Worth A Squirt Quotes

Before I knew it, the first animal had entered the chute. Various cowboys were at different positions around the animal and began carrying out their respective duties. Tim looked at me and yelled, “Stick it in!” With utter trepidation, I slid the wand deep into the steer’s rectum. This wasn’t natural. This wasn’t normal. At least it wasn’t for me. This was definitely against God’s plan. I was supposed to check the monitor and announce if the temperature was above ninety-degrees. The first one was fine. But before I had a chance to remove the probe, Tim set the hot branding iron against the steer’s left hip. The animal let out a guttural Mooooooooooooo!, and as he did, the contents of its large intestine emptied all over my hand and forearm. Tim said, “Okay, Ree, you can take it out now.” I did. I didn’t know what to do. My arm was covered in runny, stinky cow crap. Was this supposed to happen? Should I say anything? I glanced at my sister, who was looking at me, completely horrified. The second animal entered the chute. The routine began again. I stuck it in. Tim branded. The steer bellowed. The crap squirted out. I was amazed at how consistent and predictable the whole nasty process was, and how nonchalant everyone--excluding my sister--was acting. But then slowly…surely…I began to notice something. On about the twentieth animal, I began inserting the thermometer. Tim removed his branding iron from the fire and brought it toward the steer’s hip. At the last second, however, I fumbled with my device and had to stop for a moment. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that when I paused, Tim did, too. It appeared he was actually waiting until I had the thermometer fully inserted before he branded the animal, ensuring that I’d be right in the line of fire when everything came pouring out. He had planned this all along, the dirty dog. Seventy-eight steers later, we were finished. I was a sight. Layer upon layer of manure covered my arm. I’m sure I was pale and in shock. The cowboys grinned politely. Tim directed me to an outdoor faucet where I could clean my arm. Marlboro Man watched as he gathered up the tools and the gear…and he chuckled. As my sister and I pulled away in the car later that day, she could only say, “Oh. My. God.” She made me promise never to return to that awful place. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’d found out later that this, from Tim’s perspective, was my initiation. It was his sick, twisted way of measuring my worth.

HARRIS: It’s worth emphasizing the connection between perception and action. It’s one thing to talk about it in the context of catching a cricket ball, but when you talk about the evolutionary logic of having developed perceptual capacities in the first place, the link to action becomes even more explicit. We haven’t evolved to perceive the world as it is for some abstract epistemological reason. We’ve evolved to perceive what’s biologically useful. And what’s biologically useful is always connected—at least when we’re talking about the outside world—to actions. If you can’t move, if you can’t act in any way, there would have been very little reason to evolve a capacity for sight, for instance. SETH: Absolutely. The sea squirt—a very simple marine creature—swims about during its juvenile phase looking for a place to settle, and once it settles and starts filter feeding, it digests its own brain, because it no longer has any need for perceptual or motor competence. This is often used as an unkind analogy for getting tenure in academia. But you’re absolutely right: perception is not about figuring out what’s really there. We perceive the world as it’s useful for us to do so. This is particularly important when we think about perception of the internal state of the body, which we mentioned earlier. Brains are not for perceiving the world as it is. They didn’t evolve for doing philosophy or complex language, they evolved to guide action. But even more fundamentally, brains evolved to keep themselves and their bodies alive. The most basic cycle of perception and action doesn’t involve the outside world or the exterior surfaces of the body at all. It’s all about regulating the internal physiology of the body and keeping it within bounds compatible with survival. This gives us a clue about why experiences of mood and emotion, and the basic experiences of selfhood, have a fundamentally nonobject-like character.

In the early twentieth century the problem of production had been solved; after that it was the problem of consumption that plagued society. In the 1950's and '60's, consumer commodities and farm products began to pile up in vast towering mountains all over the Western World. As much as possible was given away--but that threatened to subvert the open market. By 1980, the pro tem solution was to heap up the products and burn them: billions of dollars' worth, week after week. Each Saturday, townspeople had collected in sullen, resentful crowds to watch the troops squirt gasoline on the cars and toasters and clothes and oranges and coffee and cigarettes that nobody could buy, igniting them in a blinding conflagration. In each town there was a burning-place, fenced off, a kind of rubbish and ash heap, where the fine things that could not be purchased were systematically destroyed. The Quizzes had helped, a trifle. If people couldn't afford to buy the expensive manufactured goods, they could still hope to win them. The economy was propped up for decades by elaborate give-away devices that dispensed tons of glittering merchandise. But for every man who won a car and a refrigerator and a TV set there were millions who didn't. Gradually, over the years, prizes in the Quizzes grew from material commodities to more realistic items: power and prestige. And at the top, the final exalted post: dispenser of power--Quizmaster, and that meant running the Quiz itself.

I hold her eye while I slap the two halves together and take an extra-large, extra-obnoxious bite. Peanut butter squirts out around the entire thing and the bagel fucking burns the roof of my mouth, but it’s worth the expression on her face.