Tangled Dark Web of Local Politics

So I'm fooling around with local politics, which could not be crazier. Everyone has an uncle, a cousin, an ex-wife, or a friend from kindergarten in the other party. In fact, people around here – including the politicians themselves – casually change parties as if they were square dance partners. So even when a politician gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar, not only does nothing get done about it, but no one really wants to do anything. "I couldn't turn him/her in. That's my uncle/third-grade teacher/wife." 

For instance, there's a guy running for Greenport Highway Superintendent on the Republican line, John Onufrychuk. He's up against Mark Gaylord, our man, who is the incumbent and has been managing the roads around here for 10 years. (I will throw myself in front of a snowplow if Mark loses. His workers were amazing last winter. I don't think a couple hours went by during storms, even during the worst blizzards, when we couldn't drive easily the four miles into town, starting down the back road where we live.) 

Anyway, back to Onufrychuk, who seems to be a very likeable guy. Plus he's a fireman! (Everyone loves firemen, but up here most are volunteers and approach sainthood.) Two years ago, Onufrychuk retired from his full-time job as a maintenance supervisor for a local prison. (Upstate, by the way, is riddled with correctional institutes. We have three of these major job producers in the neighborhood.)

According to a 2014 Inspector General report that I found on the web, during Onufrychuk's tenure at his particular institute, he periodically loaded up scrap metal from the prison and sold it to a local salvage company across the river, plopping the proceeds into his or his wife's bank account. The report does a good job of detailing the investigation and these transactions.  It read, "The Inspector General determined that Onufrychuk sold or directed subordinate employees to sell scrap metal belonging to Brookwood to a private company on 36 occasions from 2009 to 2011." Check the whole thing here. It makes for lively reading.

The Inspector General report was then handed over to the Republican district attorney Paul Czajka for his attention and, one would hope, action, but the DA just, oh, I don't know, scrapped it.  Turns out these gentlemen were fellow Republicans and have a number of friends in common.  In fact,  Czajka is running for DA again this year – against the Democrat Ken Golden, an entirely decent good guy. Turns out Czajka’s campaign filings reveal that he accepted a campaign contribution on June 2, 2015 from Catherine Onufrychuk, the scrap merchant's wife. 

I went to a debate between the two DA candidates last week, where Czajka stormed against domestic abusers, calling them "evil". A worthy stand, I guess, if you don't believe in rehabilitation. However, his record on these evildoers may not be all that consistent. I found an old New York Post article with the headline "Judge Dread" written at the time Czajka was a judge around here. The story covered a number of cases of abuse in which Czajka, according to the reporter, "sided with bad parents to favor lawyers he once worked with…" Also worth reading. 

And, to make local politics even more interesting,  Czajka has a new enemy – Serpico, the former New York cop and whistleblower (played by Al Pacino in the eponymous movie).  He moved upstate years ago and has now emerged from a secluded cabin to go after Czajka, because the DA failed to aggressively pursue Serpico's case against a neighbor who bulldozed part of his property and destroyed a bunch of his trees. The neighbor was fined only $350. Serpico was quoted the other day in our local newspaper that he "found an old boy's network" that blocked him from getting the correct compensation.  "I find I’m back 50 years, fighting ingrained corruption, pettiness and nepotism.”  

The other day we went to a local fundraiser to watch the movie and hear Serpico speak. The movie holds up after all these years.  So does Serpico.  (We were there for three and a half hours -- two for the movie, the rest listening to the old cop.)  The lesson, as always, bad stuff is always there and things do not always go well for the brave, good people who fight them. Otherwise, we'd all be brave and good. 

By the way, my husband Michael and I met Serpico a few months ago in town. Two old guys (our age) were hanging around one of the local restaurants when we were just getting out of our car.  Michael has long white hair and a beard and is often mistaken as either an aging rock star or Gandalf.  One of the guys came over and asked if Michael was Willie Nelson.  After we assured him that he wasn't, the man introduced himself as Frank Serpico. 

It just keeps getting better up here. 

My Criminal the Car

Before we moved upstate, I hadn't owned a car since 1966 when my first husband and I purchased a Corvair, which, I still believe, is one of the Great Automobiles of All Time. (I will never forgive Ralph Nader for a. running for President in 2000 and b. downing the Corvair because its 1965 version bounced off bridges.)  I lost the Corvair in my divorce and moved to Manhattan, where – not through any sacrifice on my part – I had no car and spent over 40 years not contributing much to the nation's automobile pollution. 

So, when Michael and I started looking for cars, we wanted something green. I argued for a Prius, but after heavy-duty research Michael discovered that Volkwagen had come up with diesel technology that not only solved the emissions problem but bestowed on these lucky cars great mileage and a fast-action engine.  So in 2013 shortly before we moved full time to Hudson we bought a white Jetta TDI, which in 2009 had been awarded Green Car of the Year.

 

I really like driving it.  It gets 50 miles to the gallon on the highway and it's zippy.  No Corvair, but very nice.   Then a week or so ago the scheisse hit the fan. We discovered that our adorable fun-loving non-polluting Jetta was actually Rosemary's NOxious Baby.  

Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are on the menu of diesel emissions and include two gases, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, which are particularly nasty environmental bullies.  When released into the air, they produce smog on hot days, exacerbate breathing difficulties in people who already have them, and, over a 100-year period, have 265 to 310 times the global-warming potential as carbon dioxide.  Besides diesel particulates, NOx is considered one of the most critical pollutants found in the exhaust.

When developing their "green" turbocharged diesel engines, German engineers were able to filter out the particulates but were stumped by the tricky NOx. So effective in producing rockets in the distant past, they were unable to keep it from escaping without reducing gas mileage and performance.  So they just decided to lie.  ("We will not invade Poland.")  They simply built software that switches on to produce splendidly low NOx levels during testing, but once the car hits the actual road the software switches off, and as our Jetta revs up to its lively speed with its terrific gas mileage the NOx-ious particles also rev up -- to 10 to 40 times the EPA allowance.

A digression: In the late seventies I regularly passed this scruffy guy on a street corner near my office in Midtown standing in front of a lopsided cardboard box pasted with wrinkled black and white Xeroxes of happy dolphins. A scummy glass jar sat on top of the box with "Save the porpoises!" taped across it and a lid gauged with a hopeful slot.   He would yell and scream at passersby, and if you were moronic enough to stop (I was), he would shift the attention of his tiny fierce eyes to you (me) and continue his harangue directly, "They ain't fish.  Did you know that?  They're mammals.  And they're smart.  They can talk.  Like you and me.  And the government is torturing them.  Torturing them.  Shooting them.  Killing them.  Stop the killing." He shoved a clipboard in front of me with a ratty petition clamped onto it.  A few other hapless suckers had signed it.  I reluctantly added my name, included a false address, and pushed a dollar into the slot. I knew he was conning me but what if he wasn’t?  A couple years later I saw him downtown, with the same cardboard box, but this time sporting grainy photos of kittens, whom he was urging passers-by to save by signing his still-grubby petition and putting money into the same paw-streaked glass jar.  I sneaked by.

This story is simply intended as an example of my inability to say no to people even when I know they're hustling me.  I'm so bad at it, in fact, that I made a decision many years ago – about the same time I was saving sea mammals -- to give to anyone on the street who asked.  It's easier than pausing to puzzle over a badly written sign pleading for train money, propped up in the lap of a dirty young woman who looks like she just graduated from Yale. I carry around dollar bills and loose change in my pockets so I can just hand cash over to any random asker without fumbling through my purse and making myself a mugger target.  I'm a little embarrassed but it saves on guilt-time.

So, until this week, I have been resigned to being a sucker.  I'm ok being a chump for gray schlumpy people poking at my liberal bias in return for quarters so they can live a minimal life.  The porpoises may not be benefiting but their lives have not changed.  But now I'm pissed. I'm pissed at playing the fool for Germans, which feels old fashioned and somehow satisfying. To be fair, they aren't the only automakers who have scammed the public. Ford and Chrysler were caught cheatingon emissions in the 1970s, and Volkswagen's current crime isn't directly deadly. 

It doesn't result in engines catching fire or ruptured airbags, but it does hurt kids with asthma, and if they hurl enough of this stuff into the atmosphere, it could kill dolphins.  

So I'm ashamed for being a patsy this time. It has consequences.  Volkswagen played heavily on the liberal hope -- a bit shabby but a well-intentioned hope -- that we can drive a speedy car without imposing extreme environmental harm.  And, after lifting thousands of dollars from us, they happily wave us off as we drive our perky diesels into the sunset, smugly tracking our savings on fuel while we spew poisons into the air.  Nitrogen oxide uber alles.

The Green Machine Enters a Black Hole

A great silence has fallen across the country, from our architectural firm in Minnesota to the sullen modular factory in Indiana to the East, where fall is closing in and winter is not far behind, and our contractor Pete is tap, tapping the earth listening to it freeze in the not-too-distant future. It is as if our house is being constructed in the wind. Every once in awhile some breeze of information puffs in on an email, information that appears to be moving things along, but is, in reality, only a letter written in light.  

Two things have been accomplished to date: the rudiments of a driveway that comes to a confused end in the middle of the field and the purchase of our tractor, which in a creepy moment I gave the cute name: "The Hamster", because "ham" is the last syllable of both Michael's and my name (Grisham and Peckham).  On its second run, its brush hog attachment trembled like a baby and went to the tractor hospital, where the doctors found nothing wrong with it. I believe it longs, as we do, for the big bulldozers, the excavators, the well and trench diggers, all the ruinous engines of destruction required to carve out the surfaces for our ever-elusive house.

Throughout the first quarter of the year, we had jolly conversations back and forth with our architects, identifying the appliances in our fantasy kitchen, placing the lively wood stoves, thoughtfully choosing the sustainable flooring. One grim February day we drove an hour and a half to Paramus and wandered through Ikea's labyrinth looking at three million kitchen cabinets until we were stunned into indecision by its spectacular awe fullness.  We went home, opened up the wine in the beautiful silence of our living room, picked out our cabinets, worked out the kitchen layout on Ikea's clever website, and sent the plans to our architects.  Everyone was happy, everyone in cahoots.

In March we calculated the amount of kilowatts we'd need to make our house come alive, and, in April, Michael and our architects burrowed into the maze of insulation options. We hired Dave, a deeply cynical HVAC consultant, with misleadingly sad eyes and the jowls of a basset hound, to worry out where cold would leak into the house and how it could be counteracted by the heat-radiating PEX snaking under our floor and the heat pumps moving warmth from the earth via the geothermal wells.   

By May we wrestled our window decisions into place, choosing a Canadian company, which has a clever tilting apparatus that will let us clean the panes on the second floor without a ladder. At the end of that month, the factory also sent a letter of agreement with a series of milestones, including dates for sending them a lot of money for a bunch of materials, culminating in the big check for executing the final contract by June 30^th.  Our architect estimated a delivery date of the modules in mid-September, assuming all the milestones were met.  Hurray! 

Then something odd occurred.  No one asked us for our money at the end of June.  The summer muddled along through July, with emails from the architect, irritating in their gnat-like importance (how about a small window on the second floor, would we like steel barn doors downstairs, what color do we want the priming paint and here's some pictures of paint cans). July ended with our money still in the bank (except for a fat payment to the window company) and no contract from the factory.  Pete was still waiting for final construction drawings so he could get a building permit from the town and start scheduling the foundation work. 

At the very end of July the architect promised a final budget and said he had been "plying the factory to keep to their expected schedule."  That month sped by, too, interrupted only by a lengthy discussion on garage trusses.  Michael remained Zen.  I alternated between trying to imitate him and screaming at random strangers and trees.

Then, at the beginning of August, the reason for the factory's limping behavior and sullen silence became clear. Its owner, a relatively small aw-shucks Midwestern company, had been acquired by a giant Florida-based real estate development corporation. Our architect had been blind-sided as well, and he apologized, passing on the inevitable shabby lie hissed by all company buyers, nation conquerors, and apple-offering snakes throughout time:  "Don't worry, they've promised that nothing will change."  

Of course, something had changed – the module delivery date and, a couple days after our architect talked to us, our basic agreement with the factory.  The acquiring monster corporation had no idea how to construct a deal with an actual human, so it wanted to do the contract with a business, which would be that of our contractor Pete. So, this meant that a bunch of lawyers would now latch on to our project like ticks, infecting it with more delays, and Pete would increase his fee – adding up to 15% to the cost of the modules -- since he was now managing the factory process for no reason at all and the fee for his liability insurance is based on his billing.  We were ready to walk away. Our barn apartment was looking pretty good.  So they caved. 

They'll do the agreement directly with us, they said, and get the agreement to us in a week.  But time had already passed.  On August 6^th, we received a contract, which we reviewed and pointed out a couple things missing from the original agreement – nothing big, some bathroom fixtures, little stuff, nothing that couldn’t be restored to the contract in a couple of minutes.  Back into the darkness it went.  After some nagging, we were guaranteed that we'd have the agreement back by the end of the month.

Today is August 31^st.  We talked to our architect about stair railings and a bathroom cabinet, with the contract still in the void or being ripped into strips by prairie dogs somewhere on the Great Plains to line their holes.  "What happened?" We asked.  "We were supposed to sign this in June?"

Our beleaguered architect stumbled through a number of awkward phrases that were not even pretend excuses. "Well, things have slipped… vacation…waiting for ducts…the acquisition."  He added, with some hope, that the head of the architectural firm is going to the factory tomorrow and would definitely exert pressure.

So, here's where it stands, or doesn't stand.  Once we finally sign the damn thing, the factory still won't schedule production of the modules for another five weeks.  And, we have to order the flooring, which takes six to eight weeks to be delivered to the factory for installation, which could bring us to mid October.  Apparently, the trolls now running the factory are very optimistic that they can put 2,500 square feet of housing together within two weeks, truck four modules across the country, and plop them on our site by November 1.  If they don't make that date or very near it, Pete warned, cold weather could prevent his crew from completing the last part of their button-up work until spring, and "you don't want to have to heat your foundation all winter long".

I am haunted by the memory of a meeting we had with Pete, Dave the HVAC guy, and our excavator Paul toward the end of June, soon after the factory ensured us that the final agreement was coming that month.  We wanted to schedule all the site work during that time.  "Everything should be done in time for the delivery of the modules, which the factory said will be here September 15^th," I announced exuberantly (for tone, think Shirley Temple tapping out the Good-Ship-Lollipop).  At that point, Dave, staring at me with those droopy, knowing, sad eyes began a dirge under his breath, "We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year." Haha, I laughed, enjoying the joke. "Haha."

Singing Into the Abyss

At seven o'clock sharp, Cameron Mitchell, the MC for Club Helsinki's open mic, introduced the first act, a fellow about my age, who clambered up the steps and rooted himself onto the stage, firmly clasping his battered guitar, beaming with amber light. After some string twiddling, he belted out Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, exultant in his past acid-laced youth, pretty much on key, ending the song ecstatically, if inaccurately, "Remember what the doorman said, feed your head, feed your head".  

My son Geoff leaned over and whispered to me, "I hope they're all like that." He, his wife Kim, two of their boys, and Michael and were seated around a table a level up from the stage. Michael, my grandsons and I were eating; my son and Kim were not: they were there to perform. 

Every Tuesday, anyone can sign up for open mic starting at six, but it's prudent to arrive by five or five-thirty, since the time slots generally fill up right away.  The music starts at seven and ends at eleven, with each performer playing two songs for a maximum of ten minutes.  Geoff and Kim had gotten there after the slots had been booked but were told they would probably be able to play, so they reserved a table and we showed up a little later with their boys to have dinner and watch their debut. 

My son and daughter-in-law met at Music and Art High School in Manhattan 30 years ago, Geoff accepted for painting and Kim for singing.  Except for the essential college break-up, they have been together ever since. Now that their three sons have reached ages of, if not reason, then a certain measure of self-sufficiency, they have decided to resurrect their youthful talents. After practicing for several months and accumulating a cache of about 100 songs, they were eager to perform publicly. This was their first gig. 

Hudson is not only a foodie, art, and antique town, it's also a place for good music.  Fine local musicians and singers show up regularly along Warren, Hudson's main street, to perform in restaurants, book stores, farmer's markets, and even street-facing apartments, where agreeable residents open up their place to the public so their friends can have an audience.

Club Helsinki, however, is the town's best-established venue for rock, blues, and alternative music.  A block over from Warren on Columbia Street, it serves good Southern comfort food and hosts important musicians, gifted professionals just starting out, and, once a week, the open mic hopefuls. The owners moved the club to Hudson a few years ago after entertaining people down the road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts for 15 years.  They bought one of Hudson's old gorgeous brick industrial buildings and carved out three beautiful rooms: an event space upstairs and on the first floor the restaurant and night club, which can be closed off from each other or opened up and connected by a graceful dark wood carousel of a bar riding between them.  The club itself has three levels of dining tables circling half the stage and a wholly professional sound and lighting system, which enhances all its musicians – from the famous to the anxious and the brave during open mic.

Cameron, who is not only the evening's MC but also a co-owner of Helsinki, is assisted each week by C. Ryder Cooley, who wanders the stage between acts, fixing wiring, adjusting mics, and making the newbie musicians more at ease. Strapped to her back is a stuffed bighorn sheep's head named Hazel, who stares bleak-eyed at the audience while Ryder does her various tasks. At first sight, I dismissed Cooley as deeply pretentious, ("Oh, god. A local girl being cute with a dead animal.") As the evening wore on, however, Hazel evolved into an eccentric but effective punctuation point for Ryder's own impressive musical gifts. Over the course of the evening she strolled in every once in a while to sing and produce strange and beautiful songs on the accordion, the ukulele, and the saw.  (I Googled her afterward and saw that when she's not helping nervous musical newbies on Tuesday night, Cooley is a performance artist as well as a song writer and talented player of weird instruments.)

And she wasn't the only good performer. Unfortunately, the acts following the White Rabbit singer were significantly more skillful and professional than his.   Geoff and Kim were told they would be playing around nine, and as the evening presented one good act after another, my son became increasingly anxious. Even though Geoff has played the guitar since he was seven he had never performed publicly, When he and Kim were finally called up to play, he later described his reaction to being on stage as holding a guitar for the first time. I thought they sounded fine, skillfully performing two covers from Wilco and the Grateful Dead.  I noticed Geoff screwing up his face a couple times at some tricky chords, but he made no major errors and Kim was relaxed and easy. She was having a good time.  When they got back to the table, Geoff was silent.  His stage fright had been unexpected and disturbing.  After they returned to their home in Queens, he wasn't able to look at this guitar for a few days.  Kim was undaunted, however, and Geoff realized he had to get back on the stage, so two weeks later they were back in Hudson for another attempt.

This time they arrived to sign up on time so that they were officially slotted in.  We reserved a table again for dinner.  That night after the opening act -- a bearded fellow playing David Bowie songs on a battered electric guitar -- Cameron read a text from Ryder, who was taking the week off in the North Woods, in which she complained that Hazel, lacking even a phantom tail, was unable to swish off the flies and there were no cats, but plenty of mice.

The musicians for the most part were not the same as those who performed two weeks before.  An exception was a young man from Brooklyn with a pleasing Eddie-Vetter-like voice who sang and played his own songs and was noticeably more relaxed this time, a good sign, I thought, for Geoff.  Again, as during the previous event, nearly all the performers were competent, skillful, and occasionally thrilling.

An appealing feature of open mic night is the on-and-off again appearance of local solid musicians (including Cameron on keyboard), who jump in to play throughout the night, collectively jamming as an improvised band or playing alone as soloists or as back ups to enrich the sound of other less experienced solitary musicians. 

Aaron, a young bass guitarist with excellent long hair, was particularly generous with his time and talent, deepening and strengthening the tunes for a number of homegrown guitarists, fiddlers, and singers.  One was Joan, who, with her r 

ound glasses, curly gray hair, and frumpy linen skirt, looked like everybody's third grade teacher. With Aaron unobtrusively backing her up in the shadows, she stood wide-footed behind her large acoustic guitar and forcefully strummed out and sang two original songs. I particularly liked the first, which involved trapping garden pests – mice, chipmunks, voles, moles, and woodchucks – taking them down the road and dumping them in the neighbor's yard.

Another excellent singer/musician regular, wrapped in dark clothes and so incredibly skinny that he looked like black lightning, introduced an original piece that he described as a love song.  Funny and haunting at the same time, it spoke for every love affair stuttering to its end with the refrain, "We're half way cross the river. Why shoot the horses now?"   

Our kids followed the lightning man. With the first few notes, I knew Geoff was relaxed and handling the guitar with his usual skill and competence.  He also has a genetic facility for picking out cord progressions and arrangements for even ordinary songs that resonate with the heart. That night Kim's sultry natural voice and physical ease played off against his focused attention, vibrantly revealing both the musical tension between them and the harmonious rhythm of their long affectionate marriage.  Another Wilco.  Another Grateful Dead. Applause.  One of the other musicians complimented them.  They were happy.  I was happy.

Certainly since the late fifties, American culture has danced, swayed, raved, and hopped on its music, and the musicians that come to open mic, performing spontaneously and unrewarded, exemplify the aching joy, anger, and grief in their home made songs that, for better or worse, underlie the currents of our nation's fantasies.

 "We wish we could play here every week," Kim said after we had gotten back to our barn. "We're going to work up some original songs," Geoff added, "for next time."  And when they're back, I'm bringing a crowd. 

Meating of My Minds

Dolores, another Salvation Army soup kitchen volunteer, who is even older than I am, hobbled in a couple of weeks ago and growled, "Who cooked last Thursday?"

"I did."  I confessed sheepishly.

"Well, two of my friends said it was awful.  They couldn't eat it."  Dolores' friends go to the local senior center, whose members we feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Dolores is, I guess, about eighty.  It's hard to tell because she tops her head with a bright yellow curly cap of hair, but she obviously lost the skill of walking fast and upright a long time ago. Nevertheless, she takes home all the aprons, washcloths, and towels every Tuesday and washes them.  She comes in the following week with the clean laundry and helps out, including washing big pots and pans.  Another SA hero.  I was justifiably rebuked. It was like losing a round of Chopped after being judged by an ancient glowering Anne Burrell with different but also odd hair.

Sometimes the meals for the seniors and our regular soup kitchen diners are different, but on that fateful day, both groups had gotten my horrible meatloaf.  The essence in these loaves comes from ground meat, donated by Walmart, that has been cast blushing-red by carbon monoxide, made E-coli-free by ammonia, and stuffed into five-pound tubes.   It doesn't cost the Army anything, and it's what we have.  That day I extracted the grim cow tissue from six tubes, mushed it together with two dozen eggs, four cups of bread crumbs, and handfuls of random seasonings found along the counter, squashed it into two long pans, which I shoved into our inadequate oven at 9:00 AM at 450 degrees. 

Unfortunately, our oven typically only manages to break the 400 degree barrier after a very, very long time, and, given that the 15 pounds of meat, bread, and eggs in each pain were compressed to the density of a dwarf star, even after two and half hours the meat was still raw. Ria, an awesome fellow volunteer, fired up two huge cauldrons and we threw the whole mess into them, frying it into a bacteria-free mush. We slapped half this beefy gruel into a serving tray for the duffers and the other half we used for our regular diners, piling blotchy gray slush onto humps of rice. It was not pretty.  It looked like the product of a chain saw massacre, a haunting reminder of the bad passage modern meat takes from life to death.  

I tried to be a vegetarian once.  It lasted three months; loneliness drove me back to meat.  While subsisting on nuts and berries, I realized that eating meat, and especially ungulates, is not only primal, it's celebratory – the hunters carrying the dead antelope dangling from a pole back to the tribe, which builds a huge fire and dances around the sizzling corpse.  The outliers, we vegetarians, are in the shadows gnawing on our roots alone. 

A recent example of this occurred over the weekend at my grandson's graduation party.  His uncle's wife, a wan and pretty woman, had been a vegetarian as long as I've know her, but until recently managed to eke out a meal at family events from any available carbs and dairy. This weekend I learned that she is now a gluten-sugar-free-vegan, so she brings her own food.  Late in the day I saw her in a dark corner, hunched over a plastic container balanced on her lap, scooping out tofu sausage and zucchini pasta, silently munching them down.  The rest of the tribe, including me, was cheerfully buzzing around the totem dining table, downing fried chicken nuggets, meatballs, and cheesy dips.  I felt sorry for her but also envious of her ability to sustain an eating system that was both healthy and humane.  

Nagged by this young woman's righteous example and by the memory of my meatloaf, when I got home I forced myself to watch slaughterhouse videos on YouTube.   In the first one, the initial few minutes were very tough; the cows were stunned, then finished off with some creepy device thrust through their heads, but the killing was quick.  The video is 30 minutes long, however, and after the initial shock of seeing a few cow murders and their subsequent terrible lurching along the gruesome assembly line, the ADD kicked in and I became distracted.  I focused on the workers, who were now gutting out the bellies, which, although gross, is a critical component of the process. Most were talking back and forth in Spanish and seemed to be cheerful, just like my imaginary hunters would be while cleaning out their antelope, dangling from its pole.

I decided to search on into YouTube's heart of darkness and found far worse examples of animal slaughter.  Most showed various creatures being brutalized in farm factories, but even organically raised animals were not spared, with one video showing several farm hands gutting a pig alive while it shrieked and screamed like a child and another a halal-slaughtered cow, still living while its throat was slit and its skull slowly crushed. Although most, if not all, of these videos were either a decade or more old or filmed in the rural backwater of some monochromatic foreign country, they were devastating. 

So to make myself feel better (because that's what certifiable liberals do), I watched and listened to Temple Grandin's soothing monotone while she gently directed cows and turkeys to their doom.   And I watched Larry Althier, a local butcher in Hartwick, NY killing with kindness.  I was comforted, perhaps hypocritically, by these videos and by a 2013 article in Modern Farmer quoting Grandin:  " non-humane handling’s no longer my biggest concern…[A] video of a farmer beating a pig with a gate rod isn’t any more representative of widespread practices than a fiery crash in one Mothers Against Drunk Driving video indicates that every driver on the road is hammered." 

Largely because of Grandin's influence and her changes in slaughter practice,  Burger King, Wendy's, and McDonalds have all claimed commitment to humane care of the animals they kill.  (Chipotle is top of the list of good guys.) 

Nevertheless, the unintended consequence of these reforms is that well-intentioned people who would ordinarily avoid fast-food might now feel it's ok to eat animals who have been kindly slaughtered but who still live out their short existences in penitentiaries, having done nothing to deserve this miserable life sentence.  Therefore, because I can, I spend lots of additional money on meat from the local farmer's market or in packages marked "grass fed" and "humanely raised".  So, of course, here's the next guilt-laden meat issue.  If you want to eat meat ethically, it costs big. Grazin, a diner here on Warren St, is owned by farmers whose menu lets you eat the remains only of grass-fed animals indulgently raised on their own or near by farms. A quarter pounder with nothing on it costs $8.50 and with cheese it's $10.50; a MacDonald quarter pounder with cheese is $3.70.  At Grazin a 10-oz burger will cost $19 with cheese; a Mickey D double quarter pounder with cheese is $6.79 (2 oz. less, but still…).

Now back to the Army kitchen.  We get a lot of really good food donations.  On a regular basis, local supermarkets and farms contribute fresh produce, baked goods, and diary products, often organic. And then there's the meat.  We can't expect the local farms where happy cows and pigs have only one bad day to donate an entire valuable dead animal, butchered and ready for our chest freezer.  Occasionally we get the odd package of meat from an entitled animal, but most of the time the meat donations are racks of ribs, big hams and turkeys, and, of course, the mysterious beef rolls – all presumably the remains of very, very miserable creatures, whose only happy day was their last one.

I checked out one of the beef rolls to see where the meat originally came from:  Tyson.   And if you want a major villain in this story, Tyson is Jaws. One of the world's largest processors and marketers of chicken, beef, and pork, as well as packaged snacks, it is not a good corporate person. It is not kind to its fellow creatures. Google Tyson and animal abuse.  You'll find links to both truly nasty stuff and corporate reassurances.  I suppose it's true that under significant pressure, Tyson is starting to reform their animal handling process, but they must be watched like a hawk.  

Death is not evil.  It just is.  The process on getting there is what counts. With the risk of stating the obvious, evil occurs when people take one aspect of a creature – flesh, boobs, skin color – and generalize it to suit their needs – eat, screw, hate.  We detach that one aspect from the whole individual and it allows us to inflict pain and even murder without feeling bad. And when this becomes institutionalized, the evil becomes more profound – penal executions, factory farmed meat, drones and air strike.  Couple this with corporate media that focuses and reports only on these flayed singularities in order to numb and distance the popular mind from any significant pain. and you have cooked up a very bad culture. To counter all this we have the distribution of unique experiences via social media -- YouTube, Twitter, FB --  that bear personal witness to such damaging effects on whole selves.  I'm counting on these Watchers and Recorders to impose grassroots pressure so that eventually what we kill and what we eat will occur in some natural harmonious balance. 

 

In the meantime, if we want to be perfect righteous Army volunteers, we should stop serving evil-empire meat to our indigent diners and start frying up tofu.  But that's not going to happen.  These are hungry people who like meat, and we have the privilege of serving it to them for free.  And when our ribs or ham or brisket are particularly good, the diners in our communal setting are lively and cheerful, almost celebratory.  And this makes those of us who have brought the dangled beasts to the table happy. 

Last Thursday, I cooked up a mean pulled pork for the seniors.  For the BBQ sauce I used canned chopped tomatoes and paste, phony maple syrup (but without corn fructose), red wine vinegar inexplicably imported from Italy, soy sauce, and a collection of random dried herbs.  I also added bacon. I considered that pig's fat and muscles and detached myself from her fate.  I'm looking forward to Dolores' review.  Anything's better than the meat loaf.