Inauguration

I HAVEN'T WRITTEN on this blog for a long time, because I've been busy finishing my book on chickens. I thought I HAD finished it : only the introduction and conclusion were left to write when the semester started, and I've started back to work on my next project, giving a talk at the ASBH on graphic narrative, illness and disability.

HOWEVER: I know now that I need to contribute one final chapter to my book, Auguries, Biology, Culture: Notes toward an ABC of Chickens. The chapters that exist so far are: "Auguries", "Biology", "Culture", "Disability", "Epidemic", "Fellow-Feeling", "Gender", and "Hybridity", and I'd been planning to end there, with just a final chapter, "The Zen of the Hen," to get the concluding Z in there. I still think I will write that chapter, which will be on "just sitting" among other things, but first I need to write one final chapter, "Inauguration." Why, you might ask, other than the fact that like everyone else in the world (it sometimes seems) I've been obsessed with the campaign to elect OBAMA, and am now in that zombie-like-zone after the election that the Onion satirized so well?

ALL ALONG I've been thinking that this campaign has seemed to have endowed chickens with more than the usual amount of political significance. I've seen stories on Jeremiah Wright titled "Obama's Chickens Come Home To Roost," noticed the sudden proliferation of "Why did the chickens cross the road?" jokes that featured John McCain and Sarah Palin, been appalled by those "OBama Bucks" created by the racist southern California volunteer (was she a staffer of the RNC or merely a local party stalwart) that featured fried chicken and watermelon on a "food stamp" dollar with Obama's picture on it. But this morning when I checked my RSS feed I found three stories that have pushed me over the edge, and forced me to contemplate yet one final chapter.

FIRST, THERE WAS THIS STORY filed on "Political Punch," the blog of ABC News Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper, on October 31, 2008, at 9:49 pm.
(See http://blogs.abcnews.com/politiclpunch/2008/10/house-gop-leade.html ) Pulled by Tapper from the student newspaper of Miami University of Ohio (bless their neophytic journalistic chops!) was the report that House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio had called Senator Obama "chickenshit" for voting "present" on house votes. As Boehner put it, "In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright? . . . Green means 'yes,' red means 'no,' and yellow means you're a chicken****. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button." As a student present in the audience, Sophomore Laura Heins, put it, "To hear this man call this man a chickens*** in front of an audience was absolutely appalling. . . . . It angered me that he would go that low in order to promote his own candidate."

NOT ALL READERS of the blog found the "chickens***" label appalling, however. As one irate respondent put it, "Obama is a chicken and it is about time that more and more of his colleagues called him out on not voting as a State Senator or a US Senator . . . . What is he going to do as Commander-in-Chief? Play chicken . . . when the going gets tough?????" And as another reader put it, "Obama is a chicken. He is like the wimpy bully that pushes people around as long as his buddies are standing behind him. His campaign is built on lies and intimidation." A third reader returned to a familiar folk saying when he concluded, "Our chickens are coming to roost. Mr. Wright has called Mr. Obama a liar. Mr. Obama in return disowns Mr. Wright only after Mr. Wright suggested that Mr. Obama is a liar. Mr. Obama is a serial liar." And a final reader, "Clintonites for McCain," cautioned, "Chicken is a big word. My only concern about Obama is that he seems to stand (I am not saying hangs out with) a lot of punks--like Rev. Wright, Ayers, Kahlidi."

TO CALL SOMEONE A CHICKEN is, as that reader points out, "a big word." The term has been an insult since Diogenes responded with the gift of a plucked chicken to Plato's definition of man as a "featherless biped." The wordless gift said it all: human dignity could not support being compared to a chicken. It was crucial to differentiate between person and poultry. Thus rebuked, Plato added to his definition the additional stipulation: "Having broad nails." (The rejoinder is almost a gag line, for the insignificance of the stipulated detail suggests that in every other way the two life forms are as close as twins . . . )

BUT NOTE THAT Obama isn't just called a chicken, and thus by implication accused of cowardice and avoidance. He is also linked explicitly to the color yellow, which extends the connection to cowardice while broadening this to a racial slur against all people of color. (Suzanne Langer has a great rereading of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" that makes this point, for anyone who is sceptical.) And such racism explains the image of Obama as a wimp who rules by intimidation, the fear that the "chickens" will "come to roost," revealing Obama's buddies to be not only Jeremiah Wright, but also William Ayers and Rashid Kahlidi (seemingly "bullies" for their advocacy of the rights of people of color at home and abroad). Finally, Obama is described as chickenshit, an excremental curse that compactly conveys not only abjection, but powerlessness, insignificance, impotence, and even backwater rurality.

AS I WAS PONDERING THESE POSTS, I FOUND THE FOLLOWING, from "John Kelly's Commons," a blog at WashingtonPost.com:

Inaugural Balls: For the Birds?

"The upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama allows us to have a quick lesson in Roman history. Though its precise etymology is disputed, "inauguration" is generally believed to come from the Latin for "directing the birds."

Birds were very important to the Romans for foretelling the future and discerning the moods of the gods: the way birds flew, what they ate, how they ate. (It was considered a good sign if food dropped from the beaks of the sacred chickens as they were fed. Yes, there were sacred chickens.) You still might say, after some mishap, "This doesn't augur well." Or, you might say that if you were, like me, kind of pretentious. To inaugurate means to prophesy about the future, something the Sunday morning pundits love doing.

Frankly, I know more about Roman augury than I do about American inaugurations. I think that's because inaugurations aren't really the province of the non-political native Washingtonian. They're for the party faithful, the monied supporter, the hopeful office-seeker.

Or are they? The balls might be tough to get into but anyone can watch the inaugural parade, right? Won't this particular inauguration draw all sorts of interest among natives and outlanders alike? [ . . . ] I haven't decided yet what I'm doing. I'll keep my eyes on the sky--and on the sacred chickens. What about you?"

KELLY'S FINAL COMMENT SAYS IT ALL. We still need to keep our eyes on the sky, and on the sacred chickens, in order to figure out what the future augurs. Or, as I argue in the first chapter of my book, "Auguries," the kinds of knowledge we can get from watching chickens are still a potent part of our cultural imagination. They've just expanded their prognostication potential, to include the realms of biology, culture, disability, medicine, economics, and yes, even politics.

CHICKENS CAN EVEN ILLUMINATE the strategies of Obama's transition team, or so this final article I found on my RSS feed suggested to me. Chickenmuseum.com posted this great advice for "Introducing the New Birds on the Block."

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"Adding new breeds into your peaceful and comfortable neighborhood of chickens can put quite a rumble between the old and the new. Admit it, nobody likes newcomers. . . . . Fret not, for this kind of attitude and feud lasts only for a couple of days. . . . There are numerous peace-making strategies to help both parties adjust with each other. . . . .

"One very good strategy is to let them see each other without having any physical contact. How? If you have a run . . . you could put your old chickens there and then put a border (chicken wire) between the run and the coop. Put your new chickens inside the coop. This way, they are able to see each other minus the harm. Be sure that both parties have access to sufficient food and water. You can do this for about a week.

"As transition day comes, . . . you can now 'join' them in one arrea. You can transfer the newcomers to the resident flock's territory during the night when all the birds are sleeping. Upon waking up, the old chickens will notice the new ones and they will . . . try to start a fight but will not because they are too groggy to initiate it.

"Distraction techniques are always effective in some way. This can alleviate tactics of war coming from the resident chickens. . . .
"Some of the distracting techniques are:
a. Cabbage heads can do the trick. By hanging a piece of whole cabbage just above their head, chickens will reach it until everything is finished. That is, if they don't get exhausted by jumping to it and reaching it.
b. Make the pursuit an obstacle for the pursuing party. . . .
c. Let them run around at a wider and freer range. The oldies will be so thrilled . . . they wouldn't even notice that there are newcomers roaming around."

**

GEORGE W.'S HEAD has always seemed quite "cabbage-like" to me. But I don't think the Republican party needs him as a distraction technique. They already have Sarah Palin!

Chick Sourcing and Hen Schlepping

First, an answer to Greta, who asked me where I find my chicks, but whose question didn't permit an individual answer.

We live in Boalsburg (small world) so we have gotten chicks from the poultry auction at Belleville. It happens on Wednesday mornings: you show up around 11:00 at the Belleville market, and look for the poultry building (around behind the livestock barn). The auction will start around noon, if I remember correctly. They auction off a wide range of birds there: not just chickens, but guinea fowl, ducks, geese, rabbits and guinea pigs (honorary birds because of their size and edibility), peacocks, and I have even seen a beautiful macaw. As far as chicks go, there are three kinds usually available: large numbers of standard hybrid meat birds, bantam hen and chick combinations, standard size farmyard hens of no particular type with a clutch of chicks, and (very occasionally) pullets. I was once lucky enough to find three beautiful Buff Wyandotte pullets that had been hand raised by the 4H daughter of the cashier at the auction house. They were wonderful: tame, friendly, smart, and they laid gorgeous brown eggs. Another time I found a pair of Silkies, that went on to lay beautifully, but not at my house because my other roosters had it in for the Silkie rooster, so I had to give them away to a more peaceful home.

They also sell roosters there, and beware, if you see a box of chicks that aren't hybrids, they will often be the result of a chick-sexing wizard who has figured out which the males are in a clutch of chicks and is off-loading them before the pose a problem. Too bad, but much better than just dumping the chicks in the landfill, which is what apparently many of the industrial producers do.
At least those roosters have the chance of life, and ideally not as fighting cocks (though I know some of them do go for that.)

Now, on to a very late report on my own chickens. Last spring, we bought fifty White Wyandotte female chicks from Murray McMurray: our second year of raising our own chickens and staying at least to some extent off the grid. (Or at least knowing exactly what kind of a life our birds had: roaming outside, eating grass and bugs as well as scratch corn, and learning about life.) There is a lot I could say about this experience--for example, the poignant discovery that incubator-raised chicks who come en masse to your brooder have no clue how to deal with the basics of life. At the same time in my chicken yard I had two bantam-hen-and-chick families, and it was actually painful to see the difference in the chicks who had mothers, and those who were raised in the circle of the corrugated cardboard brooder. I did my best--warm lights, clean shavings, food and water always fresh--but they were no more educated into the world than puppies are who are raised in a puppy mill. . . .

In any case, fast forward to this spring. Most of those chickens are in our freezer, though we have eaten a fair number, as coq au vin, or roasted, or stewed. They lived for 18-19 weeks, which is longer than standard, and it really hurt to take them to our Butcher, Eli Reiff. But as I have already written, he is a gem: kind, careful, quiet, and very fast. Only two of the White Wyandottes remain--there was a third, but a raccoon got into the hen house and killed one of them. And that's when the strange new era started for our last pair of hens.

The murderous raccoon had done the killing, but then had not left the hen house. Instead, it curled up in one of the nest boxes and fell asleep. This scared the remaining chickens so badly that when my husband opened the house in the morning they came tearing out--leaving the sluggish sleepy raccoon behind them.

Now, they won't spend any time in the hen house voluntarily. (Can you blame them? I can't!) Instead, they wander around our garden, fields, woods and driveway, happily eating whatever they find and scratching for bugs with absorption. When it begins to get dark, they head into the garage, where we find them settled in for the night on a bookcase. Because we don't trust the garage to be predator-free, we have to pick them up and carry them out to the chicken house, which we carefully check for raccoons etc., and then put them on their perch.

This has become a nightly ritual. And since I'm in New York City most of the time, writing my book, that means that when my husband gets back from a day of seeing clients (he is a psychotherapist), he has to go into the garage, pick up the two sleepy chickens (one under each arm) and deposit them in the chicken house for the night.

And to add insult to injury, we can't find where they are laying their eggs now!

Just a report from the trenches.

Urban Chickens in London

Natalie Steed has posted on urban chickens in London. http://nataliesteed-lcc.blogspot.com/While I'm there this week, I want to meet up with her, and to investigate the urban chicken culture there. Are there organizations like MadCity Chicks (in Madison Wisconsin) or the Seattle and Portland chicken movements? Natalie writes about the Suffolk avian flu outbreak: I need to learn what kind of flu it was--low path I presume, but what was its type? And I need to talk to poultry people in London, Oxford and the environs.

Al Gore

the indecency of bioethics

The horrible news has just come out that Dr. Daniel Gunther, who with a colleague performed the highly controversial (and in my view completely inappropriate) hysterectomy and breast bud removal on Ashley X, has committed suicide.

We will certainly have time to mull over the many perspectives on what it has meant to the lives of all involved. But we may not do so, if we let bioethics once again be deployed in its callous "sound bite" function to stamp "Sealed" on an episode that is anything but sealed. When Arthur Caplan once again performed the role as 'go-to' spokesman for the bioethics world, his response claimed the experience as a debate between pediatric medicine and disability activists:

"You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” said Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and MSNBC.com columnist.

But it’s certain that Ashley X’s case caused a seismic wave throughout pediatric medicine and the world of disability. It raised difficult and challenging questions about what’s in the best interest of children and young adolescents with disabilities. The controversy is going to continue to go on and I think that Dr. Gunther’s voice will be sorely missed.”

This comment is chilling, not only because of Caplan's insider position (salaried, one assumes) as MSNBC columnist and thus party to the press feeding frenzy, but because his disingenuous refusal to consider the role of the press, bioethicists, disability activists, and medical practitioners in the social context for Dr. Gunther's suicide casts depression (and other mental disabilities) as beyond knowledge, beyond commentary, beyond concern. "Those" suicidal people somehow aren't granted the same bioethical scrutiny as are the Ashley Xs of this world. And yet the tragedy of this awful story also belongs to Dr. Gunther and to his family if he had one as it does to Ashley X and her family.

What would happen if we actually opened up the whole question to discussion, rather than closing it down? If Arthur Caplan had asked simply, "What do we know about suicide?" rather than "You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” we might actually have given ourselves space to consider how institutions of all kinds (press, bioethics, pediatrics, parenthood, the law) let something crucial escape their deliberative machines. And perhaps we would be able to step outside the tidy institutional structure of the dominant model of bioethics, whose procedures risk framing situations with such linear clarity that all the disturbing ambiguity escapes.

As we can see if we look at the parodic Goofus and Gallant cartoons in the latest Atrium, procedural clarity is not always the best, or even an adequate, response to the increasingly complex questions facing us as we live our liminal lives. That is why comics are so useful for bioethics. Rather than being linear and procedural, they are spatial, often ironic, even chaotic. They hold open space for multiple voices, rather than ceding all comment to the dominant voice, a bad state of things even when that voice speaks for bioethics. http://www.bioethics.northwestern.edu/atrium/atriumissue4.pdf

The new butcher

I take my chickens to Eli Reiff, in Mifflintown, who is a very savvy local poultry processor. He gives talks at the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture conferences, has a mobile poultry processing station that he can bring to the small farms to process their poultry thus reducing the heat and travel stress on the birds, and he can talk a mean game about the problems with big poultry without romanticizing the difficulty of chicken farming or food production. I am sure there are many other small-scale butchers in this country, but they are a diminishing lot as the large processors stake their claims to whole areas of the country where travel is cheap and easy. In rural Pennsylvania, for example, the area around Lancaster is well served by large processors (well-served may be an inaccurate description given what happens in large processing plants, so let's just revise that as monopolized by those large processors), but the northern, more hilly tier of the state has precious few butchers. The onus on the small processor is to make his or her work known to the new crop of poultry growers as well as the existing small farmers. An example of how this is being done is below: the HomeGrown Poultry company got a mention in an article in the Boise Weekly on keeping chickens as unusual pets, and when I went to their website, I found this explanation for precisely why small poultry processors in our local area are so crucial in this new food system.
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HomeGrown Poultry prides itself on being the first state-approved poultry and rabbit processor in the state of Idaho. Poultry processed in our new 1920-square foot facility can be resold anywhere with the state of Idaho. We are pending approval from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare to resell rabbits within the state. HomeGrown Poultry has been in business since 2003, owned and operated by experienced poultry growers.

We believe growing food for yourself and your family is true food security.

We believe locally-grown food is more nutritious, saves fossil fuel, and supports local farmers. It is true homeland security.

We support local food systems - all the processes that go into producing and distributing food - whether they've developed haphazardly or with careful planning - from breeding crop seeds, to fishing, to raising cattle, to processing food, shipping, storing and selling it.

We support sustainable agriculture - growing food and fibers in a ways that don't compromise the ability of future generations to do the same.

The food supply chains we depend on have been growing longer and more complicated - and this has created new vulnerabilities. Food does not just pass from farm to market to table anymore. The links of these chains pass through more hands, more labs, more companies, more processing facilities, more countries, etc. Too much of this stretching food supply chain is out of sight, and out of public control. We either need to shorten the food supply chains by buying more locally produced food, or do a much better job of overseeing and managing them through all their twists and turns. We believe HomeGrown Poultry has an important role in this system.

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Rhetoricians could make much of this passage, because it is such a good example of how the rhetoric of terrorism is being adapted (productively, one hopes) by local foods activists. Of course, that is if you can call keeping your own chickens activism, as I think Grace Lee Boggs might well do: in a recent interview with Bill Moyers she talked about drawing her hope for the future as an activist from the upsurge of local gardens she saw being created.

Autumn in the chicken yard

I've been collecting news about chickens thanks to various RSS feeds, but now that I'm back with my own chickens, I'd rather write about what's happening right here in my chicken pen.

The White Wyandottes are much bigger than they were the last time I saw them (about two weeks ago). They also seem to be in a moult, no doubt a result of the very unseasonably hot weather. When they fluff up their feathers, which they do after dust-bathing to get the mites off, their small inside feathers drift to the ground. Yesterday one hen shook herself and a small feather fell into the water pan, where it sailed about like a fairy boat, until the same hen stopped by later for a drink and gobbled the feather right up. People are always so appalled to think that hens will eat anything, but here's an instance. (And of their cannibalistic tendency, too. . .)

The four bantam chickens have now come into maturity, and they are three lovely roosters, with black bodies and golden brown mantles and tails, and one modest golden little hen. The emotionally-tinged language just seems to fit them: the roosters are all display, the hen all inobtrusive speed as she gleans our garden. One of the roosters has started crowing--the lovely one with the black spangled feather-headdress spiking out from his red comb--and it's been so funny to listen to him try to find his particular song. At first it was just like a teenage boy whose voice was breaking, but now he has his riff down, with its distinctive quaver and semi slide down several notes toward the end. I'll see if I can listen and find a way to annotate it. The other day, he was practicing so loudly that he woke me up, about 5:30. I went outside, sure that he was in the garden shed annex to our hen-house because it sounded so loud I thought it was echoing. But no sign of him there. . . Instead, he startled me by flying out of a tree behind our garage just as I was passing beneath it. I looked up, and the other two roosters and the hen were all up there, teetering on a thin maple branch. I'm trying to get them to come into the garden shed so that once winter comes they can find water and food there, but so far they're reluctant to get anywhere near the other chickens (with their large turf-protective Barred Rock-Bantam Crossrooster). So the chicken flock stays in the hen house, to be let out in the morning & closed in at night, while the four bantams range at their pleasure across our lawn, fields, and even garden.

They do visit the chicken coop for food and water occasionally, though. I was sitting out there the other morning, communing with the chickens in my own form of meditation, when the four bantams came in to drink from the red dog bowl of fresh water I'd put down. I'd just seen The 3:10 to Yuma, and it reminded me of the scene in which Ben Wade's gang come into town. The White Wyandottes clucked and clustered, but they along with all of the rest of the 'town' chickens stayed away, while the little Bantam rooster had a dust-up first with the Big Barred Rock/Bantam, and then the tough mama Barred Rock who has seniority in the chicken-yard. After the gang of Bantams, so obviously built for speed and independence, took what they needed from the chicken yard, they cleared right out.

In fact, the chicken community reminds me of what I missed in the film: strong older women. It's not to fill a category that I want this, but because the chicken community shows so clearly that the foundation of a community requires not only male elders and legislators but fearless older women as well. I think of how our old Barred Rock hen patrols the food and water, keeping chipmunks away, and of how the elderly beared Bantam mama who has chosen to stay in the chicken yard vehemently keeps the other intruder Bantams away from food, water, even scattered vegetables that I bring in from the garden. There is a tight sense of belonging each group has, as well as a clear sense of the other's outsider status. The only thing that challenges this is, predictably, the exogamy mandate. Though of course the chickens don't know it as such--they just manifest it as the little Bantam tries to mate not with his mother in the alien foursome, but with the much larger White Wyandottes from the other cohort. However, he can't accomplish that, because she really is a good four inches taller than he. So in the end he turns to his indignant, squawking mama. (And so, of course, seniority only goes so far in the chicken-yard.)

I think these chickens are about three to four weeks shy of their slaughter date, a phrase I somehow hesitate to write here. Why: because the admission that I will kill them puts me in a camp that to many readers may make me the outsider? Not a vegetarian. Not dedicated to the life-long welfare of my hens and roosters. Not the wonderful chicken rescuer I read about in a Minnesota newspaper. . .

I'm interested in this: somehow it has felt important to me to work out a relationship with my chickens that acknowledges the fact that they're going to feed us. They've been well cared for, with affection and good food, water and roaming room, and pretty soon it'll be their time to go. I'll be taking them to Eli, the Mennonite Butcher in the next valley who does the butchering for all of the small farmers in the area. He's careful, gentle, quick, and the most interesting talker I've come across in a long time. When I first met him I decided that he was actually a life form in need of protection, since the small-scale butchers have pretty well vanished from central Pennsylvania. I stand with the chickens as he butchers them, having brought them to him following his careful instructions: no stress, crates covered with a blanket if the air is cold or the wind is harsh. But I'm still wondering how I'll feel after knowing these birds since May 31: we've planned on them as our dinner for the winter & spring, but I'm sorely tempted to keep at least one hen out, as a layer and friend. There's the curious one with the dark red comb and wattles . . .

Mortality: my chickens face it as my friends are facing it, and my mother (who's just fallen, and is increasingly frail), and I all face it. Autumn brings it all right out in the open: the warm, soft, mellow approach to the killing frost.