beLIEf

In advocating for animals through writing, in order to get your attention, dear reader – comrade, convert, future vegan – I want to ask the unasked questions and I only want to say things in a new way. If I am boring, you don’t read and I fail.

Without fictionalizing, my most authentic tool is memory. And as you may relate, in life the lines between fact and fiction can blur like heat on a desert road.

This is a piece about our anti-rodeo campaign, I promise, but I’m going to take you down the rabbit holes I followed the cottontails into. If you stick around – and, believe me, it’s hard to dig your way out when gems sparkle behind each labyrinthine twist and devastating turn – the payoff might be pretty good.

Throughout this campaign, I have to make the case to people who have been to rodeos, who participate in them and who want to bring them here, that rodeos are harmful to animals. We share the facts of the event, but our beliefs about those facts are different.

Here’s what the illusionist Criss Angel taught me about the word believe: it contains the word lie, right there in the middle of it. Which leads us to our first hole.

Rabbit hole #1, Cirque du Soleil, in three parts

One day I was doing laundry and found two ticket stubs to a Cirque du Soleil show in my husband’s jeans. It was near the end of our twenty-year marriage.

I quit my editing job, became a massage therapist, hooked up with the enigmatic Rolfer/truck driver at the ashram where I took yoga classes, and moved across the country. For two years we tried to build something together; when that failed, he took a trucking job, and I climbed into a semi with a crockpot and a bunch of dried beans, pretty much everything I owned. But before long, he quit that too, and without warning. We ended up homeless in a Camry somewhere in Washington state in the dead of winter.

For his next job, he had a badge from the Port of Los Angeles, a laptop with his name on it, insurance cards, business calls, stories about coworkers I was going to meet. He was picking up rare cars for high-end rentals, he said, and moving them between offices in Palm Springs and Las Vegas. A sign-on bonus: a comped weekend at the Wynn Las Vegas. There was cash, a suite, a black Lamborghini, tickets to Cirque du Soleil’s adult show, Zumanity. We should get married, he said. We got a license at the courthouse, a diamond from a pawn shop, exchanged vows in the Lambo in a drive-through chapel. Classy, I know.

Six months later I made him let me ride along on a work run that didn't exist. In downtown Vegas, he drove around in circles. At a red light I locked onto a billboard for Criss Angel’s collab with Cirque du Soleil. It was called BeLIEve.

"There is no job,” my husband eventually said. “And there is no money."

What he meant was that he had fabricated an expansive story, upheld it, and spent all of my money on escorts, gambling, cars and hotels. And I had been choosing to live in a state of suspended disbeLIEf.

What came after -- what he told me about himself, about why he needed the lie more than he needed me to know the truth – isn't mine to put on this page. But when I recovered from catatonia, broke and alone on the bedroom floor of my empty condo, I got an annulment.

Follow that rabbit.

Rabbit hole #2, philosophy?

I couldn’t stand at the podium and just say I believe – there’s that damn word again – rodeo is animal abuse. That the events cause harm, pain, suffering, trauma to animals. That animals are not ours to use for entertainment, sport or anything else. That animals do not give consent, are not property, that they are exploited, that this is forced labor. That this is speciesism.

I mean, I did say all those things. That was after I realized I also couldn’t just stand at the podium and make emotional pleas. I said a still-nursing calf is chased down under bright lights, roped by the neck, yanked so hard her throat compresses. Then she's slammed onto her back and tied up.

I said the horses and cows and sheep in the rodeo didn’t have a voice and I was mandated to speak for them.

None of that worked as strategy.

I mean, do you own a gut-level certainty, something that arose from nowhere and has never not been? If the knowing is intrinsic, buried deep in your core, it makes sense that it’s bathed in emotion and blanketed in the sinews of your inner landscape. So you try to dig it out, wash it off and re-present your reading of an experience in a way someone with a different take can understand.

Wait, hold up. Can we find different words for beLIEve and beLIEfs? Like, might I instead say it is my opinion or theory, or that I think or feel?

Words are failing, signifying nothing.

Last week I went to my first gathering of the Joshua Tree Philosophy Symposium, hoping to understand something about beliefs. I enjoyed the mostly free-for-all roundtable of lively and sometimes stymied dialectics. But the bulk of the discussion stayed in the realm of metaphysics, as the evening’s topic was something about free will, chosen randomly (presumably, or had it been predetermined?) from the crumpled papers we’d scribbled questions on and put in a basket. I already knew that religion wasn’t going to answer my questions; within an hour I knew philosophy wasn’t going to help me either.

Nevertheless, I came home from the philosophy club meeting and tried in one night on the internet to apprehend ontology (what belief is), epistemology (how beliefs are justified), psychology of belief (how beliefs form), and ethics (what we ought to believe) so I could refine my campaign strategy.

Yeah, I gave up, my mental muscle left flaccid and floundering. Just look at the word rodeo. The Latin root is rotare, “to rotate” or “to go around.” In a circle, in an arena, in your head.

Hey, do I see a rabbit hole up ahead?

Rabbit hole #3, code

I often wondered if I had imagined that billboard under the brightest lights with my bleary eyes and breaking heart. It wasn’t until I started writing this – and did a Google Image Search for “Criss Angel billboard Las Vegas 2009” – that I examined the artifact.

To highlight a core of magic, illusion depends on convincing an audience to accept a carefully crafted lie as reality. The entire premise of BeLIEve highlights that perception is shaped not only by what we see, but also by what we choose to believe.

That made me think of carnism, Dr. Melanie Joy’s explanation of why people eat animals (that was the question I put in the philosophy basket, by the way). Joy says meat eaters subscribe to an ideology so invisible that they don’t even know they hold it, that they don’t experience it as a belief. To me, that sounds like norms and traditions, and I can extend them to the rodeo argument.

Similarly, literary scholar Terry Eagleton says ideology makes a socially constructed way of seeing feel like objective reality. Suspension of disbelief – not looking at the suffering of the animal on the plate or in the arena – can curdle into something people don't even notice they're doing. He says beliefs are embedded in power relations and cultural narratives, that they are socially conditioned, emotionally grounded, and culturally mediated phenomena.

Rodeo runs on an invisible belief, dressed up in its own linguistic sleight of hand. From the Latin comes the Spanish rodear, a “roundup” – the practical, unglamorous work of gathering cattle. American English, with a cowboy twang-drawl, turned rodeo into an "exhibition" and "contest."

Emotion and philosophy have no place at the podium. This time I am going to put on a suit (no, not really) and argue a code section.

Existing municipal code prohibits beating, tormenting, or cruelly ill-treating an animal. It also protects wild animals used in performance, barring any device likely to cause suffering.

Read plainly, the code already appears to prohibit the tools and techniques used in rodeos. There is no exemption carved out for the spurs, flank straps, ropes and prods. Wild animals get protection from being forced to perform through pain; domesticated animals don’t.

I'm not asking for a new principle – only equal treatment under the law (does that ever sound familiar!).

OK, get out of that rabbit hole now, come up for air, feel the sun on your face, and let’s piece this puzzle together.

After Vegas and all that, when I finally landed alone in Joshua Tree, I found a big top out in the desert built by a very sweet couple who performed in Cirque du SoGay. We became friends, and they trained me on aerial silks – you know, the ones Cirque performers fly on. Nobody there hid tickets from me or handed tickets to me. On the silks, you either have the strength to climb and hang, or you don’t. My belief had no bearing on gravity. It was kind of a dream come true, but I never want to hear or write the words Cirque du Soleil again. That karma cycle is done, baby.

As far as rodeo goes in this town, beliefs don’t matter. If I can get the protections in the existing code applied equally, the curtain will close and the arena will finally go dark.

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