alicubi journal :: crank watch :: animal farm & speaking of pigs

From Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles, January 31, regarding a Washington Post article about "enrichment activities" for zoo creatures: "Workfare comes to the zoo: They're making the marmosets dig for their mealworms and the octopus twist off caps to get to the shrimp. And they're all happier! Even the dung beetles!...Orangutans have flash card quizzes. A keeper says: 'They are anxious to come to work every day, close to mealtime or not'...The next step in welfare reform?" Kaus has been going on about welfare reform. (So ennobling! So cost-effective!) for so long that it's hard to tell at first if he's joking. All doubt is removed when his editor (who he?) asks, "[Larger 'lesson' pls.--ed...]," Kaus replies, "[...Work really is a centering activity, just like Jason Turner says. It's how we're all built.]"

What an interesting picture this makes: beasts torn from Africa and Asia, caged, and given "centering activities" to pass the time, then held up as an object lesson for the urban poor--to be, in the immortal words of Radiohead, "fitter, healthier, and more productive, a pig in a cage on antibiotics."

Speaking of Pigs

Culture criticism is easy and fun, even (perhaps especially) if you have no idea what culture is.

At the LA Times, Norah Vincent (Red flag: Protege of Andrew Sullivan) beats up on TV torment fests The Chair, Kidnapped, and Fear Factor, with (did you anticipate this?) a War on Terror angle. For one thing, she says, it makes a bad impression on our Middle Eastern frenemies when we submit ourselves to phony tortures: "I want to shoot these people on sight"--by the way, isn't it strange that so frequently these war-watching journos express their own desire for physical violence?--"so it's not hard to imagine how your average struggling Punjabi, who would no doubt consider boredom itself a privilege, feels about our sanitized shenanigans." Next comes the mitigating sentence usually inserted when the pundit dimly realizes how daffy he or she is being: "He [the Punjabi] may not be watching NBC, but he's getting the gist of our pop culture from relatives who live here or through his local propagandists to make the point." Gee, couldn't the local propagandists use a cop show instead? At least they're fun to watch.

The perhaps-by-now-bloody shirt of terrorist hostage Daniel Pearl is also waved: "While Pearl's pregnant wife waits for news of her husband's fate, we who enjoy the luxury of freedom blithely change the channel, preferring to laugh, squeal and gawk at soulless frippery." 'Pon my word! Soulless frippery! 'Swounds, that'll teach the jades to engage in such vulgar frisks!

Even among the splattering classes, there will be debate. (Many screen inches to fill, you know.) Web jingo Glenn Reynolds takes exception to Vincent's screed at his Instapundit warblog, at least on behalf of The Chair: "This show is--in its own, unutterably stupid way--a tribute to changed values."

"Unutterably stupid" I can see, but what new values does this nonsense portend? "Instead of mastering trivia, or weeping, Oprah-like, about trivialities, the shows are about keeping your head while things go bad around you, about staying cool...Sympathizing with whiny wimps is out. We want people who can take it."

It is a venerable conservative schtick to pick through the effluvia of our Kultur for signs of moral improvement or debauch (an "enrichment activity" of sorts for people who produce no culture of their own). Some of the flags that of late festooned our public squares are slowing furling, as the War on Terror becomes a long-range proposition unsuitable for the all-day pep rallies that closely followed September 11. Even the star-spangled Ray Charles Winter Olympic ads are looking a little strained. But as long as some moron is getting lashed or eating worms on national television, bloggers can take heart, confident that America can "take it."