Barbed Wire As Social Commentary

My friend Jim confesses, "I'm kind of goofing off today, my youngest, Allison, is graduating from the University of LaVerne in the morning...." Congratulations, Jim, but I'm trying to have a productive day here, and you keep sending me these fascinating links from your international Web surfing.

Like this one, a review by Edward Luttwak in the Times of London's Literary Supplement of the book Barbed Wire, an Ecology of Modernity by Reviel Netz.

HOLD ON!! I know the Bolton hearings, the Zarqawi health watch and and the DeLay-Wolf flap all sound more exciting than barbed wire, but this is a really fun read.

Why? Because Netz is nutz. He's a classic New Age academic and Luttwak, who runs cattle in Bolivia, has got him in lassoed.

For Netz, the raising of cattle is not about producing meat and hides from lands usually too marginal to yield arable crops, but rather an expression of the urge to exercise power: “What is control over animals? This has two senses, a human gain, and an animal deprivation”. To tell the truth, I had never even pondered this grave question, let alone imagined how profound the answer could be. While that is the acquisitive purpose of barbed wire, for Professor Netz it is equally – and perhaps even more – a perversely disinterested expression of the urge to inflict pain, “the simple and unchanging equation of flesh and iron”, another majestic phrase, though I am not sure if equation is quite the right word. But if that is our ulterior motive, then those of us who rely on barbed- wire fencing for our jollies are condemned to be disappointed, because cattle does not keep running into it, suffering bloody injury and pain for us to gloat over, but instead invisibly learns at the youngest age to avoid the barbs by simply staying clear of the fence.

Netz is on a roll, but Luttwak's riding this bum steer down:

We finally learn who is really behind all these perversities, when branding is “usefully compared with the Indian correlate”: Euro-American men, of course, as Professor Netz calls us. “Indians marked bison by tail-tying: that is, the tails of killed bison were tied to make a claim to their carcass. Crucially, we see that for the Indians, the bison became property only after its killing.”

We on the other hand commodify cattle “even while alive”. There you have it, and Netz smoothly takes us to the inevitable next step:

“Once again a comparison is called for: we are reminded of the practice of branding runaway slaves, as punishment and as a practical measure of making sure that slaves – that particular kind of commodity – would not revert to their natural free state. In short, in the late 1860s, as Texans finally desisted from the branding of slaves, they applied themselves with ever greater enthusiasm to the branding of cows.”

Texans? Why introduce Texans all of a sudden, instead of cowboys or cattlemen? It seems that for Professor Netz in the epoch of Bush II, Texans are an even more cruel sub-species of the sadistic race of Euro-American men (and it is men, of course). As for the “enthusiasm”, branding too is hard work, and I for one have yet to find the vaqueros who will do it for free, for the pleasure of it.

There's more; trust me, these longish excerpts will not diminish your enjoyment. It's a long weekend and you'll probably be eating some tasty red meat before Tuesday rolls around, so click through and enjoy.