Meat Is Murder A couple of excellent articles i…
Meat Is Murder
A couple of excellent articles in the Guardian’s Weekend magazine today - The Killing Zone, written by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, is a terrifying overview of how dangerous the de-unionised meatpacking industry in the US has become and the level of contempt with which its employees are treated. Perhaps the most chilling part of all this, as with No Logo’s descriptions of the appalling work conditions in Asia at the behest of Nike et al, is that it’s become so normalised and indeed, usually passes without comment.
Is That It, on the other hand, is a biting retrospective of the playboy life of Prince Philip by Sally Vincent. I have little time for the Royal family and the monkeyprose that passes as journalism which is usually written about them, but Vincent’s piece is an excellent analysis of the power-broking and old values of the Royal family colliding with the shifting societal mores of the 20th century. It provides a fascinating history of Philip’s origins from a broken family riddled with mental illness and Nazi sympathisers through to his induction into the House of Windsor, alongside a psychological explanation of what has prompted him to become a total caricature with his perfectly ill-timed public outbursts. It reads like a dysfunctional fairy tale and clearly shows how the current crisis of the Royals within England is something that has been brewing for the last three or four decades rather than being a recent phenomenon.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- It’s Not The Simpsons, But…
- History in the Making
- Condolences Here are my favourite extracts from…
- Lizards and Lobsters He used to be reserve goal…
- Shouldn’t it be ‘cheaply’?
