A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I don't think there's an option in Facebook to "Become a Fan" of B. R. Myers, apparently one of The Atlantic's paid curmudgeons in non-residence, and if there were Mr. Myers would promptly wish each of his Facebook Fans a slow and painful death.  But I admire his work more with each sampling of it.

I tend to bestow excessive amounts of personal praise on public figures who surprise me: one of the reasons for my ongoing fondess for Daniel Cohn-Bendit is that I wouldn't have expected a Green MEP to sit down with Richard Perle and say, "I owe my life to the American invasion of France in 1944." And Myers, who started out as just a guy who could snark on Paul Auster and Annie Proulx, turns out to be, at least judging from his Atlantic writings, a conservative, at least in his assessment of many aspects of modern popular culture; a cranky defender of the English language; straight; not Christian; and not only a vegetarian but a passionate attacker of the meat-and-milk industry in the United States.  Which results in:

Like the Europeans, we have to understand that when our fellow citizens are given absolute power, the worst types will assert themselves, and terrible things will happen. (Usually we won't hear about those things; it is no coincidence that thug is Sanskrit for "to conceal.") Our reluctance to grasp this banal fact has in the past made us slower than this or that part of Europe to step between the bully and the bullied: slower to abolish slavery, slower to reform mental institutions and prisons, slower to bring about female suffrage and civil rights. So it is that we now lag behind even the Spanish in animal welfare; and when the Turks get into the EU, we will lag behind a Muslim nation as well... Do we again try to be a model for others to follow? Or do we go on contenting ourselves, like the "patriots" who shrugged off Abu Ghraib by invoking 9/11, with not being the most barbaric people on earth? At the very least we must acknowledge that America is no place to be born an animal. And these things do matter.

Dalrymple would argue with him about the wisdom of the Europeans; one can acknowledge that and still appreciate the marriage of Hamiltonian logic and pure anger at the way millions of American meat-eaters sleep soundly at night.  (Myers is not willing to give much credit to those of us currently boosting the profits of Springer Mountain Farms and Horizon in our attempts to consume meat, milk, and eggs with a clear conscience.) I was going to call that my favorite Myers animal-rights passage,  but then I found this:

But these farm workers kill animals because they can support their families by doing so, whereas we order the killing for reasons that have never been more frivolous, now that meat is no longer considered necessary for one's health, and soy products can replicate to an uncanny degree the experience of eating it. I know, "It's just not the same"—but as with the child molester, who probably thinks those very words when he rolls off his wife, the nonviolent pleasure is surely close enough to the violent one to make an insistence on the latter even more monstrous. Has any generation in history ever been so ready to cause so much suffering for such a trivial advantage? We deaden our consciences to enjoy—for a few minutes a day—the taste of blood, the feel of our teeth meeting through muscle. It's enough, as Balzac would say, to disgust a sow.

It probably says something not very flattering about me that instead of getting upset or defensive at the child-molester comparison--or at least reminding myself that I live two minutes from a "farmer's market" with a very large tofu selection--I say damn, that's good writing.

Of course, it does an angry author no good if his fans squeal, "That's so profound!" before going back to stuffing themselves full of barbecue and ham-and-cheese quiches.  I think Out is an excellent book and I do not own copies of either Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or Tree of Smoke. All the same, I would tell you to go read Myers for yourself, as his fans do not necessarily do him proper credit.