Weekly Reader

MH: Yeah, the Crass covers were, and still are, very powerful. Both the music and artwork of Crass were uncompromising and definitely had a huge influence on what I call the second wave of UK punk, from the '80s, Discharge being a big part of that. A lot of the original punk bands had become mainstream (The Clash), split or evolved into bands fueling the newly emerging Goth subculture, and playing big venues, so there wasn't a lot around for younger punks to get involved with.

Historically the best anti-war imagery in my view was from John Heartfield (1891 -1968). He was a German artist who back in the day was probably amongst the first to use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist. Calvin almost exclusively used his artwork on subsequent singles and albums. I think it is important that people are aware of that, as I have read in in a few articles that they think that Calvin made the artwork himself. (After I did the single covers for Discharge, I taught Calvin Morris how to prepare artwork for printing, at the printmaking studio at my college)

Grisly exposés are as old as the meat industry itself, but Blanchette is not interested in scandal. The genre implies that the meat industry is a secretive outlier or that it can be redeemed through liberal reform. Books in this mode tend to steer between industrial horror and vegan asceticism to arrive at the safe harbor of the small farm, yet here too Blanchette departs from the norm. He does not believe that bucolic romanticism has anything to offer us now, an insight that was plain a century ago to the political economist Thorstein Veblen. Veblen ridiculed “the Independent Farmer of the poets” as a “holdover” from an “obsolete past” and predicted his doom “under the dominion of absentee ownership in its later developed phase.” Veblen also stressed that “the case of the American farmer is conspicuous; though it can scarcely be called singular.” In similar fashion, Blanchette recognizes that the meat industry isn’t a macabre exception but rather is typical of contemporary capitalism, even if its extremes make contemporary tendencies more readily apparent. Like the bodies of the pigs it has engineered, the meat business has become a vast, fragile beast teetering on the brink of ecological and financial ruin.

The last four years have been a period of numbingly rapid change in our politics, a critical juncture containing the seeds of many different potential future paths. That rapid change has built on a much deeper structural foundation rooted in everything from demographic turnover and shifts in partisanship to full-on breakdowns of the formal and informal institutions that make up our political system. This adds up to a full-blown legitimacy crisis for the system as a whole. It’s a great deal to take in, even if we choose to put aside the raging pandemic for the moment and concentrate on the purely political. We won’t be able to grasp the full implications of everything that’s happened for years and even decades to come.