A Vegan’s Guide to Eating the Rich

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ince last November, French gilets jaunes (“yellow vests”) have taken part in organized protests, manifestations, as the French call them, against their ruling elite. But these are no ordinary protests; these are genuine uprisings against the French state. For the first time since 1968, millions of French citizens from across the country, from all walks of life, are rising up against their corporate Neoliberal government, a ruling elite spewed from the grandes ecoles, or exclusive colleges that crank out meat puppets like Emmanuel Macron, a well-spoken half-wit whose previous job was as an investment banker at Rothschild & Cie Banque. These young, semi-bright people are convinced they are not just smarter than the peasantry, but also morally superior.

In reality, they aren’t nearly as smart as they believe. Their wealth isolates them from the world occupied by the peasantry and they haven’t the slightest clue as to the challenges and struggles experienced by ordinary French citizens. This toxic mixture of arrogance and ignorance leads to a society governed by a small cadre of pampered, privileged elitists so tone deaf to the suffering of ordinary citizens that, for example, they attempt to make the peasants pay the costs of fighting climate change with diesel taxes rather than having the oligarchs who earn billions through the sale of petroleum products foot the bill.

With the yellow-vest protests, ordinary French citizens are striking back against that isolated and arrogant ruling elite, holding them accountable for their incompetence. But the French are and have always been a revolutionary culture. In the U.S., not so much. Here people are freaking out about what amounts to basically nothing, such as Trump’s lawyer paying his mistress to remain silent about the president’s many sexual dysfunctions or spending a billion dollars on some farcical wall that Trump claims he wants to build. We ignore the fact that we spend many times that amount arming Israelis so they can commit genocide against the indigenous Palestinian population, helping the Saudis create the worst humanitarian crisis in history in Yemen, and fighting multiple wars of empire. We’d rather watch the Trump reality show than contemplate the death and destruction that our policies create around the world.

In America: A Farewell Tour, Chris Hedges explains exactly why we’re unable to pry ourselves away from the theater of the absurd that is the Trump presidency, why we can’t focus on issues that actually matter: “William S. Burroughs in his novel Naked Lunch created predatory creatures he called ‘Mugwumps’… [that] secrete an addictive fluid through their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism… The addiction to… our own version of Mugwumps, has become our national pathology. We are entranced, even as the secretion of Trump’s Mugwump fluid repulses us.” When we comment on Trump’s latest scene in the theater of the absurd, we’re not being clever, even if we use some witty new pun based on Trump’s name. We’re just suckling the Mugwump secretions from Trump’s penis.

We need to stop suckling Mugwump fluid. We need to take a lesson from the yellow vests and rise up against all of these repulsive, predatory oligarchs. Let’s quit wasting our time being outraged by Trump’s latest offensive tweet and let the ruling elite know that they have more to fear from us than we have to fear from them. The Mugwumps may feel safe hiding behind their hired thugs in the militarized police forces, but that’s not working out so well for Macron and his fellow Mugwumps from the grandes ecoles; all across France, police and fire fighters are removing their riot gear, donning yellow vests, and joining the manifestations.

We need to follow suit in America. We need to kick our addiction to Mugwump fluid, take to the streets by the tens of millions and rise up against the ruling elite. In other words, we need to stop suckling and start eating the rich. Not literally, of course—there is no environmentally sound way to consume animal-based protein, which increases the risks for cancers (breast, lung, liver, gastrointestinal, colorectal, stomach), hypertension, coronary heart disease, stroke, weight gain, type two diabetes, eye diseases, dementia, osteoporosis, depression, asthma, pulmonary lung disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and numerous other illnesses. Besides, it’s safe to assume that the Mugwumps of the ruling elite are chromosomally close enough to humans that eating them constitutes cannibalism, and cannibalism can lead to the development of prion illnesses like Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease.

For these reasons and many more, no environmentally conscious revolutionary should actually eat the rich, especially an environmentally conscious vegan revolutionary. We must compromise—rather than literally eating the rich, we must take a more ecologically sound route and compost them. In addition to ending the tyranny of the Mugwumps who comprise the ruling elite, composting the rich provides numerous benefits to the environment, such as keeping Mugwump carcasses from filling up overcrowded landfills and providing an environmentally sound source of fertilizer. Win-win.