So we can escape capitalism? I mean quotas or supply management. The cows from Saint-Barnabé are not crazy, they took the key to the fields and they went to fart methane in the flowers. It’s like being in Pagnol, in animal farm by George Orwell or in Fred Pellerin. The village of Saint-Élie-de-Caxton of the famous storyteller is located 15 kilometers away, the neighboring town of Saint-Barnabé. I had my first house there, with “moohemeuh” on the buttons back, leaning on the slabs of the Yamachiche River. I even planted a Bohemian olive tree there.
I therefore understand them, these still adolescent and rebellious heifers, for wanting to escape their destiny, hampered by the cash cows of the economic system. In the best case, they will live four to five years, impregnated each year artificially, and will end up in burgers. We’ll take their calves away from them when they’re born, because the milk, you know, is for humans. And if it’s a male calf, we’ll sell it at auction (“6.39 $, is there anyone for? 6.39 once, 6.39 twice…”), or else we will slaughter him, because he comes from a line genetically more mammary than muscular. Cows are bred to produce one thing: milk. Not bucolic poetry for city dwellers who add oatmeal to their latte while bickering on Twitter.
No one understands privilege as well as those who don’t have it.
And this cow’s milk is 3.46 billion liters (in 2021) and 27% of Quebec’s agricultural revenues, 65,000 jobs and tax benefits of one billion dollars thanks to 365,400 unsuspecting cows not that we can jump the fence.
I wouldn’t have been so punctilious about milk if it hadn’t been for Justin Laramée’s excellent documentary play, milk run, presented these days at La Licorne. It’s a I love Hydro rural version, summarized in two hours. After that, you understand why the cows sacre their camp and especially why half of our farms have disappeared for 20 years. The $6.39 for a male calf, I took it there and not in my fertile imagination like a manure-fed meadow.
The cash cow is me
We have fun with the administrative labyrinth that the friendly and truculent general manager of the village of Saint-Sévère had to face in the story of “wild” cows: MAPAQ, Ministry of Wildlife, UPA, SPA, SQ, the Western Festival of Saint-Tite. Imagine what we do with diafiltered milk, producers, processors, government agencies, Canadian customs, the Food Inspection Agency, the UPA, and so on. milk run helped me to understand that even experts lose their Latin.
It’s on purpose. Like the Latin Mass of old; it’s made so that we don’t understand anything. But when the bank writes to you that your monthly mortgage payments do not cover the interest on your interest, but that this will not affect your credit rating (“Be worry-free”), you understand in the language that François Legault wants to protect that you just got screwed. Dominus vobiscum. And cum spiritu tuo.
Get fooled by who? The variable rate, mortgage advisers or brokers, the governor of the Bank of Canada, the central bank that has raised its key rate six times since March? No, the Saint-Capital, twist the piastre. We are being milked dry. Many hormones are given to stimulate lactation in cows.
“Over the past 25 years, home prices have risen the most in Canada, among a group of 21 advanced countries. We are talking here about a 553% increase in valuation, followed by those of Australia (502%) and New Zealand (451%),” the newsletter from a financial advisor tells me.
Banks don’t risk losing too much money by lending to us. I opened the precipice, a series of interviews with Noam Chomsky that I recommend to you, and I read this wise advice: “On what cannot be politely discussed, one must remain silent. »
To have and to be had
I also dove into the delicious essay by Eula Biss, an American writer, professor of literature at the university, who had the good idea to unravel capitalism very politely from the point of view of the so-called middle class. She uses the comical or banal elements of her own life in the form of short stories as a starting point to make us think in To have and to be had.
One day, I don’t know if we will live long enough to see the capitalist system burst on the planet, but it will happen. The capitalist system is going to have an end, that’s for sure.
When she becomes a homeowner—the dream of the middle class—she wonders where the money goes that she has invested, borrowed for the mortgage, made to grow (how?) in her retirement fund.
Who did she exploit to “have”, to possess? Chomsky would tell him that the big banks are “spreading their funds into fossil fuel extraction, including its most dangerous forms, such as the tar sands of western Canada, knowingly.”
She wonders if we can really escape this system, except as a loser and even by investing in so-called ethical funds which are not necessarily moral. “We are retiring through an economy based on extortion, at least those of us who can retire,” she writes.
Eula Biss points out that the word “precarious” comes from Latin precarius, “obtained by prayer”. Potentially anyone can be part of the precariat, prayer or not. Illness, divorce, natural disaster, war, forced immigration, sometimes lead you there.
He is also the Uber driver, the restaurant waitress, the artist, “art is liberating because it does not render accounts”, a freelance columnist… “What they all share is the lack of security. »
This precariat also includes people who have given up on a stable job, a pension, she writes: “Their existence is puzzling, suggesting that, perhaps, certain things are more valuable than security. »
“Freedom! »? Which brings us back to the secret aspirations of dissident cows, which have become the symbol of precariat, which shakes all our certainties about the sacrifices to be made to remain within supply management. Should we be satisfied with butter, silver butter or to fuck the creamer? There’s something to ruminate on the floor of the cows.