Chicken on the cross

KARIN SPAINK

Chris Korda is the leader of the Church of Euthanasia. This church is mainly concerned with the environment and overpopulation, but does not do so in the manner of Greenpeace, Lekker Dier or the Malthusser Bond. There are already friendly campaigns, reasonable lobbies and disturbing figures enough.

No more ads with pitiful seal eyes, no whalers getting in their way, no pictures of begging and starving Africans. The CoE advocates a more heavy-handed approach, by putting our own duplicity centre stage.

If people want to eat meat, fine, but why not our own? We bury our own good meat now. By what right do we think we can sacrifice animals and make them live a bestial existence for our pleasures?

Cow and pig farming also costs more food than it produces. Isn't it ironic - since people worldwide are starving - to sacrifice so much for that daily Western piece of food? And oh, you want to save Mother Earth? Very commendable, do it! The best way is to kill yourself, since humanity is the greatest destroyer of the earth. 'Save the planet, kill yourself' stated the CoE, and gave a series of sound tips for suicides.

The CoE soon came up against an even greater hypocrisy than that concerning the environment: that of faith. For example, the Christian churches were horrified by the idea of cannibalism. Peoples who ate their dead to honor them were in dire need of being Christianized. What did the churches then teach the pagans? To eat the body of Christ.

A CoE priest then made an ironic connection between Catholicism, cannibalism and pork chops: he nailed a frozen chicken to a cross and said, "This chicken died for your sins." In an equally grand gesture, the CoE pointed out its inconsistencies to the American religious right: being shocked by abortion, yet believing that homosexuals should burn in hell and abortion doctors should be shot.

The solution? "Eat a queer fetus for Jesus." False, awkward, biting, sarcastic, resolute, and hilarious.

I already knew them from the internet, but after I saw the CoE on TV in 1997, I promptly became a member, the first Dutch person to do so. I had to solemnly promise that I would never have children (we are against overpopulation, after all) and that was that: I was a member of a church for the first time in my life. Oh, and I could also become a martyr of the church, Korda told me. If I ever commit suicide - strictly voluntarily, of course - and mention them in my suicide note, I will automatically be promoted to Saint Spaink.

When Jonathan Swift, in a short essay in 1729, explained that Irish Catholics, being desperately poor, would be better off selling their children to the rich for food - there would be fewer children to support, which would benefit everyone, and the impoverished parents would at last have some income - everyone read the essay as a satirical indictment of the horrific situation in Ireland, where people were starving to death as a result of oppression by the Protestant English, and as a poignant commentary on the behaviour of humanity as a whole.

Now that Chris Korda, as a pastor of the Church of Euthanasia, says that people would be better off eating each other than animals, if they really want to consume meat - "Why would we put good meat in the ground to rot there, while millions of animals have to suffer in the bio-industry for our meatball?" - half of the Dutch press and politics are confused. Amsterdam CDA council member Hans Res - himself a butcher - got so angry that he asked mayor Cohen to ban a performance by Korda tomorrow in Paradiso on the grounds of 'public order'.

Korda shows her video clip I Like to Watch during her (musical) performance. The attack on the Twin Towers is intercut with pornographic images, so that the exploding towers change into squirting phalluses. Shocking, some judged, but I thought it was not that bad, and not even such a far-fetched analogy now that the United States itself believes it has been raped and wants to patch up its masculinity by overwhelming other countries.

The comparison is no more outrageous than the earlier one between the Gulf War and video games, but it is ten times more honest: the lust of the cameras is factored in, as is the bewildered fascination of the viewers.

In the United States, the clip is completely legal, there has hardly been any commentary on it. CDA council member Res wants to ban Korda's performance. More Catholic than the Pope. But then again, he belongs to a different church.

© Het Parool, 12-11-2002

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.