Goines On: Wind rushings

Image from
Juan de Valdés Leal’s
“Finis gloriae mundi” (1672)
Click image for more vignettes

In perusing his archives, Goines was reminded of something from thirteen years earlier. The passenger window in their car had stopped working, and as he was driving with both front windows open to a repair shop, a cattle truck passed him on the interstate, and he got a nose full of the aroma of livestock.
    The cattle were presumably on their way to a slaughterhouse, and Goines had felt bad about that.
    He still felt bad about animal slaughter. Those animals were related to us, as his 2010 reading of Richard Dawkins’ 2004 book, The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, had underscored for him:

…evolution tells us there are lines of gradual continuity linking literally every species to every other. When we are talking history, even apparently discontinuous modern species like sheep and dogs are linked, via their common ancestor, in unbroken lines of smooth continuity.

    Goines had reflected 13 years earlier that in Nazi Germany, people must have marveled on occasion to see a truck or boxcar full of Jews, or gypsies, or homosexuals, or “mental defectives” pass and wondered where they were being herded off to. The Nazis actually passed laws making the herding legal – laws which were overturned following Hitler’s defeat.
    Goines reflected now that it was morally and theoretically possible for the United States and other nations to overturn their laws approving the slaughter of our relatives in the animal kingdom….
    Goines distracted himself from that unlikely scenario by recalling that the defective passenger window (and the car’s age – about 18 years) had led to their trading the car in for a new Volvo that fall….Sic transit gloria mundi.

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