estebanana -> RE: Death of Patricia McCormick (La Matadora) (Apr. 19 2013 20:05:10)
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quote:
Do you have to put an animal’s life on par with a human’s to object to your fellow creatures being tortured for fun? Well animals that grow on feed lots or in those cages have a lifetime of torture. Miura bulls live on an open range and only fight the last day of their lives and for 45 minutes and they get to kill the human if they can. Bullfighting really is more fair. And in the end it's Spain's karma, and karma of the US for the feedlots is the karma of the US. Everyone is responsible for themselves or as a nation. for how they live. In ancient times, from the times the bullfighting came from and the biblical Bronze Age, there was a concept called single warrior combat. Two chosen fighters from each side would fight on behalf of their group. You can also look at this idea that the drama of two, a protagonist and an antagonist, settles a complexity within a society and the loss is negligible. Like they say on Vulcan: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...to use a saying from science ficition...which usually makes more sense than the bible. I remember a debate in which I saw Camille Paglia defend the Catholic Church even though she could cite it's many problems, as an institution that helped society get things off it's chest by the ritual of confession. She said it was a thousand years before Freud proposed the "talkign cure" that the church practiced this talking format. She said priests had heard confession and that it served the purpose of giving people a way of self examination, albeit through the filter of Christianity, but an outlet none the less even as convoluted as the church can be. During the cold war the US and Russia were involved in the Space Race and in this book The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe proposed the idea that the space race was a form of single warrior combat, Yuri Gagarin was warrior number one and so on until Apollo wins the fight. With minor side characters and sub plots like Gary Francis Powers being shot down in his U-2 over the USSR. All this is to say ritual is very much alive in modern times and Spain practices a form of ritualistic sacrifice that may serve an unconscious purpose for that society. In the US there are equally brutal cultures that are done for sport or pleasure, but not for art. And not done with the result of unifying a group of spectators and bonding them to an ancient cultural ritual. Take one form of hunting in the US that is thought of as the more "sporting" or skillful means to killing an animal, archery hunting. Archery hunters sit in wait for a wild animal, they shoot it with hunting tipped arrows and if they do not make an instant kill, they have to track the animal until it bleeds out. A poor or even well skill bowhunter can't always nail the instant kill. It takes the right position, a heavy bow and luck to drop a deer and kill it with an arrow through the heart. The shot is taken from afar. Often the hunter has to track the animal while it limps, bleeds. Finally the hunter finishes the animal while it cowers hiding in a dense thicket, or lay prostrate and helpless on the open ground, alone, with no other witness of it's death. A matador must stand between the sharp horns of an angry and extremely dangerous bull and place a sword between its shoulder blades to drop it and kill it in one stroke. A society that understands ths sacrifice bears witness to the brave bulls death. Every culture bears it own karma. And that is the only truth.
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