All Our Consequences

The US killed Ayatollah Khamenei yesterday, the head of his state. And not long before then, they kidnapped the head of state of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro. The rabid dog that is the United States. It seems to me like each powerful western country is slowly descending into fascism, a hatred of immigration, deeper fears of the other. I talked to a close friend of mine recently and I said this.

I think that all western countries are now being haunted by the literal spirits of the past. The millions of Native North and South Americans that were genocided in the settling of the continent, all the bones that they’ve built strip malls, suburbs, and schools over. All the bones of slaves and all the memories that have been forgotten with time and that were stories that have been left untold and now buried under a concrete mix that allows nothing but the concepts of commerce and a growing GDP to thrive. These unavenged spirits wreak havoc on the western world. I believe it is part of the reason for all the addiction on the streets I witnessed daily, the houselessness, the daily hatred that I saw people often posessed with.

I am writing a novel now. It’s a book I’m scared of. It’s a book that, here in Malaysia, I could get in a lot of trouble for. I won’t explain the main ideas and events in the novel that will get me in trouble, but I’ll describe this section, a theme that has been on my mind since I started writing This Year of Hunger.

There is a section in the new book where the protagonist, lost in a surreal, endless mall, who is becoming hungrier and hungrier, starts smelling something in the air that is delicious.

She follows the scent to a McDonalds in the mall. The mall thus far has been completely vacant. But here, she sees a single cashier working the counter. Excited she runs to him and asks how she can get out of the mall. But of course he just asks her what she wants to eat. Eventually, she accepts and looks through the menu. The cashier informs her that there is a special burger—really the only meat available—which is a burger made from the meat of a cow which is actually in the back of this very McDonald’s. This cow is tortured in a highly specific way, so that it experiences the maximum amount of pain, but it is never so much torture that it dies or the meat itself degrades. It is a tightrope act of torture. This creates a meat unlike any other. It is more delicious than any other form of meat, more tender, more full of flavour than was thought possible.

The protagonist, who has been stuck in this mall for an unknown amount of time, and who’s close friend has just disappeared, shrugs her shoulders and accepts the burger.

I think each and every single one of us accepts a burger like this daily.