Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Cow is a female bovine -- really!

In my job I transcribe a really weird, wide, wild variety of stuff. Today it was a Kurdish writer talking about the "poetry or resilience" and the horror of attempted genocide. The subjects are so all over the place I can't begin to list them. Last week it was trailers for the animated movie BARNYARD which is currently in the theatres.
Briefly for anyone who hasn't seen trailers or the movie: when the farmer goes away Otis, a cow, becomes leads the animals in having a bust out teens-on-the-loose party. Eventually Otis falls in love with Bessie, a lonely pregnant cow and with the calf she eventually delivers. What's wrong here? Otis is a COW, "he" has an udder. "He" is obviously not a bull. "COW" means female. Duh! I was ranting about this at work and was told "it's a lesbian story." I don't think so.
This is a nationally distributed movie by Paramount. This cost a pretty penny. How old are the animators and scriptwriters? Do they speak English?
As I've mentioned I grew up on a farm. I knew at a young age that all mammals, birds, and beasts like frogs and snakes have two sexes, as do humans. Do the people who made this movie also think that milk is concocted in a factory as Coca Cola is? Do they know where eggs come from? Do they think hamburgers grow on tropical trees? A college educated adult recently asked me what kind of animal a "veal" is. True!
I've read that Americans are becoming stupider. I know educators are saying Johnny and Janie can't read. I know even members of my generation are what one writer called "enumerate." They don't understand numbers or statistics [unless they're men talking about baseball players' records]. But have we lost touch with the real world? I think we may have -- by "we" I mainly mean Americans with our "great society" where the majority of people are urban and have never seen a working farm. I mean the under-30s who think up movie ideas.
I'm reading books that make me think [I perversely enjoy thinking] including Temple Grandin whose ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION I mentioned a couples days ago. Ms. Grandin points out that humans ARE animals. Animal studies show, she writes, that for their brains to mature puppies, kittens, etc. need to run and jump, chase their tails, pounce on shadows, mock fight, etc. The movements of the body affect the maturation of the brain. This must be true for human children too; but today children spend far more time in front of a TV, far less time climbing trees, riding bikes or playing with friends and helping mom and dad with household chores. Maybe part of their brains aren't maturing properly ... maybe it's not so much the violence on the TV but the body itself -- which, we are now told, is also getting unprecedentedly obese and that leads to a whole batch of other problems.
I'm also reading, as I've mentioned, ENDGAME, by environmentalist, Derrick Jensen, who emphasizes that our water and air are both polluted, our food is full of chemicals, and kids are being pumped full of various drugs, and now are getting vitamins and heaven knows what else in the supposedly pure water they buy because some ad agency has made it chic to carry around a bottle all day ... what is all this doing to the developing body and brain? We have no idea. Are kids getting stupider or are they mutating in ways we won't be able to see for decades? How much is going on that we don't know about?
Why aren't we at least teaching our kids that animals come in two sexes and that COWS are female and BULLS are male, HENS are female, ROOSTERS are male. Have whole parts of society become either ignorant of, or so afraid of sex, they can't even admit living beings are not neuter blobs? Meanwhile some -- at least one -- American is so afraid of sex that a parent in Texas raised such a stink because his or her child was taken to an art museum and saw a nude in a painting that a teacher lost her job and a school system will now deprive all children of the cultural advantage of knowing that art museums are places full of treasures.
What is going on here?" What century is this? If we lose touch with the natural world, what will we be?
Below is the "quartet" quilt I meant to have at the beginning of yesterday's posting. Read on to find out about it.

1 comment :

Kathleen said...

I cannot believe how stupid that is about the movie...although I should....do you know if they corrected the movie or was it left as such?

I am loving your rants and take on life and I really love the stars in that quilt.