Grown-Ups, Farmers, and Monsters

A Meandering Journey of Something or Another

Pictured: Forbidden truths. Calvin and Hobbes is © Bill Watterson. Reproduced here with undying love and respect.

(EDIT 3/31/22: For some reason no one got this in their email when it dropped Monday. I’m looking into it. Thanks to TrackCat for the heads up.)

Part One: Dads, Vietnam, Davos

It took me like an hour to find a nice, readable copy of that Calvin and Hobbes comic, because it’s been sitting in the archives of my memory since I first read it in 1991 and then a handful of times later over the years. (It prompted Brothermouth and I to replace our long-lost copies of Calvin and Hobbes collections and go halvesies on a very nice complete collection box set thingie to show my kid someday when they inevitably disbelieve my assertion that humans were funny and nice once).

But I really wanted to open this article with it, because reading it as an early teen was surprisingly revelatory, and it stuck with me forever. Like a lot of good lessons you learn in unexpectedly-wrapped packages, I forget it and remember it, back and forth, over time.

Even after we become adults, we have an expectation- a myth- that one day a switch flips and we’re a grown-up that suddenly knows everything they need to know about filing income taxes and unclogging toilets and baking pies and folding fitted sheets. You get a starter pack in the mail, including a thick booklet about home ownership and another one about irritable bowel syndrome or something, and you’re good to go. When you meet other grown-ups on the street, you give each other a slow, knowing nod. You both understand what a catalytic converter is, now. You both know how to apply foundation without looking like a mime. You both understand the stock market and explain short-selling to children, to say nothing of human anatomy and lawn care.

Have you seen the movie Apocalypse Now?

The Vietnam War is something that has existed at the edges of my consciousness even though it predated me by a good few years. My dad’s best friend, the kind of family friend you call “uncle,” came back from Vietnam unhinged and grew steadily worse over the years. When Fathermouth and I visited him once while I was in college, he physically assaulted me because he became convinced I was carrying some kind of deadly infectious bacteria into his scary, hoarder house every time I walked through his glass door. Dad knocked him down and we left and started a long road trip that was punctuated by him being mowed down by a drunk driver and me covered head to toe in his blood. But that’s another story.

As faithful readers are aware, Fathermouth suffered a major cardiac event immediately after his COVID booster and has been staying with us on Mouth Farms while he undergoes reparative surgeries and rehab. You’ll also know there was a roughly two-month period where due to some sort of spectacular medical malpractice that I’ll likely never get all the way to the gritty, disgusting bottom of, he was completely mentally incapacitated, delusional, sometimes violent, and progressively decaying in physical and mental capacities. (He’s been doing fantastic, by the way, for those of you still wondering.)

While he was in this state, I was solemnly told a couple of times that Dad would eventually die as his mental capacities continued to decline and that I should start looking into some sort of long-term care as he would likely spend the last year or so of his life fully incapacitated, waiting for his decaying mind to lose control of vital functions and that this would progress in a slow, undignified manner until his soul finally put all the chairs up on the tables and turned the lights out.

I got pretty worried about where all the money for this would come from, and while I was making the preliminary plans for selling his house and vehicles (which I thankfully put off as long as possible as he is now very glad to still have them), I remembered that Dad was probably eligible for some kind of veterans’ benefits somewhere, somehow and I shouldn’t be too proud to look into them.

I started making some calls.

“Mom, do you have any of Dad’s old Army paperwork?”

“Your dad wasn’t in the Army.”

“Yes, he was. Remember his uniform in the camper, and the picture of him on the boat in his field jacket?”

“Oh, yeah. He was. I have no idea, I never saw that stuff. I guess I forgot about it completely.”

I logged onto the VA website to request his service record, and was informed by the website that Due To Covid, all information requests- unless relating to a veteran that just died, like, right now- were suspended INDEFINITELY. FOREVER. But I filed the application anyway and like 10 years from now the CCP Office Of The American Territories will probably send a battered envelope stamped all over with red Chinese characters that say “Undeliverable” and “Doodie Head” to my barrack in the death camps but I’ll have started feasting with the ancestors years prior.

As some of you recall, I took dad down to visit the house he thankfully didn’t lose and will eventually move back to in North Carolina about a month ago, and while we were on the road, I mentioned trying to get him vet’s benefits for when he was presumably going to slip into a coma and the great difficulty I had in finding it, and while we’re at his house, could we find his discharge papers or whatever in his filing cabinet so I have them handy in case something shitty happens again?

“I don’t have them. I dumped them years ago.”

“Um, why?”

“Because I didn’t give a shit.”

I tried to remember the very little Dad had said when I was a kid, and did some mental math. “You were in Korea, right? Doing logistics or something?”

“No. I was in Vietnam, and I was on my belly.”

“Um. That’s a pretty big difference. Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

“Because it’s none of your fucking business.”

“You almost died last month, and I never would have known that. I feel like I really should try to know as much about who you are before I lose the opportunity, because I care who my dad was. Can you tell me anything?”

“That chapter of my life was closed before I met your mom, and it’s staying closed.”

“Okay.”

“I really hoped you hadn’t inherited my appetite for violence and when you were a shy little kid I figured you’d just get married and have a kid eventually but then you grew up and got interested in guns and things despite mom and I trying to keep that stuff out of your environment.” I’m paraphrasing that statement; it was a long combination of random musings he blurted out while driving the truck during interminable lengths of silence wherein I did not ask my dad about something I had just been VERY firmly forbidden to ask about but kept thinking about.

It put things into context when I ran home in my senior year of high school getting it in my head that I would be the first female in my family to join the Army and Mom was excited and Dad threw the biggest meltdown I had ever seen up to that point without being falling-down drunk. (I did not join the Army, and when I tried again later in life, it was too late. 98th percentile on my ASVAB, though, so it was their loss.)

Anyway. I went on this giant tangent about Vietnam and not knowing a gigantic thing about my father because both he and my “uncle” made me watch Apocalypse Now as a teen, and there’s a scene where Charlie Sheen’s character and his small entourage stumble onto a forward operating base under basically continuous fire, day and night, lit up with Christmas lights, and asking every panicked grunt running to and fro where their commanding officer is so they can get the support they were promised for their covert op that’s the plot of the movie.

After being sent in circles, Sheen’s character tells his group they’re leaving. “But where’s the CO?” one asks.

“There is no fucking CO,” he says, and they leave. At some point enough leadership was killed or disappeared or cracked up that there was no clear chain of command, and despite there being about a few hundred guys in a group, they were all just a bunch of worker ants running around in pheromonic confusion, going around in circles occasionally getting shot, with absolutely no overarching framework governing anyone’s actions. Anarchy, in the most literal sense of the word.

What do Calvin’s dad and Apocalypse Now have in common? There were little moments of revelation where we’re made to understand that there is no ordained “grown up” who Knows What’s Going On. Literally everyone is winging it with the resources they have available; no one exists at a higher state of consciousness than you or some transcendant state of matter than you where they are imbued with some natural, perfect competence where they are indisputably a higher being than you.

There are manifold individual variations on things like intellect, physical prowess, health, looks, and so on. But no one is more fundamentally With It than you, whether their title is Sandwich Artist or Queen of England. Everyone is ad libbing it and thankfully most of them fuck up less than they don’t fuck up.

They occupy the roles they do because circumstance, luck, and sometimes competitive ability got them selected to. Not because they are automatically good at their jobs or the best at those jobs among all humans that could possibly occupy them.

They are not gods. They are not demigods. They are not supermen, and they are not superior beings.

This is important to remember as we segue into the hopefully less rambling part of this story.

Probably a lot of you have seen this video by now (links to a Twitter post among many hundreds sharing it, this was the first one I found) in which the speaker says the following:

"At Davos a few years ago the Edleman survey showed us that the good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more so we can come together and design and do beautiful things together. The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted their elite less. So... we can lead but [cut off]."

Everyone who has watched and reacted to this video has latched onto the important part of this (thankfully), which is the use of the phrase “the elite” and “we” in the same breath. As in, ‘the elite’ are ‘us,’ and ‘the majority of people’ are… something else. Something distinct.

But “elite” is just a title, like “Calvin’s Dad” or “Head of NIAID.” It isn’t a different species, and they aren’t running different software from us (though many of them may be running that software through damaged brains).

They’re just other humans who through luck, birth, circumstance, and sometimes competitive ability ended up as members of a self-selecting set that are called “the elite” and have amassed power to control the lives of “not the elite.”

These two points are important going into Part Two: that a) there is a group that collectively self-identifies as ‘the elite’ and distinct from all other members of humanity and b) they are not gods or supermen or fundamentally different from any of us beyond their life circumstances.

Intermission

Pictured: Let’s enjoy a short break.

Fun Facts About Elephant Poop:

An adult elephant poops an average of over 150 lbs. a day.

Elephant poop can be used to make paper, worthless traditional Chinese medicine (which tells you how much China loves elephant ivory, because you’d think they wouldn’t want to cut off their supply of Immortality Dung), and hilariously expensive coffee that dumb ‘elites’ buy for over $50 a cup.

Part 2: The Domestication of Humans

I’m relatively new to the farming game but have long admired it from afar, and it was natural that when I did get into farming, much of it would involve animal husbandry because I’ve been fascinated by every aspect of that practically since I was born. I was the kid that fostered every single kind of injured or abandoned animal you could find, played with dangerous wildlife, and talked to lots of things that didn’t talk back.

When many people get a good look at what animal husbandry in agriculture is like, many- especially if you’re vegetarian or vegan- find it upsetting. I’m not even talking about the practices that are indisputably cruel in the context of so-called ‘factory farming’ where livestock are kept in the allegedly most efficient conditions as possible for the length of time needed to get their meat, milk, or eggs, and die a traumatic death after a brief life that was probably filthy, dark, continuously stressful, isolating, and what humans would probably imagine Hell would be like.

I have cows, chickens, and hogs. I probably socialize the most with the cows, followed shortly by the pigs, because the cows are the most outgoing and have a herd-based social structure that makes them interested in engaging other animals in their space. I like all my animals, and all the mammals have names. They all have distinct personalities, quirks, preferences, and unique charm, even the chickens. I pet them, scritch their ears, talk to them, and am very concerned about their comfort, their health, and their emotional well-being. Some of them even kiss me from time to time. On a certain level, I love all my livestock; I can at least confidently say that I care about them and consider their lives my responsibility.

At some point, I will end up murdering every single one of them and extracting as much useful material from their bodies as I can and replacing them with another, similar animal to repeat the process.

I’m okay with this, and I’m not a sociopath. If I’m a sociopath, every single rancher is, because every farmer I’ve met, which around here are decidedly non-factory, family farmers for whom every point of the previous two paragraphs is true, is exactly the same in this respect.

The domestication of animals is a millennia-old contract between species: we will take you out of your competitive natural environment, see to your every need, and breed you to have the most desirable versions of your heritable qualities. You will live longer, safer lives than your wild cousins or ancestors, you will be valued assets for your entire life, and you will not die of starvation or from being eaten alive.

In exchange for this, we will decide the length of your lives and the day of its end, and we will deliver this death, and you do not get a vote about this, nor where you will live, what you will eat, or who, if any, your mate will be.

There are many aspects of this contract that are similarly not hearts-and-flowers, that make farmers look like hard-hearted killers to the uninitiated. Your animals get sick with a contagious disease that’s expensive or difficult to cure, and likely to infect others? Slaughter all involved.

The market tanks or food supplies dry up due to unforeseen disaster and you can’t feed your entire herd what they need to grow up? Slaughter the excess.

Individual members of your herd exhibit intractable behavior problems like being destructive or violent? Not breeding with the right partners or insistently breeding with the wrong ones? Cull them.

Populations of your herd have physical or mental traits that are counterproductive to your purpose, whatever those purposes are? Breed those traits out and cull the living representatives of those traits.

Now replace farmer with elite and herd with people. I apologize to everyone who immediately understood the analogy and found this all a very labored point, but also, ha-ha, you wasted like a half hour because it’s the entire point of this essay and it’s a major one.

Understanding what has happened with COVID, what has happened with the governments of liberal democracies, what has happened with globalization, the WEF, Big Tech, all of the above, relies on understanding this idea vis-a-vis “the elite.”

Farmers don’t consider their actions immoral because they see themselves as a higher organism engaging in the practical exploitation of other lifeforms- whether those lifeforms are animals or vegetables- hopefully with some kind of moral framework in place, not out of cruelty, sadism, or evil but simply out of the process of converting other life into food as every single living thing does.

Simultaneously, we don’t explicitly do this to other humans: nearly every modern society has taboos about slavery and nearly every society has always had taboos about cannibalism.

People who self-identify as “the elite” believe they are simply operating under the same contract that humans made with every lifeform we’ve domesticated. Here it is again:

we will take you out of your competitive natural environment, see to your every need, and breed you to have the most desirable versions of your heritable qualities. You will live longer, safer lives than your wild cousins or ancestors, you will be valued assets for your entire life, and you will not die of starvation or from being eaten alive.

In exchange for this, we will decide the length of your lives and the day of its end, and we will deliver this death, and you do not get a vote about this, nor where you will live, what you will eat, or who, if any, your mate will be.

Much has been made of the link between “the conspiracy of the elites,” whether implicit or explicit, and transhumanism, and I think this is a little bit of a red herring. Transhumanism implies an evolution in the physical life of humans, and this is completely irrelevant to a society of human livestock being governed in a totalitarian manner by a permanent elite. Why would we be given the opportunity to live to 1000, or forever, or migrate to fantasy digital landscapes? Why would we be made any stronger or faster or healthier than we needed to be to produce value for our keepers?

If you call implanting us all with RFIDs to track and control us “transhumanism,” then sure, the globalist elites have a transhumanist agenda, but so do farmers that tag their cows and put legbands on their chickens. My chickens are cyborgs, you guys! So cool.

The cool “transhumanist” stuff that people like Kurzweil (who I admire as a technologist but is wildly overcited) talk about when they talk about “z0mg Teh Singularity” is stuff that “the elites” will have for themselves because why the fuck would you need a chicken to live to 1000 or spend eternity playing video games?

Similarly, once you’re a digital being or an immortal cyborg that doesn’t need food or cash, what the hell do you need to ranch livestock for at all?

This stuff is a distraction. If “the elites” plausibly saw a transhumanist future for themselves in the near term, we’d already be dead and dying by the billions and it would not take long at all to do. We’d just be in the way.

The behavior of the global elites- to the extent that they can be lumped together and said to have common goals- is less fantastical. They have been brought to the belief that they are a higher lifeform with the responsibility of prudently managing a herd of lower lifeforms, except that compared to my relationship with a sheaf of wheat or a tomato plant or a pig, rancher and livestock are able to communicate intelligibly with one another and share similar behavioral and biological drives.

And like farmers, the notion that this makes them psychopaths is ridiculous to them. And really, you don’t have to be a psychopath to think or act this way: you just need to be sufficiently narcissistic- maybe not even on the level of a full-blown personality disorder- to believe that you are something different than everyone else.

It remains an open question what “meat, milk, and eggs” they believe they are extracting from the herd, because economic value would become meaningless the moment they actually achieved their fantasy agenda. I don’t know that they have actually worked this part out yet beyond “power begets power” because even if they were doing better than they are their tech-enabled totalitarian utopia would still take a long time to actually pull off.

Wherein I Get to the Fucking Point

All this is to say that there’s no reason to be atavistically scared of “the elites” or what they could do. Be scared of the outcomes, sure. Hate those responsible, wish to see them stripped of their power and/or destroyed, sure.

Understand them for what they are: out of touch humans with an excess of wealth and temporal power that have allowed themselves to be convinced that they are something other than other humans in a fundamental way. But they’re not, no matter how much they or we believe it to be so. They’re not lizard people or incarnations of Moloch even when they wear silly robes or sexually assault children.

This means that they have weaknesses and make mistakes (and holy shit have they made plenty lately) and have fears and blind spots that make them as possible to defeat as any other human foe.

They’re as qualified to be God-Emperor of Earth as Calvin’s dad is to be Calvin’s dad. And there’s no fucking CO.

More soon.