DISCUSSION AUTOUR D' UN LIVRE

SOURCE ET SUITE

 LES COMMENTAIRES SONT TOUJOURS PASSIONNANTS SUR LE SITE DE JAMES MWILLIAMS!!


 We discussed Tim Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds in my “eating meat in America” class today. For those who don’t know this book, you should. You must. Pachirat’s material comes from his work as an undercover employee in an Omaha slaughterhouse. For five months, as fieldwork for his anthropology dissertation, he studied the Nebraskan abattoir from every angle, every nook, every cranny, documenting in finely grained detail the 121 stages of production required to bring meat to our plate, leather to our jackets, and, of course, fecal blood to our research laboratories. Of course. Of course.
Better than any analysis I’ve ever read, or could imagine reading, the book explores the interlocking politics of concealment and surveillance required to convince civilized society to go collectively brain dead over mass slaughter, worker abuse, and ecological degradation.
As near as I can tell, my students were moved. But in weirdly different ways. The arc of emotions expressed in class ranged from denial to silence to tears.

What I mean is that some talkers stayed silent while others took safe refuge in cold intellectual abstraction while another bravely just let it all go. Pachirat writes almost antiseptically about death. He doesn’t hype up anything. He’s about as engagingly objective about the mechanics of killing sentient beings as one could be. And that’s exactly what’s so chilling about his book. Cramming for class this morning, I, too, kept crying. Not your normal day at the office.

SUITE

 J' AI ADORE CE COMMENTAIRE, CAR C' EST TT A FAIT MOI!

"At night, as I lie in my bed, I think a great deal about these animals, where they are at the exact time I’m thinking about them, their exhaustion, their sadness, their pain, and their enormous fear and endless mourning for dear children snatched.

 I’m sure they think about things they never knew, as these memories probably are a slender, vibrant thread, a gift that ties them to ancestors long gone – those that knew the warm sun on their backs, the green field or hill, and their children, children creating a circle around them."