Strange Flesh

The American presidential campaign has witnessed what is apparently a second serious threat within two months against the life of candidate Trump, but thus far most of the news coverage about it seems concentrated upon the level of competence demonstrated by Secret Service officers in nipping it in the bud.  The press’s attitude would seem to be that since the only gunshots actually fired were those fired by the security forces, the real subject of interest continues to be the candidates’ debate held about a week previously. According to presumably reliable statistics, slightly more than sixty-one million people in this country watched the debate on television.  I will not put the well-deserved quotation marks around the word debate, even though the event had little in common with what happens regularly at the Oxford Union let alone what happened in 1858 at five venues scattered through the state of Illinois when Lincoln dueled with Douglas in an earlier set of American presidential debates.  From among the plethora of pressing national, international, and indeed inter-galactic political and socio-economic problems that potentially face the next occupant of the White House, the one that was discussed most memorably, and most thoroughly featured in the press, was the putative diet of recent immigrants to the small city of Springfield Ohio.  Mr. Trump imputed to a group of recent immigrants to Springfield, Ohio, a canine/feline diet.  According to Mr. Trump “they are eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.” 

 

What goes without saying too often goes unsaid.  So before advancing in this brief essay I suppose I am obliged to tell you that this is utter rubbish.  Neither the newest residents of Springfield, Ohio (most of them immigrants from Haiti) nor the native population (mainly though not exclusively of European ancestry) are eating dogs or cats.  This is just one of those things Mr. Trump likes to say in aid of wresting defeat from the jaws of probable victory.  From what might be called the ethical point of view, one does not know whether to hope that Mr. Trump actually believes what he claims or that he is merely making it up with gusto.  Yet more discouraging in my view is the fact that millions of his supporters greet Trump’s declaration with a yawn.  He probably was talking about hot dogs slathered with catsup.  So far has political deviancy been defined downward.  “Democracy,” said Mencken, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” 

 

From the historical point of view, however, it is likely, nay certain, that at some places and at some times on this large globe, people have indeed eaten cats and dogs.  Quite apart from the fact that the human diet throughout the world is as diversified as is human language, if you are hungry enough, you will eat anything edible and a few things that are not.  In fact, inventiveness of diet when in extremis has often been regarded as ingenious and gutsy.  Shakespeare’s Antony, rendered ethically feeble by his all-consuming passion for Cleopatra, is thus chided by Caesar.  Caesar is reminding him that he is supposed to be a tough guy, as indeed he used to be before he lost his mind over this woman:

 

…Leave thy lascivious wassails. When thou once
Wast beaten from Modena, where thou slew'st
Hirtius and Pansa, consuls, at thy heel
Did famine follow; whom thou fought'st against,
Though daintily brought up, with patience more
Than savages could suffer: thou didst drink
The stale of horses, and the gilded puddle
Which beasts would cough at: thy palate then did deign
The roughest berry on the rudest hedge;
Yea, like the stag, when snow the pasture sheets,
The barks of trees thou browsed'st; on the Alps
It is reported thou didst eat strange flesh,
Which some did die to look on: and all this—
It wounds thine honour that I speak it now—
Was borne so like a soldier, that thy cheek
So much as lank'd not.  (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 4,  485f)

 

Even without the gilded puddle chaser, such victuals do not sound exactly appetizing. Of course military power and cultural prestige have been wielded by many civilizations of beastly feeders in the past.  The Aztecs of Mexico, notable warriors, poets, and even astronomers, created a major empire powered, at the alimentary level, mainly by acociles (a very dubious looking crayfish thing thick on the bottom of Lake Texcoco), and spirulina algae transformed into a kind of flour suitable for baking.  Armadillos were a delicacy reserved for special occasions.  I must regard this menu item, though far from unknown in the American South of my youth,  as a bit iffy.  Armadillos are known to carry leprosy, and although the incidence level is “fairly low in most regions” there is apparently still a risk of transmission in handling the carcasses.

 

            One of the terms of opprobrium among the volunteer critics in our universities is “cultural appropriation”.  Recently young kids have needed to be very careful around Halloween time if they want to avoid cancellation by their second-grade confreres.  South-of-the-border sombreros are definitely out, and pirates’ eye-patches risk grave offense to the otherly abled.  You probably remember a highly televised fracas along these lines at one of the undergraduate colleges of Yale University not too long ago.  Despite this, it seems to me that cultural appropriation is a fecund force in human development, and often a very good one.  I am very glad we in this country appropriated the wheel and penicillin, to cite just a couple of examples out of many.

 

            I am now quite old, and for many decades I have had a professional interest in the English language.  Under these circumstances I am personally aware of the extraordinary increment in the vocabulary of our widely shared English language, just during my own lifetime, brought about by the American naturalization of an international cuisine.  Is there anybody who doesn’t know what a tortilla, a paella, or a barbeque is?  I could list a hundred more.  When I was a kid the only Chinese dish I had ever heard of was chop suey.  Is that even a thing now?  When it comes to gastronomic appropriation most Americans are all for it.