“It was crazy in there today. There wasn’t a box of macaroni, a jar of mayonnaise or a bottle of soda left on the shelf—chips and snacks—gone. This old broad was working like it was the day before Thanksgiving.

“The crazy thing was, all these fat bastards kept asking me who I was rooting for! The home team isn’t even playing. I just answered, “I don’t even know who’s playing.”

“Two months ago they were all talking about not watching another game because of the players disrespecting the flag. Last week it was about them [the NFL] fixing the games [An NFL player was fired for tweeting that his coach told them to throw the game in the last quarter because a Patriots win would be better for the NFL.] All this bullshit about watching millionaires fighting over a football—guys that would just be robbing you on the street if they didn’t get paid for playing ball, and all these fat bastards can thing about is stuffing their face while they yell at the TV?”

-Megan

Slaves are enslaved because their minds are easily shaped to reflect the will of their masters. For that reason, the Church in medieval Christendom—the entity that was at that juncture in our domestication and debasement charged with molding our minds to the master class will—instituted dozens, then scores, then eventually over 60 feast days. These were social pressure valves for the focus of small minds and the rewarding of those small creatures for forgetting the sins heaped upon them by their betters in the interim since the last feast day. [1]

In our consumer society, with every day a feast day by medieval standards, one does not have to reward the slaves, for they are so well-conditioned that they instead reward their masters by further indebting themselves and consuming at the larder of plenty, every piggish soul with its muzzle in the bottomless cornucopia of engineered food.

This was cast in clear relief for me in two ways this week.

I was sent an old video of my grandson and I reading together on the couch at a family get together as a football game blared in the background, hypnotizing the rest of the men, made even less than women by their emersion in the false spectacle. Liberal and Conservative, Left and Right, the only thing most folks I know agree on is the sanctity of mass diversion.

I could not hear the recording of my grandson reading his first words in my presence for the blare of the sacred game.

I was dragooned into attending my 78-year-old mother’s birthday feast at a chain seafood restaurant named The Bonefish Grill. I was shocked as I entered to see about 600 people packed into two segments of a glass-fronted strip mall eatery, upper middle class cattle jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, the floor more greasy than the dirtiest meat room I ever worked in, animal fat so thick under foot that the white concrete grouting was a raised black goo between the tiles.

The menu was all farm-raised fish smothered in gourmet sauces. Those couples that were there on dates were studiously ignoring one another as they gazed into their smart phone screens. I said to my brother-in-law, with disgust, “This is a feed lot for omnivorous apes.”

His face went slack and blank.

The entire table was scandalized when the waiter took my order and it was three beers.

I answered, under the young man’s gaze, “I would never eat in such a place as this. But I can drink anywhere.”

They all thought I was nuts until, after waiting an hour and a half, their food came out in small, poorly cooked—even raw—portions, ranging from bland to bad. My mother confided that she much more enjoyed the slice of pizza I had gotten her for lunch as we ate like humans in a human scale eatery rather than as cattle earlier that day—and did the massed cattle delight in their magnetic feedbags!

Just as the dates all ignored one another, the group parties reveled like they were knights and lady-knights at some event that proclaimed their status to all, as they sat on a slab of concrete overlaid with greasy tile and ate food that smelled and looked far worse than anything I’ve gotten from a ghetto food cart.

Today’s version of civilization recognizes 104 feast days, two to the week, holding out the hope to those who dangle the most obediently from their puppet strings that they will be granted a feast every day of their lives, that they will spend their lives with the feedbag forever strapped to their face. This is gluttonous diversion is key to make certain that any occasion to resurrect old standards of honor and decency and indignation over blatant lies and obscenities might be erased by assigning a temporary shared meaning to something utterly devoid of it.

1.

Clown or Hyena, It Doesn't Matter to Me