Psalm 73:6

If you´ve seen The Godfather, you no doubt remember very well the sequence in which Tom Hagen flies to Los Angeles to talk to Jack Woltz, a movie producer, about giving a role in his new picture to Don Corleone´s godson Johnny Fontaine.  Woltz refuses, however, so the Godfather makes him ìan offer he can´t refuse.”  We see the exterior of Woltz´s magnificent Hollywood mansion at dawn and we hear the peepers softly in the background.  As the Godfather theme quietly begins, the film cuts to inside the bedroom, where Woltz sleeps on golden sheets.  The music then takes a curious, swirling turn, building slightly but steadily, and as the camera continues to come closer, Woltz rolls over and we see red stains on the sheet near his shoulder.  It slowly dawns on him that something is wrong.    He pulls the sheet off himself a little bit and looks down to see his hands covered with blood.  Still not quite awake, he stares at them for a few seconds – and then he understands.  In a panic, he pulls more of the sheet off his bed.  There´s blood everywhere, and at the foot of the bed he finds the severed head of his prized stallion.  The camera then cuts away from him and returns to the peaceful exterior as Woltz´s horrified screams pierce the silent California dawn.

Over the past year, I´ve had much the same realization – not nearly as sudden and dramatic, perhaps, but just as horrifying: like Jack Woltz, I´ve been in bed with death and  am covered with blood – the blood that almost necessarily comes with living more than fifty years now as an American citizen.  And this blood, which is on the hands of almost every American, symbolizes not just death, not just murder – though certainly death and murder are evil enough – but also our acquiescence with, and our dependence upon, this murder, a dependence which we ignore and pretend doesn´t exist but which provides the bedrock of our culture and denies us the peace and freedom we say we want.

We´ve all heard of – and are horrified by – the Nazi Holocaust of the Thirties and Forties in which millions were murdered.  Yet every year, Americans murder more than 10 billion and then eat their butchered remains.  They purposefully execute a number greater than the entire human population just to slake their thirst for blood.  And if we bother to think about just what it is that we´re doing, we consider it good, moral, and even necessary.  The vast, overwhelming majority considers it the natural order of things, part of every day life.  It´s just ìthe way things are.”

We don´t consider it murder because, like the Nazis, we don´t consider the victims ìhuman.”  We think of them as ìanimals.”  Now no doubt most of you will question my use of those quotation marks and argue that the beings I refer to are indeed animals.  But that reaction, that very questioning, is part of my point.  We have no word in English that equates ìhumans” and ìanimals” and puts them on the same level.  Human beings use their capacity with language to define themselves as superior to all other beings, and that mental sleight-of-hand makes all the difference.

Billions of innocent, life-loving animals are slaughtered at the brutal, callused hands of man every year in the United States so that we can rip their lifeless bodies apart and use them for food, for clothing, or for whatever else we can rationalize to ourselves as ìuseful” or even ìnecessary.”  It´s a violence, a viciousness, toward life that´s only made all the more violent and vicious by our collective cultural refusal to see it as such.

Part of this refusal, of course, stems from our language, from the words we use to represent these things in our minds and from the thoughts and beliefs these words then engender.  Just by defining ourselves as ìpeople” and them as ìanimals,” we deny that their lives have as much importance to them as ours do to us.  To us, they´re ìjust” animals.  They´re ìonly” animals.  We diminish them further in our minds by calling their dead bodies ìmeat” and by calling their remains ìbeef” and ìham,” ìsteak” and ìbacon” and ìveal.”  They´re not living, feeling beings – they´re just one of the four food groups.  They´re groceries.  They´re what´s for dinner.

Another factor contributing to this holocaust´s invisibility is the fact that we very intentionally keep the helpless and innocent victims of our bloodlust hidden from our sight.  Many of us, when we can be bothered to think of them at all, imagine these animals grazing in the fields, tended by a kindly old farmer.  But think: when´s the last time you drove through the countryside and saw pigs in the barnyard or flocks of chickens in a pen?  In modern industrial America, almost all animals raised for food are kept on what are called ìfactory farms,” though ìdeath camp” is a much more accurate term.  We don´t see the horrific conditions in which we keep them: packed so close together they can´t even move in buildings where they never in their short pain- and terror-filled lives see the sun.  We don´t smell the stink.  We don´t hear the screams.  But they´re there nonetheless, and we certainly embrace the result – the bloody slices of a cow´s butchered body, or a pig´s, or some other being´s, wrapped in cellophane, for sale at the back of our supermarkets.

The third factor in this invisibility is the importance of murder to American society and our concomitant need to hide this truth from ourselves.

From the very beginning, our national culture has been built upon the domination of others for selfish ends.  America is built upon dead bodies – dead natives, dead British, dead buffalo, dead Southerners.  It thrived in the Twentieth Century by exporting death to the rest of the world, growing strong and rich by killing more of them than they killed of us.  The domination of others – this heartless viciousness towards, and callous disregard of, the lives of others – provides the foundation of the American way of life.  It runs through our past and our present.  It touches almost everything we do.  A good man´s suit, for example, is made of wool – an animal product.  Our hats are often made of wool or felt or fur.  Our shoes and belts, our wallets and handbags, are made of ìleather” – made from the skin of the dead.  And, of course, most Americans eat the dead at almost every meal, thus literally incorporating murder, cruelty, and viciousness into their very bodies with every bloody bite.

But we don´t think at it as death.  We don´t think at it as murder.  We don´t because we can´t.  What would happen to our commonly accepted reality, to our fundamental beliefs of ourselves, to our very way of life, if too many of us became conscious of just how integral murder is to that way of life?  What would happen if too many of us looked at a wool suit, a leather belt, a plate of scrambled eggs, a glass of milk, or – god forbid! – a McDonald´s and saw the murder, the violence, the death that brought them all into being?  What would happen if, like Jack Woltz, we woke up one quiet morning to the fact that the golden sheets of our beds are covered with blood?

n eating the remains of animals, in dominating their entire lives, terrorizing them, and finally killing them, we acquiesce to domination, to terror, and to death in all its forms, because if it´s all right for us to do it to them, then it´s all right for someone else to do it to us.  How can we decry injustice to humans when every single day we accept the injustice – the death, the slaughter, the holocaust –  meted out to living beings we deem beneath caring, beneath even noticing?  They´re just animals, you say?  Theodor Adorno wrote that ìAuschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they´re only animals.”

This isn´t a matter simply of opinion.  That our society is sustained by mass murder is simply a fact – one that our culture doesn´t us want to wake up to.  But if we´re serious about people, about justice, about peace and freedom, we have to open our eyes to what J. M. Coetzee called:

We can not have a good world when it´s founded on, and dependent upon, murder.  We cannot have a peaceful world when it´s awash in blood.  We cannot stop the killing overseas when we support the killing on our very shores – a daily, continuing holocaust upon which we feed like bloodthirsty savages – for as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, ìThere will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.”

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