Only a God Can Save Us Now
Butchering Cultured Meat

2,701 words

A Perfectly Neutral Auschwitz

I heard the enemy dinner-call. So I walked to UPenn for a talk on Cultured Meat. Having apprenticed in my dad’s butcher shop, I don’t relate to clinically strained beef. I have natural tastes. True flavors.

If, under siege in the Techno-Apocalypse, I was cannibalized by starving pals? The sorry chef would eulogize. He’d say, “This man has served his station in the field. It’s in grain of his tendons. It’s in the strain of his muscles.” With a lump in his throat he’d offer an act of moral absolution before dining. He’d pray like an Amish farmer before eating a pet bull. The Big Question: to whom do you pray before eating synthetic meat? To whom do you defer as the Divine Ruler of the Natural Order, with all its bloody measures and fatal necessities, before eating a slab of lab meat?

Lab-meat. Clean-meat. In-vitro meat and Frankenmeat. Maybe a desexed, deracinated and denatured “genius” would be more sympathetic. But I abhor such vain progress. It’s an abomination! It’s Modern Man, in his chutzpah-conceit, preening as the lord of creation.

To dine on muscle tissue taken from a steer? A steer whose value has been usurped by man’s arrogance? A steer that has no human need to stud, reproduce, and realize its horny grandeur? A steer given, on man’s diabolical terms, a commercial afterlife in a petrie dish, a bio-reactor, and a bell at the point-of-sale? Hubris aside, it’s tasteless. It’s fake as fiat money. It irks me as an old fashioned butcher who had a real relationship with full-grown livestock. Fat cows. Lean steers. Fresh enough kill, dripping with suet, carried on the shoulders of men. I could say “hoofed” on the shoulders of men who’d symbiotically morphed into beefy animals.

We butchers had what rootless cosmopolitans scorn: a base culture. I’m talking sawdust on the floor. Flies in the air. Cigarette coals glowing with an inhale and demurring with an exhale while hands worked apace. The #1 Rule was to work at nature’s rhythm, especially while running such modern accelerators as the power-saw. Otherwise, the joke went, you’d be picking your nose with a stump. The #2 Rule was to work at nature’s behest. We served to bring the pork chop outta the hog like Michelangelo bringing the Pieta outta the marble. The job can’t be conveyed to the uninitiated. No urban “genius,” socially knit into synthetic panties, can understand the effort. The base truth: as butchers we received our paycheck from the boss but our character from the Natural Kingdom. We had a kinship of blood, soil, and toil.

So I heard the dinner call in Philly. Moreover, I heard the evening call of “Western Civilization.” A governing state of hyper-activity and a borderless state of hyper-acceptance. A sanitized combine of all and nothing at all for the human herd. A perfectly neutral Auschwitz, neither industrialized death nor industrialized life, that’s minded by the Ivy League. Such is so-called Western Civilization today. Its faux-culture. Its baseless character.

Cultural Currency. Cash Cows. Learned Bias.

I walked to the Penn Anthropology Museum for a talk on “Cultured Meat.” Very smart. Very slick. Very well foretold by Warhol’s debut in imposing Art Museums. Collective value was seen as a fait accompli and fey replication was presented as good. Thus Warhol’s entrée: serial prints of Campbell’s soup cans and Marylin Monroe’s cheeks.

Warhol was presented as an already acquired taste. He was keenly placed to merge the muscular soul-craft of Michelangelo and Millet with the plasticity of Non-Culture. Consumer Culture. And, speaking as an old white craftsman, Disposable Culture. It’s true. I admit it. I’ve always had confirmation bias in my social research as a panicked hick. But are elite scientists, seeking results that’ll validate their blue-ribbon grants, less biased? They’re only objective in their research after a subjective value decision has been made by the brokers of Western Liberal Plutocracy. Primarily, scientists are biased towards the ends they need for funding. Secondarily, scientists are neutral as they test prototypes, cross-reference charts, eliminate template flaws and bring their lunch to market. I could say, bring their “cash cows” to market.

I arrived at dusk. Just in time for my twilight narrative. I was an old white male outside the walled museum and prize NWO armory. The fortress of rationalized metrics that equate Etruscans, Egyptians, and Eskimos with globalist pieties. I had a déjà vu as a marginalized, I mean a repeatedly marginalized, tradesman. I soon followed inside with the UPenn professors and their ace students. The milieu was impressive in its cozy oopmh. Everyone knows that understated power is the essence of glamour. Few know that it’s also the essence of deep-state schmoozing and Ivy League style.

Of course the auditorium was packed. The pimping of new meat was sure to draw a crowd. Ethicists leered into the fold. Appetite engineers from marketing and journalism peered as one. I entered the clubby hubbub. I sat where I belonged as a rustic with scarred hands: off to the side. I honored the house bias. I was a tangent species of Sub-Humanist and sub-human caucasian at UPenn Anthropology and a guest who knew his place.

A Butcher’s Schnitt of Schmitt

A celebrity brainiac from MIT provided the night’s infotainment. Curly-haired, supple, and charming. A good-natured Jew. A well-nurtured Jew. A credit to his breed, breeding, and breezy environment. I tried to rise to the occasion as a hick from the sticks.

All I could do was summon the throw-weight of Carl Schmitt. Which is to say, all I could do was butcher Schmitt’s corpus intellectus into a scrappy scrap: once the decision to rationalize life was taken in the Enlightenment, the metaphysical crisis was over. Subsequent inventions across the material grid, like the steam engine and the locomotive, were just a matter of course. Not bad. Not bad for a butcher’s schnitt of Schmitt.

Rising to the occasion among academics, I formed my own derivative thesis: once the decision was made to socially engineer enlightened society, the metaphysical crisis was over. Socially engineered macroscopic life; socially engineered microscopic life. It’s been a matter of downhill course since the Techno-Revelation asserted its blinding light. It’s been a suicide express, with a leisurely upside, for the flashy-trashy West. It’s been mort a credít for the liberal superstate of lucre and platitudes. In usury and pathos a wholly Human creation! The apotheosis of Man’s Reason!

Meanwhile, I sat as a grounded outsider. I heard reasoned arguments against industrial farming with its cold and cruel treatment of animals. Its growth hormones. Its antibiotics. Its reduction of man’s natural retinue, our furry and feathered minions, to mere animal protein. The answer: lab meat. The answer within the crisis-context of global overpopulation on our majestic Mother Earth: more lab meat.

As Schmitt coulda-shoulda said about the Enlightenment, once the decision to rationalize life was made the metaphysical crisis was left to scavengers. Like rummaging scholars in archives, libraries, and such. Late authorities who recycle yesterday’s fatal arguments like gossips. Even in science, where discovery has a lingering Renaissance brio, arch-command fades to corporate gray. Sovereign risk, the mainspring of creative genius, is institutionalized then downsized to the lackey’s plane. Thus tonight’s assigned task. Thus tonight’s problematic question of time-space econometrics: what to do about natural born cattle who take 9 months to gestate in a cow’s womb, and 1.5 years to grow into product for market? What to do about such bloated tenants? Taking up space. Consuming grain. Drinking too much water. And, buttressing the shit-show with MENSA airs, farting methane gas into the bio-sphere.

Western Liberal Genius at Work

Save the Earth. Feed the World. And, above all, do God’s Work in the spirit of Frankenmeat Humanism. Such was the Judeo-Christian blur in the ether. Such was the telos of moral uplift and turbo capitalism. Liberalism at work!

Meanwhile, I sat as a dumbfounded telluric. At least I was grounded in home dirt and more. I was grounded on my side of the perennial rub between rural life and rootless cosmopolitan life. Also grounded on my side of the rub between tactile smarts and book smarts. A high IQ is nice. But so is a craftsman’s sense of immediate consequence. I recalled a dreamy workmate who lost three fingertips in a meat saw. I also recalled losing my own over-reaching fingertip in a meat-grinder. As lessons go, my scar is as permanent.

I sat amidst specialists. I got an inter-disciplinary and faux-Renaissance take on the mono-biz: the norming of desexed, denatured and deranged meat. Dished and relished mindfare. The spin turned into a prototype that was so patently fey that the guy from MIT blushed. The Theoretical Question: how to connect with the Natural Kingdom in a fractured, atomized, and sterile world? The Model Answer: a lone white hog. Like a kept blond shiksa, it’s trophy pork. It’s pictured, on the power-point screen, in a community of urban hipsters in the Netherlands. Like everyone else the hog has its own safe-space to graze. All the members of the co-op take ownership of the pet from which muscle cells are extracted and labbed into meat cakes. Their children are taught to love the snipped and stuffed animal. Furthermore, their children are taught to love the whole from which they are physically, emotionally, and ethically fed. And the token farm animal? It’s as homey as an African-American Negro at a GOP Convention.

I sensed, in my marrow, the future of bitch-male Ausbuildung. And the termination of risk at work. Every butcher knows that danger is a formative force, strictly amoral, that teaches boundaries. First, danger is a normative authority as an apprentice learns the basics: square your hips and keep your dick outta range of the power-saw. Second, danger is an aesthetic authority as the advanced student learns to approach the saw blade like a cocky toreador. It’s similar with an iron-worker as he goes from tip-toeing to strutting along a strictly indifferent, yet highly personalized, I-beam.

The cultivation of male swag, synched to nature’s rhythms, can’t be learned from a neutered hog. Neither can it be learned at Wharton School of Business where the genius is to risk other-people’s-money. It certainly can’t be learned in an auditorium full of intellectually chic conceits: micro-biologists, start-up wizards, wannabe financiers, and drooling marketeers with psycho-metrics spinning in their eyes. Better to learn virile grace while working, quite religiously, on a traditionally set vocation. The butcher’s ritual: arm and aim. The brick-layer’s ritual: align and cement. The iron-worker’s ritual: ever-upwards to the heavenly heights with your feet firmly planted or else. When an iron-worker plunges to his death from a sky-scraper? It’s a rite too far.

I might be dumbfounded, but at least I truly know something. I know that I’m grounded in blood, soil, and toil. I’m grounded in a traditional trade and finishing school on an Ivy League campus.

Their Fetish. Our Beef. The Carnal Question.

The Q&A was a show of moral force. “What about,” a panting Pollyanna asked, “the social effects of Cultured Meat on economically marginalized people?”

I sensed a leading student at Turnip High, possibly a majorette, scholarshipped to a school of messianic fervor. Her own derivative thesis: it’s the White Woman’s Burden to feed the world at someone else’s expense. And, in the bargain, feed the global banks with their appetite for unpayable debt and co-opted collateral: mineral-rights, natural resources, public utilities, and other lawfully pirated booty. Coulda been my own niece. Too bad that her breeding had been elevated into the ethereal warp where SJWs showcase their logic arts. No less windy than Free Market patriots putting the US Dollar up the flagpole. No less blustery than Neo-Nazi LARPers It’s the permenant tuft of ephemeral conceits. It’s the uppity consciousness of The Age.

Turbulent Techno Wizardry is the consciousness of The Age too. It’s here. It’s destiny. It’s the hyper-promiscuous specter that, any butcher knows, must be carnally realized. My question: what feeds the appetite but leaves the soul hungry? Vice! Foot-fetish, techno-fetish, and isolate lab-meat fetish removed from the whole heavenly/earthly body of meaning. Stimulating, yes. Satisfying, no. Such is the “nature” of the specialist’s narrow rush and the pervert’s crimped pinch. It’s the picayune genius of The Age.

Fuck ’em. Fuck the entire congregation of pinche liberals at UPenn Anthropology. I don’t know a single “racist” who obsesses with white skin apart from the whole cosmology of Indo-European presence. Gods, numens, monumental heroes, enshrined madmen, lyrical pillars, and all kinds of spirited touchstones. Their remnants still marking time and space under a hush at Penn Anthropology. As Golda Meir said about the Palestinians: we’ll make them forget who they are. Young whites are being cowed and conquered with a similar vengeance. They’re being reduced, for pacification’s sake, into stock Human Beings who’re no more cultured than a slab of lab-meat.

Of course, you can customize the turdliness of generic rump. You can eat it with chop-sticks. You can season it with curry. Like Western Liberal Civilization, it has all kinds of superficial promise.

Black Hole. Genius Loci. White Proof.

I left UPenn Anthropology with this in mind: archaeo-futurism. It’s more than a congenial paradox. It’s the kind of poetic equation that whites pursue in an otherwise irksome world.

Judging by tonight’s interplay, whites have a conceptual drive that’s as lofty as their altruism drive. Not bad traits in themselves. Not bad if grounded in home soil that’s been dutifully manured with generations of ancestral dung. But errant pathologies if pimped around the planet. Whites! My too expansive people! My too expansive breed of rational brainiacs, irrational empathizers, and increasingly groundless experts. Unsettled aims, vectored in a hurry, taper into the urban-bedouin mode.

It’s today’s norm. It’s today’s aesthetic. It’s today’s shifty character that’s personified by the cosmopolitan professoriate. Made Men in Global Mafia terms. Party Hacks in Global Comintern terms. Judas Goats in Global Stockyard terms, chosen to lead Han Chinese, Gujarati Indians, and Turnip Valedictorians into the combine of Western Civilization where everything has its price and nothing has its value. The all-inclusive goats are the chief asshats of higher learning. They are the most hell-bent of pastors. They are the most crooked line of crooks. They are the most specious species of whites without an aligning principal between hyper-trophied mind and hyper-trophied heart.

Archaeo-futurism rectifies the madness. It provides, for heady whites, a tuning-fork in the road. A reverberating concept that aligns archaic and futuristic spheres on the grid. Whites circling wagons: old school. Whites launching a satellite state: new school. All in all it’s a racial design, on a non-nazi axis, that’s riddled with vertigo at center.

Whites, my too expansive people, need to contract inward around a core question. No need to be rushed and rude in the process. It’s axiomatic that A Master Never Hurries and neither does a Master Race. Just kidding! Every dumbstruck hick knows that it’s the cosmo-techno-psychos who’re frantic to dominate all of Man and God’s Nature. Pastoral whites simply need to contract in the rhythm of life. The heart opens; the heart closes. The love-muscle at work! But the core question remains for European Man as a race or a social-construct or, in Wallace Fard Muhammed’s terms, a blue-eyed devil with an inbred trait for tricknology. In any case, the core question remains for terminally steered and branded whites. To be or not to be?

Tech can’t auto-regulate, Man can’t auto-regulate, and Faustian overdrive can’t solve the very problems it creates. Whites must find their genius loci around the their own core question and their own non-scientific proof. Do whites have a calling? A motive-force? A germ of destiny that is adverse to the perfectly neutral Auschwitz, neither life or death, of Western Liberal Civilization? Bach confronted his own individual and corporate raison d’être within Christendom. He lived to prove himself an instrument of Divine Genius. It’s the same inspired proof that Quixote failed marvelously.

All I can say, as night falls upon Philly, is that so-called Cultured Meat presents a definitive problem. As does so-called Western Civilization. My spun thesis while fading to black: Only a God can save us now.