As the airship descended closer, Lew watched the open vehicle pull up inside the Halstead Street gate to discharge its passengers, and understood, with some perplexity, that it was an excursion group, in town for a tour among the killing-floors and sausage rooms, an instructive hour of throat-slashing, decapitation, skinning, gutting, and dismemberment—"Say, Mother, come have a look at these poor bastards!" following the stock in their sombre passage from arrival in rail cars, into the smells of shit and chemicals, old fat and tissue diseased, dying, and dead, and a rising background choir of animal terror and shouting in human languages few of them had heard before, till the moving chain brought in stately parade the hook-hung carcasses at last to the chilling-rooms.
* * * * * * * * * *
And here is "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show on its head." The stark opposite of an outside performance of skill and mettle, man against beast; a wild display of life lived to its fullest and, although fictional, at least a semblance of a fair fight. The animals at least somewhat an active participant in its eventual demise (not in the fictional representation of past events which the show portrays, of course!). But inside the dark of the Stockyards, it's the 1890s version of going to see the latest Saw movie. Perhaps the Stockyard is simply more truthful and to the point: this is how it ends so why bother with all the spectacle and theater? Although what's the point of life without spectacle and theater? Even for a cow? We need "Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show" so that we aren't overwhelmed by existence's taint of shit and chemicals, full of disease and cries of animal terror as we're all railroaded down an ever narrowing chute to be paraded out in front of family and friends for one last look before the dirt rains down upon our bodies, erasing us from all human memory in one or two generations.
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