisions?  Would she write down her dreams and read through their symbols for meaning?  Or get tattoo after tattoo (even though she still hides them from her parents who have no idea that she has any)?  Would she be so staunchly childless?

Would a mature woman get this asymmetrical haircut? Would she still believe in ghosts and assert with complete confidence that she's seen one?  Would she wear a Cure T-shirt from the 1980s and dance around the house for hours alone while listening to Typhoon or Live or Sleigh Bells or Father John Misty or Neutral Milk Hotel or P.J. Harvey or Sleater Kinney?

Would she panic?  Would she float away at the worst possible moment?

Oh, I don't think so.  She would
Calm. Right. Down.

Would a mature woman continue not to eat animals, when her father (still alive) informed her when she was 18 that this was "just a phase," and that someday she'd "be an adult and have a family to feed"?  Where's that family?  When will the phase end?

Would she continue to get lost in narrative, in books, in fiction, when there are real world problems to address, and would she continue to feel powerless to stop those problems?  Would she continue to think that women and men are equal, that animals are people, that people deserve rights, that rights are a human construction, that rights are a fiction?  That all of it is fiction?  That all of us deserve deep, deep ethical consideration nonetheless?

The things that marked maturity for me when I was a child are the things I will never have: assuredness, security, trust in some higher power, the certainty of a soul mate -- and the ability to impart these things as attainable truths to those less mature, those in search of their later selves.  I don't believe that the mature people who imparted these things to me believed them then either.  But I'm just being more honest.

A mature woman would give of herself.  She would avoid the conflicts and seek to assure.  She would nurture and protect, and she would be dutiful, sober, and sane.  She would stop buying Chuck Taylors.

She would listen to good advice; she would take care of herself.  She would take great care.  She would avoid the spotlight, the perceived unwarranted attention, the controversy.

She would stay out of the sun.  Or at least wear sunscreen.

I used to draw or paint a portrait of myself at every birthday: one year a woman filled with glass, another, a woman growing tree limbs.  Once pregnant.  Once a dead body covered in hungry cats; the next year a woman hanged from a tree.  An apple in my hand.  An apple in my mouth.  This year, a photo.  Me in the evening.  Me with tired eyes and the weight of many things upon me.

This is not a cry for help.  It is a love letter to myself.

Would a mature woman fall in and out of love and fear being abandoned, particularly as no one has ever given her reason for this fear?  Would she lash out and be always selfish, always self-interested, never willing to sacrifice that which she feels is her birthright?

I don't think so.  I am not a mature woman.  And this is me.  And it is my birthday.

The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror

Just got the proof of the book cover.  The book will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall.  Here's the first blurb:

"Combining personal narratives and gender studies with eco-feminism and pop culture, The Vegan Studies Project offers a brilliant analysis of the status of vegans and veganism on America’s cultural landscape. Laura Wright’s argument for a new field of vegan studies rings true, and this book will be the foundational text." -- Hal Herzog, author of Some we Love, Some we Hate, Some we Eat: Why it's so Hard to Think Straight About Animals

And once it's out, maybe I'll get the chance to blog again.  :)

Vegan Heart Attack

Plush heart cell given to me by a friend. Complete with heart beat sound.

Exactly five months ago, I suffered a massive heart attack and almost died.  It happened at the beginning of a run, before I'd taken more than 20 steps, and what caused it still remains largely mysterious, a source of debate among the various cardiologists I've seen since then, the subject of a paper delivered at a convention by one of them.  The facts are these: I am a 43-year-old woman, a long-time long-distance runner, a long-time vegan.  I am a combination of things that constitute exactly the kind of person who never has a heart attack, who, at least ostensibly, has no risk factors whatsoever.

The kind of person who should be a poster child for all the things that one should do to avoid having a heart attack.

I had a clot.  It was huge.  An MRI and ultrasounds of my legs and heart revealed it to be the singular clot in my entire body.  I have a paten foramen ovale, a very common birth defect that enables blood to flow between the left and right atria.  It's something I discovered after the heart attack when the doctor pumped fizzy water into a vein in my arm and we watched on the ECG screen as the bubbles cross from one side to the other.

A hole in my heart.

This is my heart attack

One specialist tells me to fix it; another says not to.  I know that I need a third opinion, but so far, I haven't gotten around to getting one -- and this is in large part due to the fact that I don't believe that anyone else will know anything further.  I have grown to believe that none of us, no matter how well trained, knows much about what makes us work and what makes us break, particularly when things  break in the wrong people at the wrong time.  All is so speculative and unclear as to drive one into a complete existential mid-life crisis, which is exactly where I find myself.  I'm an English professor.  I study language and metaphor. The fact that I have a hole in my heart seems entirely right to me.  It's the space that I've never been able to fill; it's the endless tangible ache that I feel for everything nonhuman (and human) that suffers.

The surgeon went in through the femoral artery in my right leg.  I was awake the whole time, having been airlifted from the regional hospital in Western North Carolina near the university where I work, which is where I was when I had the heart attack.  I begged the doctor not to make me ride in the helicopter, so terrified I am of flying; he said I wouldn't make it if I went in an ambulance.  He gave me an Atavan to help ease my nerves. In the hospital in Asheville, the surgeon shaved my pubic hair; I was embarrassed because he was incredibly cute.  He talked to me throughout the surgery, and a screen displayed what was happening.  I had to turn my head to the left to watch the movie of the angioplasty.  At one point, the doctor laughed at something I said.  I have no idea what it was.

After, I hemorrhaged and nearly bled out through the hole in my leg.  I nearly died a second time, and the next day, the people -- nurses and doctors -- who must have met me before, during, and after the surgery, came by to tell me that they couldn't believe I'd survived.  This is a memory I have returned to often since October 25: that no one believed that I hadn't died, that I should have died.  That my life after October 25 constitutes a complete surprise.

Flowers from friends and family (notice stealthy cat foot just behind the yellow ones)

The first nightmare that I had happened about two weeks after I got out of the hospital.  I was on a gurney, heading into a dark tunnel. It's not a very inventive metaphor, I'm afraid, but it must be a universal one.  I knew that if I closed my eyes, I would be dead and that there would be nothing more.  I fought and fought to stay awake in the dream.  And then I woke up.  I'm suffering from PTSD, an apparent after effect of so much trauma, and one that's only now being linked to heart attack survivors.

Over the course of my life, my body has undergone serious trauma, most (but not all) of it at my own hands. I had an eating disorder for over a decade, and I have consistently ingested into my body (often in large quantities) things that have sped up or slowed down my heart, damaged as it already was by the fact that I existed in a nearly starved state for years and years. I feel a responsibility to my heart now, but I refuse to feel at fault for what happened. I feel sad for my heart, the small animal that I've seen on the ECG screen several times since the heart attack, part of it frozen and immobile, likely forever, from the lack of blood it received between the attack and the time that the clot was dissolved. Valves opening and closing, moving like the legs of some bear cub running and running towards some unreachable embrace.

Carol Adams came to WCU a week and a half after I had the heart attack.  I'd invited her, had arranged for her visit, and I showed up, my heart PVC-ing like crazy, to introduce her prior to her talk on her book The Sexual Politics of Meat. I wasn't supposed to go back to work until after Thanksgiving.  After I introduced her, I thought I might have another heart attack.  No one knows this.  My heart attack has been a study in its own sexual politics, all the literature given to me in the hospital clearly aimed at men in mid-life or older; the first meal I was offered when I awoke the next morning was a bowl of beef broth.  The disconnect between who I am, the food I eat (and don't), and the reality that beef and foods made from animals are more likely to cause heart attacks than anything I've ever done all have constituted the grim irony with which I continue to view my circumstances.

I worry that I've somehow betrayed veganism, that people will read this and think that it's because I am vegan that this happened.  And maybe they'd be right.

But I doubt it.

So often, when I wake up from the nightmares that are now becoming less and less frequent, I want to hold my heart in my hands and comfort it the way I would any other abused or harmed or suffering animal.  And this is the way I'll be able to make sense of what's happened to me, even if the surgeons can't, to care for the creature that keeps running towards me, wounded and vulnerable.

Detail from a portrait I painted of my heart

The Moral Monday Politics of Meat

Every Monday since April 29, groups of protesters, led by the Reverend William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP, have descended upon the North Carolina legislature in Raleigh to protest any number of Republican legislative initiatives.  Led by Barber's charge of "forward together, not one step back," thousands of people have taken up residence on Halifax Mall outside the Legislative Building to challenge a raft of legislation that will (among other things) decimate public education, limit women's access to reproductive healthcare, restrict voting rights, and devastate the environment.  Hundreds of people have been arrested in a carefully staged performance of civil disobedience -- the rules for which you can read about here.

Barber and two protesters

North Carolina's decline from what the editorial board of the New York Times refers to as "a beacon of farsightedness in the South, an exception in a region of poor education, intolerance and tightfistedness" to something unrecognizable to those of us who live here -- particularly those of us, like myself, whose families have been here for generations -- has been swift and putative.  I attended last week's protest, spurred, finally, by the House's swift and sneaky passage of HB 695, a bill that contains provisions that will (again, among other things) effectively shut down all but one abortion clinic in the entire state.  The presentation of this bill, which is ostensibly about protecting North Carolina citizens from Sharia law, was so underhanded that even our Republican governor Pat McCrory decried the covert nature of its passage.

From Asheville, where I live, Raleigh is about a four hour drive.  Along with about 100 other people, including three other faculty members at Western Carolina University, I rode to the rally on one of two buses chartered by Asheville City Council member Cecil Bothwell.  Some of my fellow travelers had done this before; some, like the 79-year-old man who shared his story, had been arrested and were wearing their "I was arrested with Rev. Barber" pins in solidarity.  Many told their stories of entering the Legislative Building, of their meetings with various members of NC's general assembly, including Tim Moffitt, who represents Buncombe County, and of their expectations for this particular rally.  

Seriously.

We brought our own lunches and ate at a rest area about two hours out, and we arrived in Raleigh at about 3.30 with enough time to wander the halls of the legislature prior to gathering on the mall.  One of my colleagues tracked down Moffitt and spent about an hour in his office.  Later, when we outside, my colleague told me several things about this meeting.  Two seem important to me.  First, Moffitt said that he was "troubled" that state employees would be in attendance at these events.  The implication, as far as I can tell, is that as a state employee, one is not in a position to challenge the state.  And I think that there is some real fear on the part of state employees that they could get in trouble for attending such a protest.  Indeed, Art Pope's Civitas Institute maintains a database of information about Moral Monday protesters, including, when the institute can get it -- which it can in the case of state employees -- information about protesters' jobs and their salaries (so when you click the link for "protester salaries," you see lots of college professors.  I'm not up there, by the way; the database only seems to contain folks who got arrested, which I didn't).  

The second thing that Moffitt said to my colleague was this: "you are not those people," meaning the people protesting on the mall.  OK, so let me back up for a second.  To address the issue of what it means to be protesting as a state employee, none of my colleagues were there to protest as representatives of the state institution for which we work; we were there as individual citizens with individual interests.  In terms of not being "those people," my guess is that the reason Moffitt said this to my colleague is that my colleague, like Moffitt, is a young, affluent, white man (Moffitt also asked my colleague how much money he made, and my colleague told him, even as he said that he wasn't attending this rally to protest his pay).  "Those people" are, effectively, the NAACP (therefore, black people), women, the poor, and the elderly.  At least this is Moffitt's estimation of who "those people" are.

A little protester photographed by another of my colleagues

What's scary -- and very telling -- to me about Moffitt's claim is the very clear indication that Moffitt is dividing his constituents into two categories: people who are "like him," and "those people" who aren't.    Such a reality points to a lack of any sort of empathetic imagination that might allow for someone like Moffitt, or for that matter any number of his colleagues in the general assembly, I would venture, to imagine their existences as linked to the existences of the people that they supposedly represent.  It's terrifying to know that the North Carolina legislature is a space wherein my district's elected representative can proclaim such blatant racism, sexism, and classism even as the state's citizenry stand outside his window and try to shine a light on that very reality.

When my colleague told me about his exchange with Moffitt, I bristled, and I offered (as I always do as an ecofeminist) that oppressions are linked, intersectional, and co-dependently reinforcing.   To see oppressions as discrete entities and to view oppression of one group as somehow independent of the oppression of others is to misunderstand the mechanism of oppression; to claim that those who are being oppressed are not the same people as those who are elected to represent them is to misunderstand the concept of democracy.

Yeah.

I imagine (and even know after conversations with many folks on the mall) that the people protesting get it, know that what affects one of us affects us all.  That's why they were out there holding posters, pumping fists, chanting, and clapping.  

On the way back to Asheville, we stopped to get something to eat.  It was 9 p.m., and everyone was starved.  We pulled into Burlington and stopped in a shopping center where the options were Wendy's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Subway.  We were told to get off the bus, grab some food to bring with us, so that we could get back to Asheville.  When everyone piled back on, they brought with them burgers and pepperoni pizza, turkey subs and chicken filet sandwiches.

The recognition of the interconnectedness of oppressions often breaks down when it comes to animals, even among people who see and recognize such intersectionality as profoundly significant and even as immoral (hence the notion of "Moral" Mondays) when to comes to legislation that affects their fellow human beings.  The question that I'm always left with in such instances, when empathy and moral consideration don't extend beyond our non-human framework, is whether or not any liberation movement will ever amount to much when the most liberated and liberal among us fail to recognize as foundational the linkages between animal and human oppressions.  

Human beings have justified the oppression of other human beings by rhetorically constructing them as animals.  Racism and sexism are predicated on a foundational lack of recognition of "others" as human; consider, as I've noted before, that the Nazis killed the Jews with rat poison, that women are treated "like pieces of meat," that African slaves were sold at auction as chattle.   

Oh, and here's an Obama sock monkey.

Don't get me wrong, here: I am behind the Moral Monday movement.  I am glad to see the swell of this tide of discontent, the coming together of disparate groups, and the disenfranchasing of the notion that, in issues that pertain to our moral health, there are no "those people" and "these people."  But if this movement is about unity and the uniting of what might otherwise be disparate elements of society, then I want for the protesters to consider one more moral issue, and let's have a Meatless Moral Monday.  I know you're laughing, but it couldn't hurt, after all.  And it might make even more manifest the false dualisms that underscore someone like Moffitt's ability to turn away from all of those voices on the mall.  "Forward together."  All of us this time.

Why Brad Pitt's World War Z sucks, and why no one is saying so

After watching Brad Pitt's World War Z, one of my former students posted this comment on Facebook: "So, you guys know how World War Z the book [by Max Brooks] is a thoroughly researched, well thought-out, nuanced exploration of how the various institutions of the globe might respond to a pandemic such as that of the actual zombie apocalypse? The movie is literally none of those things."  So far, this is the truest and smartest statement I've seen made about the lackluster, not scary, not politically savvy or interesting, not smart, nonsensical and extremely boring film version of Brook's very cool, polyphonic, fake oral history of the zombie war.  

First let me just say that I'm an unashamedly huge fan of the zombie apocalypse genre.  I love both the horrific concept of someone you knew in life potentially eating your face off after death; I love the metaphorical content afforded by the concept of the zombie, the way that the walking dead show us so much about the mindlessness consumption of the living in late capitalism, the soulless nature of the modern condition, the fear of various "others," and the certainty that we may encounter in the not-too-distant future a virus, man-made war, or natural disaster that releases our inherently -- or Kantian -- evil nature.  

When the genre works, it works, which is why I love Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, an utterly terrifying vision of England post-zombie apocalypse, a world where the evil done by human beings in the aftermath is more horrific than anything done by those fast as hell zombies.  It's a premise that AMC's The Walking Dead tried to plagiarize in this last season, possibly because it's such a terribly misogynistic train wreck of a show that it was willing to try this route.  It's why I love the sequence in Edgar Wright's zombie apocalypse parody Sean of the Dead in which Sean wanders out into the post-apocalyptic world and doesn't notice that anything's different, because in many ways, nothing is.

 Sean (Simon Pegg) the day after the end of the world

It's why Ramero's classic socially aware zombie trilogy is so terrifying, provocative, and, yes, funny, particularly, in my opinion, 1978's Dawn of the Dead, which is set in a suburban shopping mall.  And even though the concept and representation of the zombie as mindless consumer and as animated, soulless corpse has evolved over the years -- from seemingly aimless, slow moving masses that, despite their lack of speed, kill you anyway, to fast and even super-fast swarms, social creatures who warrant occasional sympathy (as is the case in the first season of The Walking Dead, for example, or, even more outrageously in Jonathan Levine's Warm Bodies) -- I have to call foul when the rules established by the historical lineage of the genre are completely disregarded.

This is the problem I'm having with what's happened to vampires of late.  Vampires that don't drink human blood?  Not vampires.  Vampires that go out during the day?  Still not vampires.  

 Ah, Edward.

And this is part of the problem with World War Z: its zombies are having an identity crisis.  First of all, are they zombies or aren't they?  The film never really takes a clear stance on that one, and, as a result, the audience has no clear sense of what is happening or why it has happened.  There are swarms of really fast dead looking people ready to ruin your day -- and succeeding with great skill.  These things are seriously lethal: once bitten, victims change in a matter of seconds (no time for introspection or reflection), and once they change, they're pretty much going to change everyone else around them.  This zombie apocalypse could be a fabulous metaphor for what a global pandemic might look like.  But unfortunately, it isn't, because this movie just isn't that smart. 

There's no real development of the pandemic narrative; hell, there's no development of any character or any narrative whatsoever, nor any explanation of what the fuck makes Brad Pitt's Gerry Lane the go-to guy for saving humanity.  But -- and here's the other reason why this movie sucks -- there doesn't need to be: World War Z assumes that we'll just buy Pitt as the sole source of salvation because the beautiful white man always saves humanity in mainstream American films.  And just look at Pitt in all of his Robert Redfordesque Christ-like glory (see the picture below), traipsing off to -- you guessed it -- Jerusalem just in the nick of time to save a few people as the zombie mass comes spilling over the protective wall (drawn, as this mass seems to be, by the singing of silly young women who don't know that these zombie things are "activated" by sound).  How could he not save the world?

The scarf about drove me crazy.  Why bother to accessorize at the end of the world?

So spoiler alert: Pitt's character saves the day, arriving always at just the right moment, in just the right place, with just the right sense of ineffable insight, and just the right sense of fashion.  He figures out that dosing himself with a deadly but curable disease will allow him to walk past zombies without being eaten, and he passes on this knowledge so that a vaccine can be created to immunize non-zombies from the virus (or whatever it is).  That he has no real credentials to do any of these things (he's a former UN investigator) is not important, because Hollywood has a serious hard-on for its white Messiah myth, and it recycles that myth ad nauseam.  As David Brooks notes, "It’s a pretty serviceable formula. Once a director selects the White Messiah fable, he or she doesn’t have to waste time explaining the plot because everybody knows roughly what’s going to happen."

But barring my displeasure with its white Messiah complex -- and, really, haven't we seen enough of this story at this point? -- the film is just plain bad.  It's badly written, and for a film that contains such fast zombies, it drags and shuffles along, moaning and making scary noises without ever doing much of anything.  At one point, I was so bored that I took a restroom break, visited the concession stand, and chatted with the kid behind the counter.  When I returned about 10 minutes later, absolutely nothing had happened.

So why, then, is this movie getting pretty good reviews?  And why am I, a person to whom my film studies colleague attributes "no taste whatsoever" (she's right, really; I love anything with Danny McBride in it), one of the only people saying that it sucks?  Because -- and solely because --  Brad Pitt, particularly at this moment in time, is above critical reproach.  On an airplane last month, I read a Vanity Fair article about World War Z's ridiculous production history debacle.  My sense after reading this article was that the movie was going to be an epic disaster but that Brad Pitt is, to borrow an oft used phrase, simply too big to fail.  And in the realm of Hollywood celebrity, he's also too good: he does all sorts of charitable things and has adopted a zillion children from all over the planet.

Then, just weeks prior to the opening of Pitt's must-be-successful film, his partner Angelina Jolie announced via a New York Times editorial that, due to genetic testing that indicated that she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer -- the disease that killed her mother -- she had had a double mastectomy.  How does one say something bad about the work of the partner of such a courageous woman, particularly when he stood by her side throughout her surgery and recovery?  In making this connection, I in no way mean to undermine Jolie's decision to extract her boobies; if I were in her shoes and had her money, I'd do exactly the same thing.  But her surgery also gives meaning and weight to Pitt's vacuous movie in ways that may very well have protected it from harsh criticism.

Jolie's narrative of her preemptive strike against cells that could rapidly mutate and quickly overtake and kill her gives Pitt's zombie narrative the metaphor it needs: even if there's nothing consciously explicit in our thinking about this film post-Jolie's mastectomy, there's enough unconscious provocation to consider that in that space, this film is about another preemptive strike against another rapidly spreading disease.  It's about the sacrifice of the part in the service of the whole; at one point, in order to keep her from dying (or becoming undead), Gerry lobs of the hand of a female Israeli soldier named Segen (Daniella Kertesz) after she's been bitten, and this strategy saves her.  And it's about a man working to get home to his wife and children.

But if reading the film through the narrative of Jolie's choice can give it a kind of meaning that might allow it to make sense, doing so still doesn't make World War Z a good movie.  There's much better zombie fare out there, and there are reasons not to forget the lineage that led to this moment, even if World War Z has forgotten.