To the slaughter

"The Slaughter-House" by Alfred Hayes is a poem that has been much on my mind this past week, as reports have continued to populate my news feed about the appalling conditions essential workers are facing in the meat processing industry, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hayes is somewhat of a left-wing hero, having penned both the lyrics to "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," as well as the screenplay for The Bicycle Thief. One might, therefore, expect his treatment of the meatpacking industry to resemble Upton Sinclair's. It should be a naturalistic exposé and a cry of the conscience, right?

Yes, but not quite. His disturbing and potent poem is not primarily a statement of social concern—at least not in any topical sense. Rather, it uses the abattoir as a metaphor for the individual's role within the social cosmos as a whole—a vast and unfriendly mechanism that ultimately chews us up and swallows us, but which also supplies us with a purpose.

Such is the argument of the short poem, as I understand it. Each of us, and the poet himself, is consumed within the small compass of our existences by the immediacy of our own pain ("bleating my private woe"). But what this pain occludes from us, Hayes suggests, is the fact that our torment is neither meaningless nor unnecessary.

To the contrary, we are being used. Our meat will go "to make some world a meal." Our suffering, in other words, serves a "higher purpose"—but a less romantic metaphor for this familiar notion could scarcely be imagined. And Hayes is in no way suggesting that that higher purpose is a wholly beneficent - still less a merciful - one.

I first encountered this unforgettable piece of writing years ago in the Prosody Handbook by Beum and Shapiro. It takes on a far more immediate and less academic resonance, however, at a time when frontline workers - including those in the meat industry - are having to endure exceptional risks from COVID-19.

"We are not sacrificial lambs," at least one essential worker has put it. Yet they are being treated as such. They are being sent into work with grossly inadequate health and safety protections from the federal government. And with a president in office whose executive order on meat processing facilities seems to have been designed above all to shield companies from liability if their workers sicken or die from COVID-19 acquired on the job.

It is a horrifying image to contemplate. The workers supplying the United States with meat are, in a sense, being led to the slaughter. Knowing the risks, and acting with incredible courage, they nonetheless choose to do it—they go to work and keep the rest of the nation—all of us—fed and healthy. Even at the risk of their own lives.

Moreover, many of them are immigrants and refugees. They are, that is to say, putting their lives on the line for a country that has treated them—especially in recent years—with incredible callousness, scapegoating, and cruelty.

The altruism of this sacrifice, the image of the lamb... the more one thinks about it, the more one is put in mind of a Francis Bacon painting—one in which images from slaughterhouses - large hunks of butchered meat - are transmuted into crucifixions.

In seeking for Christ in our present moment, that is to say, it is well to start here: in the presence of immigrant workers who are putting themselves at risk every day in order to feed a nation that greets them with hostility and contempt. If anyone is turning the other cheek, it is they. If anywhere we find the innocent taking up the cross in order to save the guilty, it is here.

Is this suffering "redeemed," in some sense, because it goes to help feed and protect the rest of us— those with the incredible privilege of comfortably sheltering in place during the crisis? Hayes' poem was not trying to say that it is. He was merely stating a fact. He was pointing out that, in many cases, it is the individual's pain and sacrifice on which the larger social organism sustains itself.

That is certainly the case here. There is no way to entirely eliminate the dangers posed by COVID-19 to workers on the frontlines of the pandemic response—those cleaning and sanitizing our buildings, keeping the nation fed, transporting goods, stocking grocery shelves, providing childcare and healthcare. The people willing to do that work in this moment will always be people of unusual courage and generosity of spirit.

The question is whether our society can meet this incredible act of self-abandonment with some form of gratitude, in response. Can it bring itself to finally grant permanent legal status to TPS holders, DACA recipients, and undocumented workers, all of whom are disproportionately at work in essential industries?

Can it pass federal protections for frontline workers to ensure that the risks from the disease are minimized to the extent possible, and that all workers can receive paid sick leave in the midst of a pandemic?

Can it eliminate the cruel provisions of the last several relief packages that excluded undocumented taxpayers and mixed-status families from receiving stimulus checks, or from receiving emergency coverage for testing?

Or will we continue to feast, vampirically, on the innocent, and never honor the sacrifice they are making each day for the sake of our undeserving selves?