August 24, 2007
Weekly Columnist Roundup: Meat, Schools and Granola
We read all the local columnists, so you don't have to. This week we find meat-eaters being compared to Michael Vick, a lot of bum opinions on city schools and District residents being called "granola."
Courtland Milloy: According to Milloy's Wednesday column in the Post, your choice to eat a hamburger isn't all that different than Michael Vick's decision to brutally fight, torture and kill dogs for money. "We'll kill a duck, deer, turkey -- name any meat -- for the sheer entertainment of our palates or for the fun of the hunt," he writes. While there's little doubt that we judge animals on how cute they are, how useful they are to us and whether or not we've been taught that it's OK to eat them, it's more than a stretch to say that Vick's actions aren't all that different than eating a chicken breast, grilling a steak or buying a salmon filet. At least Milloy makes it clear who he's going to pick for his fantasy football league next season.
Colbert King: The king -- pun intended -- of the District's columnists argued in his Sunday column that new school Chancellor Michelle Rhee faces but one big challenge in her quest to improve public education -- the school bureaucracy. "The central office fervently believes that the status quo is a blessed concept to be defended against all comers," he notes. "The central office has outlived superintendents, elected and appointed school board members, a congressionally created financial control board, an Army general, auditors and a rotating corps of inquiring reporters. Through it all, the central office has remained an incubator for incompetence, obstruction, cronyism and corruption." Hmm. Sound like something else we have here in Washington?
Tom Knott: It's a battle of the extremes, as our favorite right-wing hitman at the Washington Times takes on the ANSWER Coalition and their many fliers plastered around town. And in attacking the so-called "revolutionaries" at ANSWER, Knott gets in a little dig at us while defending the city's actions. He writes: "There are few places more granola than the nation's capital, where the denizens actually believe in the nut-job political messages found in the grocery aisles of Whole Foods, hold candlelight vigils for fallen trees and preach at the altar of multiculturalism from the safety of their highly segregated neighborhoods." If Knott thinks that the District is as granola as things get, he needs to climb out of his bunker and travel a little, shouldn't he?
Jonetta Rose Barras: The District's public school bureacracy just can't get a break this week, as the Examiner's Rose Barras attacks the rules that make hiring good people hard and firing bad people even harder. Like King, Rose Barras makes it clear that reform at the city's schools will only go as far and happen as fast as the bureaucracy allows it -- which may not be much, and not very quickly. "[E]veryone continues to talk about creating a student-centered public education system," she writes. "Watch out! They're blowing smoke."
Harry Jaffe: The other half of the Examiner's local politics columnist lineup, Jaffe used his space this week to tackle...the Redskins. Apparently Jaffe isn't happy with the quarterbacks Joe Gibbs has offered up over the last three seasons. "Why have Coach Joe Gibbs and Redskins owner Dan Snyder bet their entire season on the knee of a 26-year-old kid who’s started a few NFL games and won only one? Isn’t it time to ask these two geniuses why — with all the money Snyder throws at players — they can’t get a decent couple of quarterbacks?" Well, Harry, give the Redskins 12-18 months and a few years on top of that, and we know of one quarterback that'll be looking for a job.
Marc Fisher: We covered this yesterday, but it's worth mentioning again. Fisher -- yes, the same Marc Fisher that couldn't find enough good things to say about spending $611 million in public funds on a baseball stadium -- seems to be having second thoughts about the wisdom of such an investment. "There is still no guarantee that the D.C. experiment with baseball as economic development tool will work," he warns. "Yes, some very big developers are pumping very big money into the area, and yes, the plans look great on paper or on a computer screen. But the ultimate test of the new Southeast's success will be whether people come, and the declining attendance at RFK over the Nationals' first three years is not hugely encouraging."
Loose Lips: Even though the City Paper announced a replacement for former Loose Lips columnist James Jones, the column remains on hiatus. Sure, the D.C. Council is on vacation, but there's always enough Marion Barry for a few thousands words a week, right?
|
TOM KNOTT - God fearing, right winger.
DCist - Left winged, gay and anti-American.
One never gets tired of commenting on the commentators comments. Circle-jerk blogging at its best!
Can someone please make a snarky comment on my comment about the commentator's comments? Then finally maybe my head will asplode from trying to deconstruct the "comment-ness" of the comment about the commentator's comment.
Courtland Milloy is an unadultered idiot. His argument had more flaws than Bush/Cheney's Top 10 Reasons To Go To War, but the greatest of those is the complete glossing over of the fact that human beings are omnivores--meaning that we're programmed to consume both meat and non-meat food sources. Unabashed animal cruelty does not remotely fall within the same scope. The fact that we can *choose* not to eat meat does not alter our genetic programming. Milloy may feel a certain smugness calling out meat-eaters the world over for being no better than a man who encouraged dogs to tear each other to shreds, and killed them when they weren't up to the task. But as for me, I believe I'll order up another steak, thank you very much.
I prefer young milk-fed kitten to cow steak or chicken. Plus, with kittens, you get four tasty drumsticks. Hard to go wrong with that.
Maybe if meatpackers took cows and sharpened their teeth and hooves and pit them against eachother in a ring and drowned the loser with their bare hands, I'd understand Milloy's point.
It would also be unbelievably cool.
The meatpackers should do that with baby cows, then the loser would be nice, already tenderized, pieces of veal....
so tom knott lives in virginia, right?
King has never been more right than he is in this column. I'll be interested to see if Rhee can make any headway against the Central Office.
The thing about Milloy's article is what he didn't say: that one reason people are getting particularly angry about this case is because dogfighting has become associated as a "black" crime, and had it been Tom Brady committing some "white" crime (like running a meth lab or something) the media wouldn't be so indignant about it.
Frankly I don't know if I buy that, but more to the point, I wish he'd just come out and say what he's really thinking.
By the way, is this a new feature? I like it.
Oh and I second Hillrat. King is dead on. The DCPS has become one big bottomless money pit for the well-connected in DC. They have stolen the futures away from several generations of DC kids just to add a few more tacky columns to their Maryland homes. I hope Rhee has some generous firing powers.
Milloy once wrote a column about - I don't remember what it was about - but something to with racism and the music industry. He said that Charley Pride was the first black musician to play the Grand Ole Pory. He was wrong. As Mike Licht could tell you, harmonica player Deford Bailey was the first, and one of the very first Opry performers.
I wrote a letter to the Post about this and got a reply saying that they would tell Mr. Milloy. I never gt a reply from him or read anything in his column about it.
I disagree with the previous guest. We aren't genetically "programmed" to be omnivores. People like any living creatures evolved and adapted to their environments, including what they CHOSE to eat. That's why some populations have evolved to be better able to digest milk as adults. Just as what we eat is a choice (particularly for modern adults in the richest country in the world) how we treat animals is very much a choice, individually and collectively as a society. All of this is beside the point, because Milloy's despicable purpose wasn't to "call out meat eaters" but rather to minimize the cruelty of dogfighting.
The fact that you *choose* not to kill the guy who steals your girl away, or the fact that you *choose* not to murder the colleague who got the promotion that you deserved more, doesn't alter our genetic programming of being Neanderthal like thugs deep down, and fully capable of such things.
With a certain evolved reasoning over time, for what is morally right and wrong however, most of us choose not to do these things.
So if you're trying to suggest that you have a unquestionable right to do something, just because you're "genetically programmed" to do so, then I suggest that it is you Mr. Guest of August 24th, 2007 10:19AM, who has more flaws in his arguments than Bush/Cheney's Top 10 Reasons To Go To War.
Michael Vick raised and used dogs for his enjoyment, and for no other purpose than for something that would most likely result in their deaths, though maybe not for a few that were better than the rest.
The steak you will be ordering up is from an animal no better or worse than one of Vicks dogs, killed purely for your enjoyment, and that was born and raised for no other purpose but your enjoyment. If anything, at least some of Michael Vicks animals got a chance at survival. The long production line of your "steaks to be" will have approximately 0% chance of survival.
Without question, the means of death is quite different, but then again are they really? Were the wonders of the killing process involved in you getting your steak, splashed over CNN 24 hours like the details of the Vick case, I really don't think any evolved and moral brain could really put much between the two.
Like it or not, the difference you think you perceive in the two things is purely down to the society we all live in. And nobody is telling you what you can and can't do, please yourself my friend. But to this pointed out to you is certainly not smugness on anyone’s part, it’s just a plain and simple fact.
"The steak you will be ordering up is from an animal no better or worse than one of Vicks dogs, killed purely for your enjoyment, and that was born and raised for no other purpose but your enjoyment{...}But to this pointed out to you is certainly not smugness on anyone’s part, it’s just a plain and simple fact."
Oh, spare me the self-righteous vegetarian propaganda. The only "fact" introduced into this equation is that humans are free to elect to eat what they want--be it plant or animal--as are numerous other animals throughout the world. The highly dubious comparisons between meat eating and dog fighting are nothing more than condescending vegetarian dogma meant to shame meat-eaters into accepting the point of view that eating other animals is somehow morally wrong. To argue that meat eaters have no moral standing from which to be disgusted at the actions of a person such as Vick is a fallacious argument akin to stating that people who support the death penalty have no moral basis from which to object to indiscriminate murder.
As someone who grew up on a farm, living amongst cows, I choose to eat them because they are, bar none, the dumbest fucking things that God put on this entire green earth.
"People like any living creatures evolved and adapted to their environments, including what they CHOSE to eat."
And considering that evolutionary traits are inherited genetically, that is the crux of the point. It's not that we're programmed to eat meat, it's that were programmed with the capacity to elect to do so. (If anything, anthropological studies indicate that early human ancestors consumed more meat than humans do today.) And, true, simply because we *can* do something does not mean that we *should* do something, but this ultimately comes down to issues of morality and what we find to be acceptable and non-acceptable behavior--something that is, by and large, a personal choice, as evidenced by the number of people who differentiate between killing for consumption and killing for sport.
sdr
So what you vegetarians are saying is that Vick should've eaten the dogs?
Lol, how funny that you assume that I'm vegetarian. But that's beside the point.
This isn't a one side against another thing, and nobody is trying to shame anyone, and as I pointed out, you are free to do as you please my friend. Just reality check time.
It is a fact, that animals are killed purely for your enjoyment of eating them. Is that really so hard for you to understand? An animal is put to death, so you can eat it, this isn't rocket science, and isn't any kind of propaganda.
And it is a fact that Michael Vick killed dogs for his enjoyment of sport.
It is a fact that in both cases animals are put to death prematurely for our pleasure. I defy you to give me any kind sane reasoning on what differentiates the two?
You don't "have" to eat animals in order to survive in this world. You choose to. And that's just the way our society is. Go into any restaurant around here and ask your server if they have any cat or dog on the menu today, and see what kind of looks you get.
That’s just what is accepted to us here in our part of the world. There are some where you’d get quite a good selection of both, because that’s the way things are where they are.
So sorry, you don’t get away with using the majority opinion on the subject of those in your part of the world, and what your society finds acceptable, to gloss over the root of the issue which is that animals die for your pleasure.
And seriously, are you comparing your food choices as a human to those of other animals food choices? I mean come on, seriously? Can you hear what you’re saying? You are either a pretty well evolved human being with a brain living in the 21st century, or you’re not.
I get it, you like your meat, good for you, and nobody is going to tell you what you can and can’t eat. But that’s still no reason not to be honest with yourself about what you’re doing?
Milloy's column was sloppily reasoned and contained some dubious points (like calling people natural "carnivores" rather than omnivores, as someone pointed out above). He has a pretty good point when it comes to race horses, though.
These are animals that are born and raised purely for the purposes of entertainment, and who are often put down immediately when they injure one of their legs. If they can't run, and don't offer good stud prospects, they could possibly end up sold to the pet food factory somewhere down the line. Racing dogs, which are perfectly legal in many states, have it just as bad.
I don't think Milloy was really trying to say that there was nothing wrong with what Michael Vick did ... I think he was trying to get people to realize that there are ALSO questions about the way lots of other people treat animals every day. If we're going to scream bloody murder about Vick's crime, we should wake up to a lot of the other dubious crap going on all around us, or accept the fact that we're being somewhat hypocritical. Seems like he's pretty much on target with that, despite the sloppiness.
Thank guest #19 for that commentary.
And, I am not one of the ones outraged over Vick's dogfighting drama.
I do eat meat sometimes, and I accept the fact that animals do die for human's consumption (and enjoyment for eating them). You are right, it is not rocket science.
Animals are killed everyday for the enjoyment of eating them. We have deer hunting for SPORT. Deer are killed all the time for enjoyment. Fish are hunted for SPORT also.
Yesterday, someone told me they were preparing fish for dish. They said it was grown organically and was a "happy" fish. I responded by saying it is also a dead fish, organic or not. I'm not sure how happy the fish is now.
I love how people try to make themselves better about killing and eating fish. It's organic. So f'ing what? it's dead. you idiot. it was grown and raised in this "organic" farm simply to kill it for the enjoyment of eating it.
Get over it people.
and those cows and pigs and chickens are just slaughtered everyday for human enjoyment! lol. no other way to say it.
Oh, but it's organic meat! great. I feel better now about an animal getting slaughtered because it was grown organically. thanks. I really feel sorry for those non-organic chickens and cows. All that bad non-organic food and living in shit. darn.
These are animals that are born and raised purely for the purposes of entertainment, and who are often put down immediately when they injure one of their legs.
Actually the reason horses are normally put down down when they break their leg is because it is very unlikely that a horse can survive. Look at Barbaro; tons of money was spent trying to keep him alive, but in the end he just couldn't make it. I believe it has something to do with the circulatory system and infection.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't some shady backwater horse tracks that put down a horse when it loses a step, but the general practice of euthenizing a horse with a broken is a humane practice.
Guest 14 - I simply pointed out here that both dogfighting and meat eating involve choice. I didn't make that point to condemn you for eating meat, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is to try to minimize the cruelty of dogfighing by comparing it to meat eating. Like many who for the first time grasp the concept that they chose to kill animals for their won pleasure, you have responded with knee-jerk defensiveness. Why can't you simply accept responsibility for your choices?
Guest 15 - growing up on a farm doesn't earn you extra credibility on ethical issues. In fact, your comment suggests that you simply have no compassion for living things you see yourself as superior to. Not exactly an enlightened point of view.