"Some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals..."

"... often by gassing or shooting them. It’s gotten bad enough that Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has asked the Trump administration to provide mental health resources to hog farmers. Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential? And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change....  One of the unexpected side effects of these months of sheltering in place is that it’s hard not to think about the things that are essential to who we are.... We cannot protect against pandemics while continuing to eat meat regularly. Much attention has been paid to wet markets, but factory farms, specifically poultry farms, are a more important breeding ground for pandemics. Further, the C.D.C. reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals.... As in a dream where our homes have rooms unknown to our waking selves, we can sense there is a better way of eating, a life closer to our values."

Writes the acclaimed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer in "The End of Meat Is Here/If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals" (NYT). He also does non-fiction with "Eating Animals" (2009) and "We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast" (2019). From his Wikipedia article:

Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."... He has been an occasional vegetarian since the age of 10... In his childhood, teen, and college years, he called himself vegetarian but still often ate meat....

I thought that meat-as-home image was interesting. Meat almost feels like home, but you know those dreams where you find other rooms in your house? In your home that smells of meat, there's another room, and it has no meat in it, you've seen it in your dreams, and you can find it in real life. Or something. It's a bit cornball, and the references to "home" are at the beginning and the end — much farther apart in the actual article that in my snippet above — so it would be easy to miss.

Something else that caught my eye: At one point, he says: "These are not my or anyone’s opinions, despite a tendency to publish this information in opinion sections. And the answers to the most common responses raised by any serious questioning of animal agriculture aren’t opinions." There's something dictatorial in that: This isn't opinion, this is truth. Ironically, that makes him sound more opinionated. It yells: I am a polemicist, an ideologue.

I can appreciate a good polemic, and Foer seems to be striving to be a first-rate polemicist. I suspect that his great success as a novelist makes him think that if he does polemics he'll trounce the other writers. This didn't work on me, though. Who exactly is supposed to be horrified by pigs getting abortions and euthanasia? People who support abortions and euthanasia for human beings? People who accept that pigs are raised for slaughter, want to eat meat, but are morally opposed to abortions and euthanasia for human beings? If it's just people who feel sorry for the farmers who won't make the money they'd planned to make from their hogs because of the pandemic, that has nothing to do with the inevitability of an impending transition to vegetarianism.

AND: Senator Grassley has been advocating for mental health resources for farmers since long before the current pandemic. See "Grassley Signs Onto Bipartisan Ernst Legislation to Provide Mental Health Support to Agricultural Communities" (press release from Grassley, May 24, 2018)("("[O]ur farmers and agricultural workers experience disproportionately high levels of suicide... 'We must do more to ensure those who work tirelessly from sunrise to sundown to feed and fuel our world have access to the mental health resources and supports they need'")).

The gods beneficently bestow text upon the humble people.

NPR reports:

In an unusually metaphysical copyright case, a German court has ruled that an American psychologist — and not Jesus Christ — is the author of a book that she said Christ dictated to her in a 'waking dream.' The late Helen Schucman said she was a vessel for the words of Christ in her book A Course in Miracles, and a German Christian group called the New Christian Endeavour Academy argued that they were therefore free to put text from the book up on their website without paying for it....

Arguably, to defend ownership in the text is to undercut the truth and significance of the text. Kind of a Catch-22. I haven't read the court opinion, the attorneys' briefs, or the PR for the Foundation for Inner Peace (the copyright owner), but I'd say that even if we assume divine inspiration in the extreme — the human "author" merely took dictation — the activity of setting the words into written form, with sentences and punctuation, is enough to create authorship when there is no human competitor.

By the way, did Schucman assert that Jesus dictated like a boss with a Dictaphone? Did he say "comma," "period," and "new paragraph," and so forth? Surely, even in these divinely inspired texts, the human author in giving some form to the material.

What happens in cases where a human author has related a story told by another human being? I think the person who sets it down in writing owns the copyright. For example, if David Sedaris writes a story that quotes one of his sisters telling some long anecdote, can the sister say it's hers? People are talking all the time, spewing out their stories, and authors nick these things all the time. Maybe one of you copyright experts knows about some cases like this.

I've linked to to NPR which seems mostly to think it's funny to see these legal entanglements following on the absurd claim that Jesus poured His words into the vessel that was Helen Schucman, but it's not necessary to snigger at religion. How many artists have expressed a belief that a text came from them from beyond, that they were merely a channel for the words that flowed from an unseen source? I think Bob Dylan has said things like that. And I'll just preempt the commenters who are ready to say NPR may laugh at Schucman but it wouldn't write an equivalently humorous article about the idea that the Quran has no human author.

Meanwhile, at the same NPR link, there's news of the very best human authors — Jonathan Safran Foer at the head — teaming up with Chipotle to print stories on the chain restaurant's paper cups. We all need inspiration, and if we've left all our books and other reading devices behind and the voices in our head aren't saying anything interesting, we might be sitting in a restaurant someday, staring a blank paper cup wishing there were some text there to read.

For the grandest human customers, the blank cup is enough to contain all knowledge:  "Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither wildly as they slip away across the universe."

But for the humble people, the routine Chipotle customer, the experience of the text-bereft paper cup is empty. Foer envisions persons "of extremely diverse backgrounds," perhaps lacking "access to libraries, or bookstores." And even though Foer has issued his screed against meat, he pictured all those lost souls and that empty paper in cup form, and "Something felt very democratic and good about this."

The gods beneficently bestow text upon the humble people.