Confused

According to Spiegel, vivisection is “any experiment performed on a living creature, human, or on-human” (Spiegel, 65). It sounds innocent, doesn't it? An experiment. When I was in first grade, and I was just starting to learn the scientific process, and my teacher Mrs. Rick was explaining to me what constitutes an experiment, none of her examples were anything like those described in our reading. I'm pretty sure her “cruelest” example was one involving the optimum living temperature of lizards, and that was only because there was a chance that you would get the optimum temperature wrong and the lizards might be slightly uncomfortable.

http://www.petcentralvets.com/category_cover_imgs/b2e964cc59aa720.1e034b684f0e2874.lizard.jpg

I didn't stay naïve forever. Eventually I realized that experiements done on animals are not always for the betterment of the animals life, as in the experiment Mrs. Rick described to me. I put the pieces together, started noticing the tiny lettering on my shampoo that read “THIS PRODUCT HAS BEEN TESTED ON ANIMALS”, started reading in my psychology book about Harlow's monkeys, separated from their mothers to understand the importance of care-giving for development.

Here's what I don't understand. If we're doing all of these “learned helplessness experiments” (Spiegel, 67) on animals, cruelty punishing them until they “stop trying to get away from the source of their torment” (Spiegel, 70), and we're applying what we learn from these experiments to humans, then we're assuming that animals basically feel and react to things the same way humans do, aren't we? And if this is the underlying assumption of these experiments, then why the HECK are we treating animals so badly? Why are we willing to perform painful experiments on them that we would never subject a human to when we know that they are just as capable as us of feeling?

Robert Titus says that Victorian scientist tried to establish boundaries between “inflicting pain during 'justifiable experiments' and mere cruelty” (Website). I know that sometimes, experiments are done on humans that are... questionable, experiments that could fall into this category of “justifiable”, experiments that under any other circumstances would just be immoral and cruel. However, humans, at least today, are experimented on by choice. For example, some psychology, experiments entail a certain degree of deception by the experimenter to the participant. I know that deception doesn't really compare to Robert's graphic description of having to “forcefully slide the [guillotine] blade down [a] bird's neck” (Website), but experimenters are still required to have all participants sign an informed consent forms which explain to them what exactly the experiment entails, and at any point during the experiment the participants may stop. Amazing, isn't it, how psychology has such different ethical practices when it comes to humans and animals? Humans have the right to information, and the choice to refuse participation in experiments. Animals have no rights.

Example of an informed consent form.

http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs160-fa06/wiki/images/f/fd/JigsawInformedConsent.gif

Well. They have the right to be experimented on, apparently.

Just like Europeans felt that African people had the right to become slaves. Just like the confederacy felt that they had a right to own slaves.

Oh. My. God. Speaking of the confederacy. It amazes me how I saw the UT commercial like... 50 million times during the game, with its deep voiced narrator and beautiful views of campus, an inspiring orang-lit tower, and a cheesy slogan of “what starts here changes the world”, and yet its apparently the most confederate campus in the nation. I love you, UT, but you're confusing me a little bit here. You want to change the world and yet your “statue's and fountain inscription” suggest you are living in a deeply confederate past. Now, granted, I did not miss the fact that this statement was made by a professor of history at A&M. Let's face it: that guy probabaly was not that fond of UT, and its possible that bias made him exaggerate. But there's no question that UT has quite a few confederate hero statues. After all, South mall has “four bronze leaders [who were] leaders of the Southern case”.

I would, however, like to put in a good word for UT. I understand the problem with having all of these statues of confederate heroes. However, I read a book called A Heart Divided a few years ago, set in a town called Redford in Tennessee that had been the sight of a major Civil War battle. One of the characters talks about how for the south, the war was different because the “hallowed ground” where the war was fought was right in their own backyards, and that today “half of white southerners are descended from Confederates” (Bennet and Gottsfield, 233). He also says that his great great grandfather fought in the battle even though he didn't believe in slavery and opposed secession. I think that the statues are bad in a way because they don't represent everybody: the people they are honoring were not heroes to everyone. But I can sort of understand how some of the people who fought for the South may have been fighting not for slavery but for... I don't know. For the south itself. I know that earlier in US history, people saw themselves not as American but as North Carolinian or New Yorkan. And here in Texas, we still sometimes refer to ourselves as Texan.

Map of the Civil War. (Blue is the Union).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/US_map_1864_Civil_War_divisions.svg/800px-US_map_1864_Civil_War_divisions.svg.png

Ugh. I lost track of where I was going with that thought... I think that my point is that the statues at UT can be seen in more then one light. When you look at them one way, they are honoring the confederacy and all that it stood for, which, sadly, included slavery. However, when you look at them from a different perspective, you might see them as honoring men who's loyalty lay with their homes, and not necessarily with slavery and all that this entailed. Robert E Lee, the commander of the Confederate army, was actually asked by Lincoln to lead the Union army and declined because his home, Virginia, was seceding, despite his opposition. There is actually a letter in which Lee says that he believes “slavery, as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country”. All things considered, the statues at UT are without a doubt controversial, but may not stand for the Confederacy in quite the way it is usually envisioned.

"Superiority

I learned in anthropology that one of the key differences between race and ethnicity is that a race is assigned by a dominant group.

Now. Let's think about what kind of a connotation this gives race.

If race is assigned, then the power to choose an identity is taken away from the group which is being labeled.

If race is assigned, then dominance, and by default superiority, is built into the identities of groups, and the people that form these groups.

And if race is assigned, the dominant race has, because of its default superiority, a ready excuse for imposing conditions upon the labeled race that lack freedom.

In a way, racism is inherent in race.

And what of this superiority?

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf comments on a text she read on the inferiority of women, saying that “possibly when the [author] insisted a little to emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority.” I think that this idea can be stretched to the “line arbitrarily drawn between white people and black people” (Spiegel, 20) by early European explorers. Think about it. You are... I dunno, John Johnerson from... Europeland. You've just arrived in an unknown land, and everyone around you looks different from you. Not only that, but they have a way better idea of how to survive in this unknown land then you do. You (John) are probably feeling a little bit insecure, am I right? Back home, you're a big deal. You're the brave explorer who volunteered to brave the elements and venture into the wilderness. However, here in the wilderness, you are just Some Lost Guy: not exactly what you pictured when you started off on this journey.

So what do you do?

You label. You tell yourself, and everyone else, that you are better. Smarter. Stronger. Morally purer. And you keep saying it, over and over again, until you believe it, and your friends believe it, and their friends believe it. Not only that: you do your best to make sure that those people you are putting yourself above believe it too, do your best to make them, as James Baldwin said, “despise themselves” (Speigel, 18). And once this process has been completed, once your armor of false superiority has been cinched tight, once the paper bag of inferiority has been mercilessly placed over your victim's heads, it is then that you look at those you have labeled and see not a person but “[your] own reflection” (anthology, 317), your own power to do with the labeled party as you please. They exist for you, after all.

Explorers (like John Johnerson).

http://karenswhimsy.com/public-domain-images/european-explorers/images/european-explorers-3.jpg

We, as a society, have labeled animals as inferior. I don't know when it started, this labeling. We must have been very insecure when it began, must have seen their “depth of feeling” (anthology, 316), the love and the beauty that they exuded, and decided that their was a danger that we, as a species, could not compare.

And really, its not the label thats the problem. This idea of us and them is fine. Its the connotation we attach to it, the “we are better” that drips off of our labels, that messes everything up.

Labels are OK as long as they don't imply inferiority

http://gethurt.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/nametag.jpg.

I'd heard of racism. Sexism. Ageism. Even sadism, though I was (sadly) a little bit more fuzzy about what that meant. But I don't think I'd ever heard anyone explicitly use the term speciesism. I mean... I'd heard of the idea. But I didn't realize that it was like... a real thing.

Wow. That came out wrong. To explain... we grow up, go to school, make friends. We learn to share, to say please and thank you, to treat others as we wish to be treated. But when we learn these things, we learn them in relation to other people. To other human beings. And we learn about racism, and sexism, and ageism in accordance with how these prejudicial practices apply to homo-sapiens. Sometimes, we'll learn to be nice to animals, to treat them with respect. But it seems to me that as we grow up, we are given a list of Things We Should Care About, and animals are placed very near the bottom of it.

When we're young, we learn to share, just as these ducks are sharing an umbrella.

http://imagecache5.art.com/p/LRG/16/1649/SVAGD00Z/lopez-ducks-share.jpg

I think that as we grow up, we rearrange this list, based on what we learn about the items it contains. Like... everyone learns about slavery, and the racial prejudice that this country has been through. And as we learn about this, over and over again was we grow up, in more detail every time, we are able to make educated decisions as to how we view the practice of racism, and how much of an issue we have with it. So, when we are rearranging out Things We Care About list, we generally tend to put racism pretty high on it. But since we're generally not taught about speciesism and the treatment of animals in such detail, since we're not told over and over again growing up that “99% of US chickens spend their lives in crowded confinement” (anthology, 389), that “dairy operations each hold thousands of cows, year round, in crowded dirt lots” (anthology 390), we're not able to make as educated a decision about where to place it on the Things We Care About list, and its doesn't really register for us how grave of an injustice it is. It's not that our educators “hasten to cover the obscenity” (anthology 399) of speciesism. It is more that they never give us a clear view of speciesism, an perhaps more importantly, never attempt to reveal to us “the passion of the animal” (anthology 400)s, the small things that animals do that make their mistreatment a terrible thing.

Though we often think of cows as grazing in a large field, dairy cows are crowded onto dirt lots.

http://paddyk.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/expensive-cow.jpg

I don't know if this is on purpose, or if maybe in grade school, they concentrate so much on our treatment of other humans, trying to make sure we become productive members of society and don't let some of our baser evil instincts, such as being fine with inflicting pain on another as long as we are “not held responsible” (website), manifest themselves in dangerous ways, that they run out of time and don't get to the speciesism dilemma, but I think its wrong. Regardless of whether you decide that animals are equal to humans, I feel that it's ridiculous that it took until I was 19 years old, in my freshman college english class, for me to become informed about exactly how speciesism is being acted out. I'm not saying that it's not partly my fault. I think that somewhere, in the back of my mind, behind the curtains of my heart, I sort of, maybe knew. However, that doesn't make the lack of attention this issue is given in our moral and academic education any more acceptable. As Chris Cacciatore says, “With ignorance comes the silencing of sympathy and the roots of cruelty.” So if part of the reason we are educated is to, as I said before, keep us from giving in to our more base instincts, our “'genuine, sadistic tendencies” (website), why aren't we taught about speciesism?

Years passed an I remained uninformed about speciesism.

http://www.designbliss.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/2008_yearly_calendar.gif

It doesn't make any sense.

Words

Look at this.

These letters, how they come together to make words, how the words are strung like beads into sentences, how these sentences are carefully arranged, slowly constructed into paragraphs. How these paragraphs are placed with caution in a deliberate, systematic order.

The effect is aesthetically pleasing, isn't it? Like a picture.

Oh, what a tasteful arrangement of symbols!

Dear goodness, yes! So elegant, so simple! Genius, of course.

HA! I laugh. You laugh to, if you've ever read or written or heard anything worthwhile. Words are not pretty.

Words are powerful.

I was reminded of this yesterday while shopping, of all things. I am actually not fond of shopping. Quite the opposite in fact: the mall gives me sensory overload and usually I end up in Borders Express, “sampling” books (or cheating the bookseller by reading them and not buying them...). Anyhow, my mother decided, after realizing that I was still wearing jeans she had bought me in 7^th grade, that it was time to expand my denim collection, so she dragged me with her to engage in a day of horror, aka shopping. Anyhow, I finally found a pair of jeans that fit me, and I was very excited, because that means I could leave the mall. My mother, however, had other ideas, and brought me a shirt to try on. I was substantially opposed to this idea. However, being the smart cookie that she is, my mom told me that if I tried on the shirt she wouldn't make go shopping with her for a month.

http://churningthewordmill.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/women_s_jeans1.jpg

Let me tell you, I'm pretty sure I broke some kind of a shirt-trying record. Those word were some pretty power stuff.

In Dos Palabras, Isabelle Allende's character Belisa is kidnapped not for her beauty, or her money, but for her words. She is forced to sell them to el Coronel, who, after years of ravaging the countryside with his men, longs to rule the country not through fear but through, I suppose, his own merit. Well. He doesn't get off to a great start, with the whole kidnapping thing. Not exactly the turning over of a new leaf. However, Belisa writes him a speech that gets the whole country behind him, that wipes way his past misdeeds and gains him the support he needs to rule legitiamtely. Not only that, she sells him two secret words, all his own. Sneaky of her, really. Because they overpower him. He gains support throughou the land and at the same time wastes away, repeating the words to himself over and over again. Eventually, Belisa and the Coronel find each other again and Belisa's presence makes brings the Coronel back to a semblance of sanity.

The author of Dos Palabras.

http://i270.photobucket.com/albums/jj88/malinamaniac/LIBROS/ISABEL_ALLENDE.jpg

But do you see it? How words are so powerful that they can both bring you power and at the same time dominate you completely?

Red Peter saw it. He is careful to clarify what he means by “a way out” (Anthology, 367), cautious in pointing out the reader that he is “deliberately now saying freedom”(Anthology, 367). He recognizes the power of the words freedom, and prefers not to unleash its full force in his description of his situation.

Elizabeth Costello saw it. She dared not tell her son why she had “become so intense about the animals business” (Coetzee, 114) for a long time, saying that “when [she thought] of the words they seemed] so outrageous that they [were] best spoken into a pillow” (Coetzee, 114). And again, in her agonizing inner debate over her lecture on Paul West and evil, she demonstrates her faith in the power of words, wondering if he can “wander as deep... into the Nazi forest of horrors and emerge unscathed” (Coetzee 161), later announcing that she feels “ certain things are not good to read or to write” (Coetzee, 171). In Costello's case, at least in reference to Paul West, the power of words is multifold: Reading Paul West's novel, full of words, bring her to the conclusion that he himself has been changed by the evil which his words described, and uttering her conclusion affects those who heard her lecture, whether they agreed with her or not.

Costello lectures about evil.

http://www.goodandevilforyouandme.com/images/evil%20setup%20pics/evilword_heading.jpg

Even Sister Bridget, or perhaps the catholic church, depending on how you look at it, recognizes the strange capabilities of words. Why do you think she changed her name? Look at the effect that tacking Sister on the beginning has: it's almost like she, with this name, has created a new person. But it's really just a word.

Sister Bridget: a new person?

http://www.clipartguide.com/_named_clipart_images/0511-0712-2114-0701_Praying_Nun_clipart_image.jpg

But what is important about those who recognize the power of words is that sometimes, with practice and dedication, they can wield the power. The Coronel tried, and succeeded, to a point, at least in the realm of gaining the presidency. Red Peter, through his wary trading around the word freedom, succeeded as well. With Sister Bridget it's harder to tell: Did she become a hard-liner on her own, or did she allow her title, that 6 letter demand shoved onto one end of her name, to mold her?

But how can power be gained over words? Costello says that “it is enough for books to teach us about ourselves” (Coetzee, pg 128). A random young man says that “the humanities... develop as a body of disciplines devoted to interpretation” (Coetzee, 129). I think to gain power over words, themselves so powerful, you have to take these two ideas (that words teach us about ourselves and that they can be interpreted in different ways) and combine them. Figure out what the words teach you. Then, take what ever you've learned and reconfigure it until you've created a masterpiece that others can interpret in the way you've intended. Therein lies the danger, because, to be quite honest, you can't REALLY control how others are going to take what you say. It's a challenge to be sure. But think of the possibilities if you could just control how others construe your words.

Endless. The possibilities of words wielded with skill are endless.

When I said that Disney movies gave me unrealistic expectations, I think (not exactly sure but almost certain) that I was referring to boys. Like... you watch Cinderella at the age of three and youi grow up with this idea that you're marrying Prince Charming and then you go out into the world and you realize that Prince Charming is a huge lie and you'd better give yourself a reality check before you end up like Amy Adams in Enchanted, climbing onto roofs in a poofy white dress and calling rats to help you with the cleaning.

What I realized after watching the second half of Earthlings was that Disney movies didn't just give me unrealistic expectations about boys: Disney movies gave me unrealistic expectations about LIFE. They present an ideal world where all problems are solved and no deaths are tragic, where a fox and a hound can be best friends, where humans go out of their way to save a tramp from the pound, where circus elephants are reunited with their young and live happy lives, unbothered by their captivity.

What a lie.

Not to be melodramatic or anything, but really. WHAT A LIE.

I should have known though. I mean, in the original Little Mermaid there is no happy wedding between a red haired beauty and her dashing prince: the mermaid dies after the prince falls in love with someone else. Obviously, Disney has a knack for glossing over the less pleasant parts of life.

In the Anderson's version of The Little Mermaid the mermaid dies at the end and is given an immortal soul.

http://www.fairytalescollection.com/hans_christian_anderson/li_merma3.jpg

But you know what? It's not even just Disney movies. When it comes to the treatment of animals, I feel like there's been this huge, systematic conspiracy to keep what's really going on in the fur, entertainment, and meat industries hush-hush. I went to the circus last year and let me tell you, the elephants looked hunky-dory to me. You would never know that underneath their colorful costumes these huge animals are probably quaking, afraid that one mistake will earn them a sharp smack and unfriendly words. I dunno. Maybe I'm getting sentimental, anthropormorphising a bit, but honestly. Honestly. Why don't we anthropomorphise? In fact, why do we even have that term? Is it anthropomorphisation to assign feelings to animals? Because I'm pretty sure that feelings. that sadness and happiness and love, are something that animals most definitely posses.

Pain is often used to get elephants to perform.

http://stevecotler.com/tales/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/circus-elephants.JPG

We humans so conceited. God. Why is it that we think we're the only ones who feel? We're not special. Ok? We're unspecial. Tweak our DNA and we're not even human. And what are we saying with this whole "anthropomorphising" thing, that if we tweak our DNA, and we end up as a mouse, or better yet, if we end up as a cow, that we no longer feel? That we no longer value life?

At least Disney movies got one thing right. At least they have the good sense to show animals expressing emotion.

Simba cries when Mufasa dies. I cried when my uncle died.

Last summer, my neighbors dog Chasta died. She was fourteen years old and had mothered a litter of pups at the age of four, one of whom remained with her until her death 10 years later.

When Chasta died, that puppy cried.

Anthropomorphise that.

Image

I'm looking at my copy of Elizabeth Costello right now, and I feel compelled to ask: Could J.M. Coetzee's name be written any bigger? I swear, he takes up about half of the cover page. The title of the book is written in these tiny little letters at the bottom. I mean, yeah they're written in gold, so they stand out a bit. But I really think that, even though Coetzee's “fictional device enables him to distance himself” (Anthology, 347) from what is being said, the cover of my copy of this novel hints that Coetzee is not as distanced from what is being said as he'd like us to believe. And the amount of time dedicated to Costello's ideas within the novel, as well as the title of the book, makes me think that it is with Costello and her arguments that Coetzee most identifies with, though he tries to get by “without... really committing himself” (Anthology 347) to what's being said.

Coetzee's name is written in HUGE letters.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/416HPNV61ZL.jpg

Now. Why is this important? If I wanted to get all technical, I could talk about how it's a superb literary device used by Coetzee to tackle a potentially controversial topic, namely animal cruelty. I could compare it to... I don't know... The Yellow Wallpaper, and how Gillman uses her main character to express the dissatisfaction she feels about the condition of the married woman. But really, the literary device itself is not what I think is important. It makes Elizabeth Costello a book of literary merit, which is probably part of why it has received so many rave reviews, some of which are quoted in all of their fawning glory on the back cover. But this literary device, to me, is important because of how it plays into what Coetzee says in his first few chapters, through Costello, about image.

Gillman uses the same literary device as Coetzee.

http://thefuturists.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/yellow.jpg

Actually, what Coetzee talks about more then image itself is the divide between image and who we really are. I love Costello's detached feeling as she gives her cruise ship speech, how “she is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying” (Coetzee, 39). Oh, my goodness, I have done that before. More times then I care to remember.

Exhibit A: At my high school, I took a class called Theory of Knowledge. Not the funnest class of my life, I've got to admit. I guess if I had to describe it, I'd say it was a philosophy class. But it wasn't one of those memorization philosophy classes, where you sit around memorizing everything Aristotle ever wrote. The whole thing was that you were given a few topics over the course of the semester and you created your own philosophy about them. SO, anyway, I was super excited about getting to write on all these crazy topics, and I wrote this intense paper about how there is no such thing as objective knowledge, and blah, blah blah. I turn the paper in, and two days later my teacher hands it back and he's basically highlighted every single line in red and at the end of the paper he's writes me this note that basically says he disagrees with me so, even though my paper is well written and well supported, he's not going to give me an A.

WELL. Excuse me for being original. I mean... I knew from our dicussions in class that he had a differing opinion. But I didn't want to play that game that so many of my peers got caught up in, the game where you write exactly what you know the teacher wants to hear, regardless of whether or not you agree with it. I wanted an A though. Quite a dilemma I was in... In the end, I sort of cheated. I turned in pretty, agreeable papers all semester long, regurgitating exactly what my teacher had said in class, “believing whatever [had] to be believed in order to get the job done” (Coetzee 39). That summer, though, I basically rewrote all of my papers. Pretending to agree with my Theory of Knowledge tyrant teacher was too much for me. Upholding my “image” during the semester almost undid me, and now that the job was done, now that my A was secure, I was ready to shed that image like an old coat and give myself over to how I really felt.

I created an image of agreeing with my teacher so I could get that ever elusive A.

http://z.hubpages.com/u/210160_f520.jpg

I think Costello was able to give her speech on animal cruelty despite the fact that "her sponsors would no doubt like [for her to speak about herself and her fiction]" (Coetzee, 60) because, after decades of toning down her beliefs, she was too tired to uphold the image she had created for herself. My mom always says that the older she gets, the harder it is for her to be polite. That's basically what I think happened to Costello: she is “old enough not to have time to waste on niceties” (Coetzee, 94). And she makes people uncomfortable with what she says. Abraham Stern actually refuses to come to dinner with her, he is so offended by what she has said. But her image has already been shattered by her lecture, and she keeps picking away at it the next day at the debate even after receiving his biting explanation for his absence because she is tired, tired, tired of being what everyone else expects her to be.

Now, I talked to you earlier about Coetzee and his grand literary device, about how he prettily separated himself from what was being said in this novel. I also said that this literay device wasn't important. And for my purposes, for just taking to heart what the book is trying to convey, it really isn't. But I think that this particular literary device, used for separation, relates to what Coetzee uses this book to say about image. It's like... it's like Coetzee wants to be Costello. Like he would love to be able to speak freely as she does, to ruffle feathers and attempt to change the world, one lecture at a time. But he hasn't reached this level yet. His use of Costello to talk about the subject of animal cruelty hints that he has yet to fully discard his image.

I don't know that much about Coetzee. I don't know if he's actually very vocal about his animal right beliefs, or if he truly does speak solely through his characters. But I do know that most of us spend our lives wrapped up in the protective casing of the image we let the world see, and sooner or later our beliefs are going to get too big to fit in that casing. The casing is going to burst, eventually. Everyone is going to know what we really think. Is it better to just let it out right away, to bypass the casing alltogether? I don't know. But, I figure, if Coetzee is right, and it's all going to come out eventually, I might as well divulge as much of it now as I can, because, sooner or later, everyone's going to know anyway.

The image we try to show the world can be likened to this decidedly unattractive chemical suit, but eventually the suit will not be able to contain our true selves.

http://lib.fo.am/_media/chemical-protective-suit.jpg

Images, as Coetzee proves through Costello, are hard to maintain and very fragile.

The Core

"Earthlings".

How am I supposed to respond to it?

No, really. What is it that I can say that hasn’t already been said, that isn’t obvious from the graphic, horrific scenes that I watched over, and over, and over, and over.

Blood on the floor.

Pain in my eyes, in my ears.

And this gnawing feeling that something was dangerously wrong about what I was watching…

No. Not that what I was watching was wrong. I knew it was wrong: that feeling was out in the open, blurring my eyes, making my stomach churn, and my hands shake, and my brain, no, my heart, scream NO at the top of its lungs.

I know what the gnawing feeling was. That something was wrong with HUMANS. With us. I mean, what were we doing in that video?

(I hate that I have to include myself in that term. We. Human. I am human.)

What I hated the most, what made me want to run out of the room, what made my sympathetic nervous system rush away from my control, was the perverse, sickening, EVIL pleasure that I sensed in the background of the scenes that splayed out before me.

They liked it. Those people? Those faceless, nameless, empty shells I was watching destroy lives, were enjoying themselves. It was like… it was like they were raping the idea of humanity. Like being human, or at least, everything we’ve discussed about what it means to be human, was being peeled away, layer by layer, until all that was left was a core. And that core? It wasn’t empathy. It was a rotting, grotesque mass of hate, soft, pulpy, and ripe, like fruit after a few days in the compost heap.

How I saw our core.

http://www.daleysfruit.com.au/forum/i/188/compost-flys.jpg

But I sat it out. I didn’t run away. I didn’t scream. I didn’t even cry, not really.

When I left World Lit on Thursday, I remember feeling detached. I walked to my next class and I sat in the back and I was a good kid and said all the right things at the right time and wrote an essay and oh my goodness, wasn’t I just SPLENDID, the way I could function so normally employing absolutely no part of my inner self.

Well. That lasted about an hour. Until it was time to eat.

Nothing was safe. The cheese on the pizza? Made from the milk of abused cows. The neatly sliced salami? Harnessed from slit throats and hanging bodies, from animals deprived of sunlight and love.

After "Earthlings" this pizza was thoroughly unappetizing.

http://www.watchmojo.com/blogs/images/pizza.jpg

And, of course, my mother calling. On the phone.

On Thursday my uncle died.

Did you know that I cried? A lot.

I don’t cry. Ever. I bite my lip, and I blink, and I breathe deeply, but I don’t cry.

And yet there I was, sliding down the wall in the Andrews hallway, tears streaming down my face while my heart lay bare and bleeding in front of me.

http://www.timeoutofmind.com/images/bryce/bryce_large/left_in_tears.jpg

And in that instant, my faith in humanity was restored.

There is no way to justify what "Earthling" portrays. In fact, honestly, I don’t think justification should be attempted: the images speak for themselves. But I also don’t think that the view of humanity that Earthlings brought to mind for me is correct. The core of humanity is not hate. The core of humanity is love. If we could just figure out how to employ our core in every situation…

The core of humanity is love.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/58/220279254_17c20cbec5.jpg

I know that at the core of humanity is love because I loved my uncle, and when I found out he died, I felt my core shift, and cramp, and painfully rearrange itself to incorporate the news. And I think that if those nameless, faceless figures abusing the animals in "Earthlings" had just taken the time to employ their cores of love, they might not have been so callous in their practices. Maybe, after euthanizing that dog, they wouldn’t have thrown it in the growing pile of dead animals like a sack of potatoes. Maybe they’d have buried it with respect. Or maybe they wouldn’t have euthanized it at all. Maybe they’d have fallen in love, and taken it home, and grown old with it.

Maybe, instead of just looking human, they’d have acted human.

I wish they had.

Lessons

After the first reading, at least for me, the question of whether androids had human rights seemed silly. I mean.. they are man-made robots, OK? They have no emotions, no sympathy, no empathy, no love. They can never be “affected by the condition of another with feeling similar or corresponding to that of the other” (Anthology, 274M) or be “moved by the suffering or distress of another” (Anthology, 274J). I couldn't understand how they could even be considered for human rights when they were so decidedly not human. For me, even though androids had human characteristics, even though they looked like humans, and acted like humans, and could imitate our mannerisms, there was no getting around the fact that... they are robots. They are not alive, and there seemed to me to be no point in treating them like they were. When Deckard was killing them off, it was just him “taking care” of a malfunctioning machine.

Though androids might look more like humans than this robot, they are still machines.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/12/24/asimorobot_48.jpg

Except... then came along Luba Luft. I feel like Deckard sums up my feelings after her extermination perfectly: “so much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs” (Dick, 142). Well YEAH. SO MUCH FOR THAT DISTINCTION. I feel like that's exactly what Philip Dick was getting at with her death.

Is there a distinction?

In the movie terminator this character was full android but this picture illustrates well my idea that, with the introduction of Luba, the distinction between humans and androids becomes fuzzy because of the emotional response she evoked in me.

http://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/terminator2.jpg

I still stand by what I said last DB that there is a distinction, that a humans ability to WANT to feel empathy, to be acutely aware of the empathy they are lacking, is what distinguishes humans from other beings. But like Deckard, I really felt for Luba. And my feelings weren't anything like what Phil Resch telling Deckards his feelings were. I couldn't even see Luba, so my emotional response to her death definitely had nothing to do with “love toward... an android imitation.” For me, it was more that Luba, through her music and her slightly vapid, innocent personality, evoked from me an emotional response. I got kind of attached to her. And, to be honest, I was pretty mad when Deckard shot her. I liked her!

So anyway, then I got to thinking about some of the other technically non-living things I've gotten attached to. The list is actually embarrassingly long. However, probably the non-living thing I've been most attached to was my Simba stuffed animal. That guy was my bff from the age of 3 all the way to a terribly old age that is far beyond the appropriate age for being friends with a toy (coughOLDcough). And he was just... great, you know? I remember after one particularly horrific day at school, I got home and my mom was busy yelling at my sister for... I don't know, eating dirt or something, so she didn't have time to listen to my sad tale. Guess who was there for me? That's right. SIMBA. He listened to the whole story without interrupting me, and when I finished, he didn't judge me or try to tell me what to do. He just gave me a nice, big lion hug. How could I not get emotionally attached? He was such a good friend! And I would have been heartbroken had a bounty hunter come into my room and exterminated him.

A Simba much like this one was one of my best friends.

http://www.hermanstreet.com/store/media/img/00/48/51/07/0048510730012_100x100.jpg

So, I do think that androids should have human rights, not because I think that they have are like humans, or like animals, or really like any “living thing”. I think that androids should have human rights purely for the selfish reason that I could very easily become emotionally attached to... any of them. Of course, this creates problems. Andriods are not as cute and cuddly as my old Simba toy. They're not alive, and they have no empathy, and in Androids we see that they can be a danger to humans. But if we “suspend theory in order to focus on what the person of object in front of us might teach us”, we might realize that androids, despite all of their un-human flaws, may be able to teach us a higher form of empathy. I mean, it's easy to feel empathetic towards something that is like you. But with androids, I feel like we have to search more, and find that small sliver of likeness that connects us in order to be empathetic and emotional towards them.

Androids can teach us how to be empathetic and loving towards something that is quite unlike us.

http://hannahsworld.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/hannah-heart.jpg

In fact, I think I may have already begun to learn this lesson of empathy. I like those androids. I like them and it makes me very upset to think that they're being killed off for being exactly what we made them to be: unsympathetic, empathy-lacking machines.

Human...

Today, I woke up wishing I had mood organ. I mean, yeah. As Iran says in Androids, it would probabaly be “unhealthy... sensing... life... and not reacting” (Dick, 5). But oh my goodness, I could have used a Penfield this morning. My alarm didn't ring, I ran out of shampoo, I stepped on my glasses and now they're all crooked, and I noticed that my desk is mysteriously sticky and I'm not sure why. To top it off, because my alarm failed to wake me I was almost late to class and had to run like a maniac across campus, trying desperately to ignore the fact that everyone was staring at me like I was Leslie, out from the hospital and back to my fashionable ways.

Leslie himself :)

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL4PKHoPqkTPHpyvIYll-X_jNOVhFidzZY8ofKgiNdhJ4KdJ5yEAJj3VC3cGjLOjCFWsxePH0FLiCaT_9jo4pfAXJLnRsjd-MvADyDnTmxj7d8eftSuwLL3oG7abn0_XsiwEE4JdmRnfAX/s400/Leslie+Magnet.JPG

Unhappy. That's how I felt this morning. Ridiculously, irreversibly unhappy. I wish that I could say I kept this unhappiness to myself, that I had “self control” and “[found] ways to manage [my[ disturbing emotions and impulses”(Anthology, 336) . Instead of “channelling [my emotions] in useful ways” (Anthology 336), however, I decided to be a Debbie Downer rain on the parade of every person I talked to. One girl expressed anxiety over a test: I responded not with words of encouragement but with a particularly gruesome tale of a test in my past that I failed miserably. Another boy told me a humorous tale about a childhood experience involving long hair and gum: I didn't even crack a smile. Finally, my sister called me with some news on her crush. Instead of being supportive I told her she was too young to have a boyfriend. What a joke. The girl is almost 16. I don't think she's too young to have a boyfriend. I just didn't feel like being nice and decided to emotionally vomit all over her.

Debbie Downer as portrayed by SNL. Basically she just makes you feel terrible, just like I was doing to everyone I met this morning.

As I watched myself spread my rain clouds of unhappiness over everyone else's day, I found myself imagining a world where I could press a button and all of the unfortunate occurrences that had happened to me would have no effect on my mood at all, a world where I could feel what I wanted when I wanted, a world where unhappiness could be scheduled for a more convenient time. Basically, I fantasized living in Rick Deckards world.

Let's face it: society does not encourage strong, uncontrolled emotions like the unhappiness that was emanating from me this morning. In Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Lumieure, Cogsworth, and Mrs. Pot all tell the Beast that the most important thing to remember when addressing Belle is to control his temper, something Belle repeats to him later. In Ella Enchanted, Ella's father tries to muffle her sobs at her mother's funeral, finally telling her to “get away” (Levine, 11) and “come back when [she] can be quiet” (Levine, 11). Fergie made a katrillion dollars a few years ago by singing about how “big girls don't cry”. Obviously there are some advantages to controlling your emotions. In The Secret Life of Bees, May is unable to control her emotions and they end up destroying her. And I'm pretty sure no one I talked to this morning appreciated my uncontrolled unhappiness, least of all my sister, who promptly hung up on me. I'll have to fix that later...

Anyhow, the point is that uncontrollable emotions can be a real downer. And yet... a mood organ is not the answer. I feel like emotions make us who we are. Like... the way we react to thing emotionally is our own essence. It says a lot about what we're like as people. Dick goes so far in Androids as to suggest that emotional intelligence is the defining element of our humanity, making an EQ test the primary device used to differentiate between a human and an android, who "[bounce] helplessly when confronted by an empathy-measuring test".

But here's what I don't understand. If emotional intelligence I the defining characteristic of humanity, what happens with those few people who honest to god don't have emotions? Take Gary for example. He's “emotionally flat, completely unresponsive to any and all shows of feeling,” (Anthology 275A) and yet we KNOW he's not an android. He, a human being, would fail the EQ test. And in Androids, Rachael, an android, very nearly passes.

In Androids EQ tests are used to find androids among humans.

http://www.ihhp.com/images/quiz_01.jpg

So, this reading kind of confused me because it presents an idea and then immediately provides evidence to the contrary. Is it emotional intelligence that makes us human? And if this is so, are alexithymics like Gary not human? Except... he is human. Technically.

I dunno... I do feel that what makes us human is inside. And I know that it's more then just the structure of our bodies and the order of our genes, more then our ability to talk, and walk upright. But I think it's wrong to say that alexithymics are not human, or even less human then people who are able to empathize. Maybe being human doesn't have to do as much with your ability to empathize, or your emotional intelligence, as it does with making an effort to empathize and understand those around you. I mean, it's not your fault if you seriously just cannot empathize. It's not like you can do anything about it: they don't sell over the counter empathy pills just yet. But if you fail to even make an effort to empathize... that, to me, points to a lesser degree of human-ess.

Though packets of empathy like these are not available to alexithymics, I think they can still assert their humanity by making an effort to empathize, even if they are unsuccessful.

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/files/2009/06/empathy.jpg

Animal Ethics in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

This was kind of hard for me for a couple of reason. First of all, when I thought about the animals in Alice, I didn't see them as animals. I mean, think about it. The White Rabbit has a waistcoat pocket, OK? And he's worried about being late. I don't even worry about being late, and I'm actually a human. He's out-humaning me, I tell you! It's utterly preposterous. And the Lion and Unicorn in Looking Glass, fighting over the kings all-powerful crown? Seems like a pretty human desire. Not to mention the Cheshire Cat. What kind of cat sits around grinning and exclaiming to small human girls that “[everyone] is mad” (Carroll, 66)?

Doesn't this rabbit look ridiculously human to you?

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/myee/architecture/Picture1.gif

Anyway, so I sat around confused for about a half an hour, trying desperately to reverse the humanization that Carroll, through Alice, had so liberally bestowed upon the animals in Wonderland before realizing that THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT! Through this humanizing, Carroll was showing:

1. how we dehumanize animals just because they don't communicate and act the same way as us and therefore allow ourselves to treat them unethically, although lack of understanding for animals is not a “good and sufficient cause” (Anthology, 329) for this unethical treatment.

2. the astounding difference in Alice's treatment of animals that arises when they DO communicate and act like humans. I think that animals possess a lot of the same traits as us, but we fail to recognize these similarities because we are blinded by what separates us, such as the ability to talk. Take my dog, for example. Last weekend he had a little happy heart attack when I let him walk with me to the mailbox. In fact, it was astonishingly similar to the the happy heart attack my sister had when I took her with me to the movie store. The only difference between their happy heart attacks was that my sister jumped up and down shrieking “MOVIEMOVIEMOVIEMOVIEMOVIE”, while my dog jumped up and down yelping “YAPYAPYAPYAPYAP”. In Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Alice find it time and time again easier to act ethically towards those animals which Carroll has given the power to act and communicate in familiar and human ways.

This is about what my sister looked like when she found out we were getting a movie.

http://scienceblogs.com/neurotopia/happy%20and%20excited.jpeg

One of the major ways in which Carroll proves these two points is by contrasting the way in which Alice treats those animals he has humanized to the way she interacts with those who are in their more natural state, namely the pig, the dog and the cooked animals at her feast in Looking Glass when she becomes a queen. I thought the pig was probably the most interesting of all, because it started out as a child. Alice, when the pig is a baby, tries to save it from the abuse it is experiencing with the duchess, exclaiming that “if [she doesn't] take this child away with [her]... they're sure to kill it” (Carroll, 63). However, Alice is annoyed with the “child” as soon as it begins acting in unhuman ways. She tells it not to grunt because grunting is “not at all a proper way of expressing [oneself]”. After awhile, Alice tells the pig-child that “if [it is] going to turn into a pig... [she'll] have nothing more to do with [it]” (Carroll, 63). Once it becomes a pig she simply sets it down. But here's the thing: isn't the pig still potentially in danger? Tenniel drew. So how is it supposed to protect itself in the dark forest of Wonderland? Honestly, I think it was ethically unsound of Alice to let the pig go off on its own, when it was really only slightly better prepared to deal with the dangers of the world than the baby was. As for the dog, I didn't necessarily think that Alice behaved unethically towards it, but she didn't make much of an effort to be civil to it, just throwing a stick at it and then scurrying away. This could be partially explained by her fear of the dog because it was much larger than her, but Alice felt a certain fear of the duchess as well and left her in a somewhat more civil manner, taking her “baby” to play “nurse” with it at the duchesses request. When Alice is confronted by the mutton at the feast, she “[takes] up the knife and fork” and makes an effort to cut it. Though the mutton is not a living animal, it represents an animal that was once living, and Alice has no knowledge as to whether it died a “painless death” (Carroll, 329) which makes her effort to eat it border on the unethical.

Pig? Or baby? Don't worry, Alice was confused too.

http://catalog.lambertvillelibrary.org/texts/English/carroll/tenniel/images/alice22a.gif

Alice's treatment of these animals can be contrasted to her treatment of the humanized animals in Carroll's classic tale. When the White Rabbit asks Alice to fetch his fan and white gloves, she immediately goes to do so. Though the Caterpillar is short with Alice, she stays and talks with him for quite awhile. This animals interaction in particular is important because Alice gains the ability to choose her own growth from it, showing that if we take the time to listen to and understand animals we can learn valuable lessons. In Looking Glass, Alice rows the queen-turned-sheep in the little boat, something she probably would not have been so ready to do had the sheep not been able to talk.

The caterpillar was kind of a jerk, but Alice still stayed and talked to him.

http://kennethtangnes.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/mts2_lethe_s_669091_caterpillar-2.jpg

It seems like Alice doesn't have the same respect for all animals that Jude, in the excerpt from Jude the Obscure, shows. Jude lets the birds eat from the farmers field he's supposed to be scaring them away from, telling them to “make a good meal” (Anthology, 320) even though he knows that he could be fired. I thought this was brave, but I also thought it was possibly an unnecessary sacrifice, because the birds could probably have gotten food elsewhere. I thought it was interesting how Jude was “struck with... [his] own rattle,” the very instrument he used to drive away the birds. I feel like Alice got a taste of her own medicine in Wonderland as well. When she is small, Alice is forced to see things from the perspective of smaller animals, like the mouse. The mouse expresses fear of dogs, something that Alice is unable to understand until she is confronted by a dog in her new mouse-ish size. Though Carroll never explicitly says so, I think this experience helped Alice better understand the mouses aversion to dogs. Once she was back in the real world, she probably never looked at dogs in the same way.

Alice is significantly smaller then the dog, which may have helped her understand the mouses fear of dogs better.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/lowres/csl2982l.jpg

So how does this all relate to me? I'm not sure, actually. I think, though, that what I most appreciated about the animals in Alice was that, though in some cases their human-qualities were exaggerated to the point where they no longer seemed like animals, there were times when I felt like they were simply animals with the ability to speak. I kind of felt like this brought to life the bond that humans share with animals. I'm always telling people that we're the same person whenever we have anything in common. We both like chocolate? SAME PERSON. Both have brown hair? SAME PERSON. If I apply this foolproof logic to humans and animals, I'd say they're the same as well.

Humans and animals both have deep emotions? SAME PERSON.