Every time that I think that maybe, just maybe, PETA has gone as far as they can go, they decide that, no, they CAN get even more offensive.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is reconsidering a campaign comparing images of animal abuse with those of slavery after complaints from civil rights groups and others. The animal rights group's "Animal Liberation" campaign included 12 panels juxtaposing pictures of black people in chains with shackled elephants and other provocative images.
The Norfolk-based group wrapped up the first leg of the tour in Washington on Thursday, visiting 17 cities before deciding to put the tour on hold.
"We're not continuing right now while we evaluate," said Dawn Carr, a PETA spokeswoman. "We're reviewing feedback we've received -- most of it overwhelmingly positive and some of it quite negative."
One panel showed a black civil rights protester being beaten at a lunch counter beside a photo of a seal being bludgeoned. Another panel, titled "Hanging," showed a graphic photo of a white mob surrounding two lynched blacks, their bodies hanging from tree limbs, while a nearby picture showed a cow hanging in a slaughterhouse....
I find it quite impossible to believe that they truly got any "overwhelmingly positive" feedback -- at least, not from anyone not already a member of PETA.
While they are "reconsidering" the tour, the display itself is still running on their website. Even for PETA, this particular exhibit is quite outstandingly vile. In any event, since they're still displaying it on their site, apparently the only issue is whether or not they drag the thing around from city to city, setting up outside various restaurants to offend as many people as they can find.
The problem with using that particular metaphor, and those particular images, is that it requires spectacular blindness to this country's history to even consider doing so. Blacks in this country were always considered subhuman, and animal comparisons and metaphors were used to justify treating us as less than animals. After all, if your horse or dog or cow got out and ran away, when you brought it back, you'd just make your facilities more secure. Beating it to death would likely not occur to you as a reasonable thing to do, but that frequently happened with escaped slaves. It would not strike you that it was reasonable to hang and burn a Jersey bull for lowing at or looking at a Guernsey cow, but it struck many as reasonable to lynch black men for speaking to or looking at white women -- even when they hadn't done so. Most sane people would never consider these reasonable comparisons to make.
But then, PETA seldom seems reasonable these days.
Ingrid Newkirk, head of PETA, had an initial response to the offended reactions which could be politely described as tone-deaf, politically speaking.
"How dare you compare my ancestors' subjugation to the subjugation of cows prodded down the slaughter line to their deaths?!" I can, because it is right to do so and wrong to reject the concept. Please open your heart and your mind and do not take such offense.
Generally speaking, mustn't rhinos think that rhino suffering is more important than vervet monkey suffering and vervet monkeys think that their suffering is more important than songbird suffering? I'd imagine so, for a monkey mother who must choose between rescuing her own baby or a squirrel baby from drowning would surely pluck the monkey baby from the water? Just so, humans who define themselves by religion or culture or nationality or skin color think that their suffering can never be compared, no matter how factually, with any other human or animal's suffering. To do so makes them feel belittled, reduced. But perhaps that's just our primitive biology crying out to protect and save our own kind, the more narrowly defined the better, and the rest be damned. I reject that. Or I try to. Only supremacism makes us think that "our kind," our narrow view of ourselves as Protestants, Muslims, white, black, a woman, a man, a human being, is more important than the rest. But a broader definition of ourselves is simply that we are all animals. Our indignation at injustice to fellow whatever we are should go further-to indignation at injustice to anyone. Otherwise, what are we, but selfish little supremacists.
And, indeed, "selfish little supremacists" would be what PETA has made itself appear, albeit not in the way they've intended.
I don't get them, I really don't. Surely there must be a point at which grandstanding for attention in this way is so profoundly harmful to your organization that it's massively counterproductive. Based on the "Holocaust on your plate" campaign and this, they give the impression that the organization is profoundly anti-Semitic and profoundly racist, and I can't imagine why anyone other than some truly bizarre white supremacists would have anything to do with them. (Note that I am not saying that they are anti-Semitic or racist ... or that they are not. I am saying that their stunningly idiotic shock tactics make it appear that they are. Running these campaigns back to back may well deal the organization a type of blow from which it may never recover.)
From the organization point of view, the problem with using these shock tactics, over and over, isn't just that it brings the organization a type of attention it can't use. It's that it pretty much ensures that PETA's message gets buried in the onslaught of bad press, and gets dismissed as the rantings of an insane organization when it is heard. And frankly, there are just so many times you can say, "Ooops. Sorry. Didn't mean to offend a substantial portion of the country quite that much." It makes no sense to continually pull the sort of stunt that ensures that the people you want to reach never take you seriously.
If PETA's goal truly is to get people to stop eating and otherwise using animal products, then they might reconsider their means and methods. If, however, their goal is merely to brand themselves the most lunatic of the lunatic fringe, then congratulations! Goal achieved!
Posted by iain at August 16, 2005 02:14 PM
