Hamstock

Behold the death of Youth!

Witness the silencing of Rebellion!

Hearken to the imprisonment of Freedom!

Coherence itself is pulped and quietly disposed of. Wait, did we say quietly? No, no! This is Hamstock, and there is nothing quiet about it. This is triumphal! This is the glorification—reverberating from the hills—of senselessness!

Woodstock, with its tawdry legacy of stickittothemannity, has effectively been erased from the history books, for now we have the amplified justice of Hamstock! Unlike those unruly peaceniks—some of whom were no doubt vegetarians—the pig sings no hymn to individuality. He is no unique blossom in life's garden. He is a cog in a meat machine, remarkable only for his uniformity. Along with the millions of his identical brethren, he makes music to accompany the end of his days.

I'm a Hog for Que, Baby!

This ponytailed freak of nature represents the first sincere, full-blown hippie animal we've profiled! Bring on the marching bands, for we are making history!

(We've seen animal hippies before, sure, but none this genuine. This one, for instance, was the suicidefoodist equivalent of an undercover narc at a peace rally.)

This fellow is a (temporarily) living and breathing mass of discontinuities. Now, on top of the standard well-adjusted animals happy about the prospect of their imminent destruction, we can add the discrepancy of an ostensibly vegetarian creature (hippies are "all" vegetarians, right?) eagerly cooking—and hogging—meat. And just look at him! He's grinning and peace-signing like there's no tomorrow. (Which for him there might not be.)

It's true, though: The Grateful Dead's "Steal Your Face" symbol has never made more sense!

National Chicken Cooking Contest

So there's thing called the National Chicken Cooking Contest.*

From what we've been able to determine, the contest was inaugurated in 1949 by a businesslike chicken who wanted to drum up support for chicken slaughter.

The chicken, who had a penchant for garish neckties (he was almost as interesting as an actual human person!), was frustrated at the glacial pace of poultry killing then occurring on the Delmarva Peninsula.

This was a chicken with initiative.



Here he is in his "Average Joe" outfit, pinning the blue ribbon on a golden-brown (that is, dead) bird of his acquaintance.





In the 60s, he went undercover as a free-love hippie fowl.

You can see that the live-and-let-live philosophy of the counterculture didn't come naturally to him. ("Make chicken casserole, not war"? To chickens, chicken casserole is war!) But for the cause, the wanton destruction of innocent birds, he would go to any lengths. He would sacrifice his life to this cause, which was convenient.







Finally, we see him in CEO mode, rallying the troops, pumping them up with bromides. The unspoken vision statement of the whole operation: The only good chicken is a dead chicken.

By only the most depraved any measure, the chicken is a success. And at the end of the career, he can expect to be richly rewarded with a 375° oven, an artful recipe, and the satisfied belches of his consumers.








*Or, there was something called the National Chicken Cooking Contest. In September, 2009 it was announced that the contest had been canceled.

Suicidefood Book Report: Endgame

Suicidefoodism is not just for tobacco-stained hillbillies with paunchy overalls anymore. Now, even the most earnest earthies can claim the "food" animals are doing it all for us.

Take note:

[Smoked salmon] tastes so good. I return to the refrigerator, open it, pull out more salmon. It says… "Remember the bargain." I eat the food. Close the door. Try not to think about it.

I go back again. I remember the predator-prey bargain: If you consume the flesh of another, you take responsibility for the continuation of its community. I open the refrigerator. Eat more.

This time the salmon says something else to me: "I know you don’t like killing. If you help take out the dams that will help us survive. Then you can kill and eat all the salmon you'd like. We will even jump out of the water and right to where you are waiting. You won’t feel bad about killing us, because you have helped our community. We will gladly do this for you, if you will help us survive." (Emphasis added.)

This excerpt comes from Derrick Jensen's provocative Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization (Seven Stories Press, ISBN: 978-1583227305).

Of all the species of suicidefoodists, we find the pious, connected-to-Nature types the hardest to stomach. Their artisanal meats! Their eyewitness accounts of slaughter and butchery! The profound connections they imagine with the animals they carve up with reverent knives and forks! They have achieved a near-holy state that the mere vegan—with his perverse willingness to let the animals be—can never hope to understand. Once again enfolded within the embrace of life's fundamental forces, the "conscious eaters" are the true animal lovers.

For all of them, the message of the animals is never a straightforward, rational, commonsense one: "Don't kill me or my kind." No, it's always a message that allows the animal-carers-about to continue as before, making but a few concessions: buy your meat from this or that kind of supplier, support the removal of these or those dams, give thanks before you eat.

Why not tear down the dams, scrub the air clean, replant the forests and then—this gets tricky, so pay attention—not eat the fish, after all? To eat them on the grounds that you are only doing their bidding is pure solipsism. This "bargain" Jensen speaks of: who came up with that?

And this "community" the animals are said to hold in such regard? We say, how can there be a community with no individuals? "Kill me! Kill us all! Just spare our community!" In this conception, animals will sacrifice for a principle, thus showing themselves to be more sophisticated than most of us.

Regrettably, we possess the poisoned mind of the "civilized," but we can more easily imagine the gratitude of animals who have been spared our gory awe and left alone altogether. But for all of their honoring of animals, the neo-traditionals never seem to remember that animals have an interest in finding comfort and security. In using their healthy bodies. In being alive.








Addendum: Is anyone else reminded of those suicidal whales of yore?

Mae's Phinney Ridge Cafe

Mae's Phinney Ridge Café of Seattle should be proud to have such a devoted spokescow!

We know you don't require any pointers in the art of suicidefoodism analysis, but we thought this graphic might be too small. And so we took the liberty of highlighting all the menu items that might unsettle a normal (or simply less devoted) cow:

Hot Meat Loaf Sandwich, Chicken Fried Steak, Old-Fashioned Homemade Beef Stew, Cousin Ray's Chili Con Carne, and Mae's Famous Reuben (with corned beef).

And that's just lunch!

Reminiscent of the monstrous (and presumably all-powerful) pig of the Ye Olde Cherry Tree, Mae's cow has superpowers—see her flying to the rescue? And yet she does nothing to put an end to this madness! Instead, she stands four-square in defense of The System!

Can you read what the far-out cow is saying up there? It's precious in a suicidefoodistic way: "No Substitutions, Please." Could anything better encapsulate our message? Not only does the cow preside over the menu—overseeing the proceedings, as it were—but she will allow no deviation from the carefully planned carnage. The System will not be questioned!

We don't know whether this hippie cow is the same cow—and, truthfully, we don't care. Because whether Sunglasses, Superhero, and Cool-out are but manifestations of the One True Beef or three different characters in a cast of thousands, the fact remains that something wrong is going on. Then again, it's the same wrong something we've seen over and over again.

McDonaldland Hamburger Patch

Yes, this still is a dispatch from an Age of Hallucination: the Clown with Jodhpurs—we will not use his name here—and the headsmack of a world where every object is sentient. Add to that the hit of nostalgia you get (if you were born circa '66), and you might very well miss the big picture. The big picture is not red wigs, dancing "apple pie" trees, or milkshake volcanoes. (Good lord, but those were unsettling times!)

No, the big picture is the powerful statement this makes of the Doctrine of Inanimacy, one of suicidefoodism's lesser-known tenets. (The primary precept, of course, and the subject of most of our reports, is the Axiom of the Willing Victim. For examples of this, see just about any of our analyses.)

Simply put, the Doctrine holds that animals, being inert—mere blobs of matter—have no interests, and certainly no rights. (Rights? Ha!) Quailing at the thought of butchering a pig, say, is no more rational than second thoughts about scraping gum from the bottom of your shoe.

In McDonaldland, the Doctrine finds expression in hamburgers that grow like weeds. Literally. The twist here is that they are inanimate objects—plants—that can still want to be eaten. But that surreal point is just a pebble in the mountain of mindfuck that is this advertisement.

The way the Doctrine plays out in McDonaldland is not dissimilar to the "farm fresh" rhetoric so common in images of farm life. Rhetoric we have scarcely begun to document.

Spicy Dan's Premium Jerky

Dude.

Our Dan is groovy as well as spicy. He's got the patched bell-bottoms, the sandals, the vest. The granny glasses. The headband. The scraggly goatee. The peace sign around his neck. He's got the attitude: catch his groovin'-on-nature vibe, the way he gives the world the thumbs up. He's a hippie and he is at one.

The cow—let's call her, oh, Rainbow—is a beautiful spirit, too. She's got the hooves and the horns and the udder and everything? Life is fine. The pasture is, like, green. I mean it's green, you know? And right there, with her every step, there's Dan. These two, they are, like, together. Togetherness is a beautiful thing, man.

But something's not right. Something is wrong. Rainbow's got the pasture, right? The fields? The green? She's smiling, you know? But the smile, it's not on the inside. Her heart isn't smiling. She wants to check out. As in check out. The pasture's not enough for Rainbow. But while this is going on, like, where's Dan? He's there, but he's, like, not there. It's almost like he wants her to leave it all behind and join the Universe, you know?

A theory: Spicy Dan is The Man. Ask yourself: would a real hippie sell out his sister? No way. He would talk her down. Show her the sunrise after her dark—dark—night! Wouldn't he, like, get her through this shit? A real hippie would do that. But that's not, like, Dan's trip. He's just thinking about all the jerky he's about to score.

Like, total betrayal.

Heavy.