Seas incarnadine

The Cove

Crit

I tried to get the author of a book I edited recently to tone down a parallel between the Holocaust and the ongoing slaughter of elephants in Africa. I tried because I know that many readers, perhaps most, will be outraged to the point of rejecting everything the book has to offer if the author clings to a stance that the worst thing humans can do to nonhuman animals has even the remotest equivalency with the worst thing humans have done to other humans.

So I tried to get her to tone it down a bit--tried but mostly failed. And now I'm kinda glad I failed (and also glad that scarcely anyone reads this, so I won't have to fend off angry commentary), because if the bloodfest I just saw--not Hollywood blood but dolphin blood, the footage captured with hidden high-def cameras planted by genuine guerrilla filmmakers--if that had nothing to do with holocaust, then we might as well abandon all pretense to being the planet's most evolved species, or even its smartest. If lancing a corralled dolphin until it spouts red and sinks, then lancing another, and another, and another, until the massacre of trapped animals is complete--if that doesn't merit the most profound censure we can summon, if the savagery that motivates it isn't the equal of that that motivated the sickest SS commandant, then point the way to the Lower Species Consulate, because I'd like to petition for a change in citizenship.

And this will be sort of a hot-button anticlimax, I suppose, but the part of the film that isn't holocaust is slave trade: the dolphins that are killed for food (mercury-rich food, incidentally, much of it falsely labeled as having come from whales) are the ones that aren't handsome enough to attract buyers for all the Sea World clones around the world. These are essentially aquatic circuses, and like terrestrial circuses, they treat their animals like the cash cows they are. The difference between intentional cruelty and good intentions is the difference between the sadistic overseer and the benign slaveowner. And I've come to believe that zoos are only marginally better.

OK, that's my annual quota of preachiness, and then some. I'll just leave you with a link to the Oceanic Preservation Society's website.

Trailers

• Cold Souls--Oh, hell, yeah, notwithstanding a lukewarm Times review. Looks far too Eternal Sunshine for me to miss it.
  
• The September Issue--Why I should care about Anna Wintour and her big fat baby is beyond me, but it actually looks kinda interesting.