Alison Croggon wrote:
> ...The only white cannibals I can think of are Sawney
> Bean and his family, and they're considered gruesome freaks, not the
> emblematic image of the Scots (or that gay German cannibal who
> advertised for his dinner). If it's funny, it's because of the
> assumed impossibility of a "cannibal" (complete with skull necklace
> and bodypaint) eating with a knife and fork. It doesn't work with a
> Scot or a German.
>
And the culture wars continue. There are tons of bad jokes about
"darkest Africa" and natives eating missionaries (decency forbids
repeating them here). But the only two recountings of cannibalism with
which I'm familiar involve white people. One is narrated by Charles
Olson in his introduction to *Call Me Ishmael*. I have no idea whether
it's true. The other is the hideous and quite true history of the Donner
Party in the California Sierras. I'm sure that where there are two
stories there are fifty.
For me the very concept of eating the flesh of another human being
suggests an in-your-face question William S. Burroughs asked circa 1962
in *Naked Lunch*: "Wouldn't you?" Which is to say, he'd wait in his
hovel in Tangiers for his "friend" to pass out from a drug overdose,
then roll the visiting junkie for his wallet so he could buy *more*
drugs. And he asks "Wouldn't you?" with the implication that anyone
will commit any violation of human decency if need dictates morality.
Thus...if I were starving and so was the other person but I had the
strength left to commit murder...or if s/he died first...would I be able
to disengage from a lifetime of taboos and eat flesh, "the raw [or] the
cooked"? And if I were that starved and s/he was now available meat,
frankly I still have no idea. Just don't come to my house when the
refrigerator's empty....
ken
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Ken Wolman http://bestiaire.typepad.com http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with a strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in sunlight, in a beautiful garden."--Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande
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