A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Of Palin and poultry

I’m with Jim Henley – there’s nothing particularly disturbing about this Sarah Palin interview at a turkey farm (well, except insofar as Sarah Palin is inherently disturbing). Where exactly do people think Thanksgiving turkeys come from?

Jim’s also right that the farm where the interview takes place is, by all appearances, far more humane than, say, this.

I did find it grimly amusing how the MSNBC anchor introduced the clip by saying that the video had been “sanitized” as much as possible, but that parents might want to have kids leave the room, etc. If animal slaughter is so unspeakably horrible, maybe there’s something, y’know, wrong with it? At the very least, isn’t there a problem if you think that our food production process is so awful that it needs to be shielded from public view?

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5 responses to “Of Palin and poultry”

  1. lutherpunk

    You are right on here, Lee. If people can’t stand to see meat in its “original” packaging, maybe they shouldn’t eat it.

    I wrote something back in seminary about how our culture has been alienated from death by the factory farming system, and that if people were going to expect an animal to be food, maybe it is high time they start killing it themselves from their own stock.

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  2. Chris

    I think the same way about the death penalty . . . (A Painless Death Penalty?.

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  3. Christopher

    I chalked this one up to (sub)urban silliness. I note that it was a real farm and folks were killing the turkeys the old-fashioned way–with an axe.

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  4. johnrj08

    I don’t think this is a fair assessment of how people feel about slaughtering animals. Eating meat does require a bit of selective cognizance. Things have changed since human beings lived in tribal villages and had to hunt down and kill their food. I would guess that a lot of people would give up steak if they ever visited a slaughterhouse and actually saw hundreds of steers being killed as if they were nothing more than inanimate objects. It is disturbing. I used to work summers on my grandparents ranch in Nevada and saw everything there. We had cattle, pigs, horses, chickens, sheep and anything else a ranch could possibly have. I saw pigs, chickens, steers and sheep slaughtered every summer and always found it to be upsetting. And I don’t think my sensibilities are all that different from the majority of people who eat meat in this country. If you’re a politician who has aspirations for national office, the very last thing you would want to do is appear callous or indifferent toward this sensibility. That’s part of being an intelligent, thoughtful politician. Palin wasn’t smart enough to understand that trying to “add a little levity” to a scene of turkeys being bled out right behind her was an idiotic thing to do. That interview typified her total lack of self-awareness and common sense judgment. People know where Thanksgiving turkeys come from, but very few want to be reminded as they sit down to dinner that their meal was alive and breathing just a few days earlier. To top things off, Palin said at the end of this remarkable interview that the turkey she had just “pardoned” was going to be her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. This is a person who is not up to holding high office, and it just proves that a high school cheerleader has all the brains that are necessary to be governor of Alaska.

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  5. Lee

    Well, you’ll get no argument from me that Sarah Palin should be kept as far from national political office as possible.

    Still, I don’t think there’s much virtue in denying what happens when animals are killed for food. We ought to be aware of what it is we support. Chris’s analogy to the death penalty is instructive here, I think.

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