God help me. I’m three days into a vegan diet and horrible things are happening to me. I can’t feel my earlobes. And last night I watched Alive, the 1993 film about the crash of a Uruguayan airliner in 1972 whose survivors were reduced to cannibalism, and the predominant emotion I felt was not horror, but envy. Those people had meat in their diet. The only thing that made me sorry for their plight was their failure to pack an emergency stockpile of A.1. sauce into their luggage.
Why am I doing this? Simple. Because I’ve been listening to Vegan Reich, that fanatical bunch of imbeciles who took intolerance—against meat eaters, leather shoe wearers, druggies, smokers, drinkers, women who get abortions, and gays—to queasy-making degrees. Their philosophy, which they dubbed hardline and spell out in part on 1995’s Vanguard, made straightedge bands like Minor Threat look like icons of “live and let live,” but—and this is the frightening part—their melodic brand of hardcore brainwashed me, yes brainwashed me, into trying veganism myself.
The odds were stacked against me from the start. Why, I couldn’t even hack it as a vegetarian a while back. I subsisted for two days on acorns and thistles, and at a cookout on day three snatched a hot dog off my brother’s roasting stick and devoured it in a single glorious bite. It was almost worth choking to death. That same night I dreamed I was in a barnyard at midnight, trying to lure a chicken into a sack. “Come here, you clucking little morsel you. Pappa needs a brand new bag of chicken fingers.”
To their credit, Vegan Reich (they’ve been quiescent since 1999’s “Jihad” EP)—were also starkly opposed to racism and sexism, and like many of my meat-eating ilk I have moral qualms about the way the animals that end up on the end of my fork are treated. But Vegan Reich—who advocated anarchy leading to the creation of a “vegan dictatorship”—took things way too far. Like Colonel Kurtz in the Cambodian jungle, their methods were unsound. Formed in 1987 by singer/ guitarist/ songwriter Sean Muttaqi, the band proceeded to release songs such as “The Way It Is,” which included such moderate lyrics, pointed at meat eaters, as “Expect no fucking mercy/If you’re guilty you will pay/No chances to discuss it/You’re gonna fucking hang.” O-kay. Do I want the burger or the noose?
And that’s just one of the eight friendly missives that constitute the songs on Vanguard, a “best of” LP of sorts. On “This Is It,” Muttaqi casually informs us that our options are simple; become a vegan or “you’ll face extermination.” Meanwhile, on “No One Is Innocent” Muttaqi flatly condemns fence-sitters with the nicey-nice lines, “If you don’t stand firm on the side of right/You’re nothing but a waste of life/So you’d better choose a fucking side/And not be sitting in the middle/When the bullets start to fly.” On the fiery screed “I, The Jury,” Muttaqi and Company attack a range of targets, including smokers (now he’s really pissing me off), drug users (the dick!), drunken drivers (guilty as charged), and so on. After “I, The Jury,” the hilariously titled “Mystic Warrior” comes as a relief, seeing as how it’s an instrumental and doesn’t threaten me with imminent death for the crime of smoking Marlboros.
As with “I, The Jury,” “Rage of a Prophet” proves that Muttaqi is that most dangerous of humans, a self-righteous prick who is convinced the rest of the world has fallen from what he termed its “natural order” (hence his assaults on abortion and gays) and that only he knows the proper way of living. “The wickedness you have sown,” he sings, “Will surely cause your blood to run/Nobody’s fault but your own/Remember that when you hear/… The executioner’s song!”
Why, shades of John Brown and Joseph Smith! Muttaqi’s megalomania and savage wrath are Biblical in proportion, and the last two songs on the LP actually come as a relief of sorts. I can commiserate with Muttaqi on his diatribe against animal testing, “Stop Talking—Start Revenging,” and I’m not particularly disturbed by his assault on a lapsed comrade, “Letter to Judas,” although once again it reveals Muttaqi’s psychotic megalomania, as he obviously sees himself as a latter-day Jesus come to redeem us, not with love but with Kurtz’s philosophy of “Exterminate all the brutes.”
All of Muttaqi’s fanatical and homicidal threats seem to have been idle ones; as of yet we do not live under a vegan dictatorship, and I’ve heard of no murders of meat eaters. That said, Muttaqi is not just some hateful crank. People who support abortion and members of the LGBT community are at very real risk because of people like the assholes in Vegan Reich, who took and presumably still take a militant stance against legal abortions and gays.
No, our boy Sean is a true believer, and there’s nothing more dangerous under the sun. It’s illustrative to point out that Muttaqi would have put such people as Moses, the Buddha, and Jesus Christ to death, while sparing the likes of those two ardent vegetarians, Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson. Meat is murder; it’s undeniable as well as lamentable. But people will always eat meat, and the best we can do is to treat the animals we kill for food as humanely as possible while they’re alive. It’s a sad compromise, I know, but we will never do better.
My attempt at veganism was a stunning failure. Far from converting me, it convinced me that I am a savage carnivore, and that I always will be. I may not like it; my ravenous appetite for cheeseburgers and the like may even cause me tremendous guilt. But I am what I am, and tofu is, in my opinion, a much too serious punishment for my crimes. Why, it’s worse than death at the hands of Sean Muttaqi, even.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
F
