Here is my argument for slaughtering animals: we slaughter each other, why should animals get a get out of death free.
But I have no problems with Helen being a Vegan or Morrissey the same, or either of them fighting for their beliefs.
So my problem with Morrissey comparing the mass murder in Norway by a Christian nutjob with McDonald's slaughtering of cows for my quarter pounder with cheese isn't on moral grounds. It is on esthetic grounds. It is lazy thinking. It is a tautology of the worst kind and is fundamentally wooly headed when it comes to how death and mourning function.
Look at it this way, Morrissey is suggesting grief is a numbers game.
Say, you're lover died of AIDS.
You are heartbroken.
You go to Morrissey and tell him.
His reply would be, you lost your lover? That's nothing compared to the millions of cows that die every year.
True, but so what? Does that make him or anybody else feel any different? It is off subject. How about the freedom fighters in Tiananmen Square, the 20 Million purged in Stalin's USSR, the tens of millions murdered in China, the final solution against the Jews in Germany and the Native Americans here?
The truth of the matter is that the only tragic deaths are those that effect you. It is the only way to live or you'd spend your life crying for the dead. About 70,000 people die every day.
And more? The chances that we kill ourselves and everybody else before the 10 Million years time when the sun burns out are excellent.
People might not know why Morrissey's comment is stupid, but they know it is. It seems to be just weirdly inappropriate: it is like he is leveling off death to a numbers game and that's not how death works. My cat Cath died in February 2006, I couldn't have been sadder. That's how death works.
More, even if you lose your child, and if you wish it was you who had died in their place, the most important death is your death.
Imagine the cow. Born, stuffed with food for a coupla years in Ethiopian type conditions of feces and pain, and then slaughtered in merciless terror.
It is awful for the cow, and I am as responsible for its death as I am for the children in Pakistan two years ago who were accidentally killed by the US Armed Forces. So what? What do you want to do with that guilt? I pay for one, I buy the other, I am responsible for both deaths. That's the choice I have made to live in this way in this place and Morrissey's stupid comments only trivializes it by making it nonsense.