Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Abandoned Hipster Chickens

In the city of Portsmouth it is illegal to keep hens in your yard for egg production. Many refer to these as “backyard chickens.” In many other parts of the country it is legal to keep them and that is not going so well for the chickens. In fact, the new trend of raising these backyard birds has become fashion among a group of counter culture that has become known as “hipsters”. I woke this morning to an article on some form of news media stating in the title stating; “Chickens Increasingly Abandoned At Animal Shelters By Hipster Farmers”. I found this to be amusing and horrific at the same time. I was amused by the fact that these orphaned fowl are being rendered as such by hipsters and appalled by the cruelty of taking on “egg laying pets” as a short sighted statement of coolness which is now ultimately leading to the wholesale euthanization of what were once soft, cuddly creatures. Many arguments have been made about the lack of humanity in chicken industry slaughterhouses, and I will not echo that argument or attempt to draw any likeness to this new threat. I will however try and get to the marrow of why a human would think it chic to take a chic as a pet, and why, once that little fuzz ball turns into a lace-less, low top shoe-pecking pest, one might feel justified in simply boxing them up and carting them off to a local animal shelter. Most of these kids would treat their mobile telephones with a higher respect. In examining this phenomenon I must first get to the bottom of what a hipster is. I looked in several dictionaries and periodicals to try and find a definition, and I have found some very interesting observations. For example: Wikipedia refers to “hipster” as “a culture of young, urban middle-class adults and older teenagers that appeared in the 1990’s”. They associate this subculture with “independent music, a varied, non-mainstream fashion sensibility, progressive or independent political views, alternative spirituality or atheism/agnosticism, and alternative lifestyles”. Douglass Haddow referred to these folks in “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization” as a “mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior(s).” While in “Time Out New York” Christian Lorentzen asserts that “hipsterism fetishizes the authentic” characteristics of most “fringe movements of the postwar era—beat, hippie, punk, even grunge”, and borrows from the “cultural stores of every unmelted ethnicity”, and “regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.” Another contemporary columnist Mark Greif wrote in a New York Times editorial entitled “The Sociology of the Hipster”, that the term” ‘hipster’ is often used by youth from disparate backgrounds to jockey for social position”, while questioning the contradictory nature of that label and the way that no one thinks of themselves as a hipster: “Paradoxically, those who used the insult were often themselves said to resemble hipsters – they wore the skinny jeans and big eye glasses, gathered in tiny enclaves in big cities, and looked down on mainstream fashion and ‘tourists’” Greif is said to believe that the difficulty in analyzing the term stems from the fact that any attempt to do so provokes universal anxiety since it “calls everyone’s bluff”. In his conclusion, he draws from Pierre Bourdieu’s “Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste”. He writes: “You can see how hipster neighborhoods are crossroads where young people from different origins, all crammed together, jockey for social gain. One hipster subgroup’s strategy is to disparage others as ‘liberal arts college grads with too much time on their hands’; the attack is leveled at the children of the upper middle class who move to cities after college with hopes of working in the ‘creative professions’. These hipsters are instantly declassed, reservoired in abject internships and ignored in the urban hierarchy – but able to use college-taught skills of classification, collection and appreciation to generate a superior body of cultural ‘cool’”. He continues: “They, in turn, may malign the ‘trust fund hipsters’. This challenges the philistine wealthy who, possessed of money but not the nose for culture, convert real capital into ‘cultural capital’ (as Bourdieu calls it), acquiring subculture as if it were ready-to-wear. (Think of Paris Hilton in a trucker hat.) Both groups, meanwhile, look down on the couch-surfing, old-clothes-wearing hipsters who seem most authentic but are also often the most socially precarious—the lower-middle-class young, moving up through style, but with no backstop of parental culture or family capital. They are the bartenders and boutique clerks who wait on their well-to-do peers and wealthy tourists. Only on the basis of their cool clothes can they be ‘superior’: hipster knowledge compensates for economic immobility.” In other words, as Wikipedia touts, “Greif’s efforts put the term ‘hipster’ into a socioeconomic framework rooted in the petty bourgeois tendencies of a youth generation unsure of their future social status.” And the “cultural trend is indicative of a social structure with heightened economic anxiety and lessened class mobility.” Well, that is quite a bit on a little word now isn’t it? What about the chickens? Why would these disenfranchised and wanna-be upwardly mobile spawn of Hunter S. Thompson’s “doomed generation” be so interested in raising chickens? I live in North Carolina now, and I can assure you that having a dozen fresh eggs with which to make a luscious crème brulee, or Sunday French toast is a wonderful thing; but backyard chickens are legal down here. We have the space. So I ask myself again; why would some ultra-cool-kid bartender in Portsmouth’s Olde Towne district get the urge to suddenly drive out to Airline Blvd to the feed and seed, or out to the country to some chicken hatchery and scoop up a few of those little peckers and build a coop? When I was just a young hipster, I was content with the co-op, or the availability of those farm fresh eggs on the side of the road on a Thursday tailgate sale. I loved the fresh eggs sure, but I wasn’t rushing to get how-to directions from some internet site on building a better henhouse. What are these kids of today thinking? I guess, as I have said many times, it can be attributed to what I call “upper level shit”, or that which is above our heads. It is a general term I use to refer to questions for which I have no real answer. Example: why is it raining but all of the bushes are covered in ice? (upper level shit) Why have so many friends of mine from Portsmouth died in the past year from either natural or drug related causes? (upper level shit) Why can’t three hundred million pissed off people overthrow five hundred and forty five little minds who continually run our lives and living into the ground after they told us that they loved us and wouldn’t do that to us? The answer once again is simply upper level shit. I think I first got the term from watching a weather forecast and subsequently training myself to determine the tracks of hurricanes instead of always opting to be prepared. Wait! That must be the answer to all of the questions I have posed about hipsters, economic uncertainty and chicken rearing; stupid human laziness. There is an organization called Chicken Run Rescue in Minneapolis where the owner Mary Britton Clouse cites that in 2001 only fifty chickens were dropped off at area shelters and by 2012 that number had grown to five hundred. In an article Clouse said “it comes down to people not wanting to invest the time or the energy to raise the chickens.” Better yet, Clouse explained it like this; “People don’t know what they’re doing. And you’ve got this whole culture of people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing teaching every other idiot out there.” So I guess that’s it in a nutshell. When you have a whole generation of “winning participants” ready to change the world through their music, fashion, politics and even chicken regulations, somehow, everything just gets a little screwy, and in this case, hipsters deciding to raise backyard chickens seem to me are making a poor “fashion statement.” If there be any good news for the chickens at least, as I reminded you all at the start of this piece; it is illegal to raise chickens in the city limits of Portsmouth, Va. I don’t even need to resort to my old standby here, as it is much simpler than upper level shit in this case, just humans being dumb…under the sad and unfortunate guise of trying to fit in.

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