Kafkaesque: of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially : having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality <Kafkaesque bureaucratic delays. Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
–
Imagine that you are living a middle-class life, slightly unconventional, independent of corporate strictures, in an unobtrusive and decidedly non-controversial work. You are doing the work your parents did, your grand-parents did, perhaps your family did for hundreds of years. You work with animals, horses, giving rides to people who want them, are happy to pay for them, and enjoy them. It has never been controversial work, or especially glamorous work, not in the great city, where glamorous work is everywhere.
You work hard, get up early, drive in heavy traffic to the city from Queens or Long Island or New Jersey, you support your family, pay your bills, have enough left over for vacations, to save for college tuition, even retirement, you and most of your colleagues dream of small farm in the country with animals – your horse, perhaps, some sheep, a place for the kids to visit.
You are not especially political, you use your cell phone, go online, but are not savvy in the new technology that is revolutionizing the world. You are quiet, clannish, children of the immigrant experience, close to your friends and family, but far outside the power circles of civic life. Like so many working people, you do not really have the time or money to keep up with all of the new communications tools. You have never been famous or glamorous or powerful or wished to be. You have never functioned in the public eye, or had attention called to your life. Your life is centered around family, not causes.
Your horses are not pets in the sense of dogs and cats, they are your partners and your livelihood, you treat them with great affection and respect, and they in return provide sustenance for you. You know that abused animals do not work well and are dangerous. You do not mistreat or abuse them.
For you, the American Dream is very present, very real, you get to work hard, follow the rules, earn a solid living, take care of your family. You love your work, you love your life.
__
Suddenly, really out of nowhere, there is danger everywhere. Your life is upended, changed forever.
You are under attack, you and your family is threatened. In a flash, your work is the most controversial work in the great city. A millionaire real estate developer – The Developer – has become obsessed with you and your work.
He is determined to end your way of life, to shut down your business and ban the horses from the city. He seems to work out of a righteous and unwavering fury, he calls you the worst kinds of names. He gathers a small group of committed people who seem, suddenly and with no reason you are aware of, enraged over what you do.
The people who seek to banish your work gather every week of the year on Sunday – the quietest day – to accuse of you in the loudest and most public way of things no one has ever accused you of, to call you awful names no one has ever called you, your parents, grandparents or ancestors before.
They call you murderer, torturer, they accuse you of being cruel to the horses, of starving them, of caring nothing about them, they poke the horses with placards to upset them and provoke and accident, they shout at your customers, even the children, they say you starve the horses, overwork them, keep them in “cells” too small to turn around or lie down in, they say you are a thief who takes advantage of the tourists and visitors. It is almost impossible to keep up with the accusations, they fall suddenly, and like rain, out of the ether, all throughout the digital world, it is not possible to defend yourself, to answer them, to even keep up with them.
The Developer is determined, he funds an organization that collects millions of dollars showing photographs of fallen and dead horses, claiming you hurt them, injured them, even kill them in the most uncaring of ways.The horses are sad, they say, depressed, pining for another life, their natural life in the great wilderness, where they can run free and socialize with their fellow horses.
These accusations do not come from the police, the authorities, the regulators, they come outside of the system of government and law, the accusers have no mandate from anyone, no expertise, no experience. There are no safeguards or processes or procedures to protect you from such an enraged mob.
The Developer gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to a new mayor and helps him win his campaign, the mayor promises to carry out The Developer’s wishes, he will ban the horses as quickly and totally as it is possible. The Developer spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to build prototype vintage electric cars, he has it all figured out, he says, the cars will replace the horses, they do not, he says, belong in the city. If you wish to feed your family, you will drive one of the cars, he says.
It shocks and frightens you to learn that it does not seem to matter to anyone that the accusations are not true. The horses are not abused. You have not harmed or killed them. They have room to lie down and turn around. They get good and fresh food every day, and the best medical care, they live a long time, their lungs are not filled with soot and exhaust, they do not harm the people of the city, they are the healthiest and best cared for horses in the world, they are not overworked. They are not sad and depressed.
Month by month, you become more unsettled and confused, sometimes over time frightened or depressed or exhausted. The people surrounding you and threatening you are not animal lovers, owners of horses, experts on horses or animals. They know nothing about horses or animals. Mostly, they live in apartments in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Queens, they have no experience with animals who are not pets, they have no idea how they should live or be treated. They say the most unknowing and foolish things about them, their comments never challenged in the sophisticated city. They believe only they can decide the fate of the horses, and of you.
All this lying and hatred, you think, all these many lies, and always in the name of morality and love. The world is upside down. You wait for it to make sense, but it does not.
Over time, you come to see that you do not exist, really, you are no longer a real human being. None of these people will speak to you – not the protesters, the mayor, the developer. They say they will never speak to you, or agree to hear what you think, your work is “immoral” and worse. They dismiss you and your work in the cruelest way, they call you “random people,” they exclude you from the civic community of reasonable and moral people. You are not to be consulted or heard or given dignity. There is not a single time when you are offered the opportunity for defense.
The Developer and his followers will not meet with you, see the horses, hear or ask for an explanation of their charges. They speak only to journalists, or more frequently, through their blogs and websites. You will never be given a chance to refute them. There is no accountability on these sites, no challenge or dissent or disagreement is permitted, no space for the targets, corrections are never made. This is where the naive flock to see their photos of suffering animals and send their money, feeling good about themselves.
Almost all of the people who see these images and awful accusations believe them and repeat their ugly accusations day after day, week after week, year after year. The journalists and politicians do not talk to you either, they do not come and visit the stables, they seem to accept everything the developer and his angry colleagues tell them, the mayor – who has never owned or lived with animal – is adamant in his belief that your work is evil, he says so and promises to find a way to end your work and way of life as soon as he can. This is the new reality you and your families are asked to live with.
There is no one to speak with, no escape, no end in sight, no one who will listen, negotiate, compromise or relent. You are trapped in a nightmare, a maze from which there is no relief, no escape is possible. Slowly, inexorably, you come to see you are in a kind of prison from where there is no release, no justice, no prospect of a trial or fair hearing, they will never stop, understand, or care what you say.
And then, this is your choice, do you go mad, flee, surrender, give up your freedom and way of life. Or stay in the maze, for as long as you can bear it.
_
One of the marvels of the carriage horse controversy is the dignity of the people in the carriage trade, of their drivers and the owners. Some have lost their tempers and shouted back at the demonstrators taunting them for years, but it is striking how they have kept their calm, stood their ground, spoken in decency and patience. Every day this needless controversy drags on, the contrast between the carriage trade and their tormenters becomes more vivid and powerful.
The term “kafkaesque” is somewhat overused in our society, but mostly, it has come to symbolize entrapment in an irrational, dangerous and terrifying system from which there is no escape. The term does not apply to people stuck in a traffic jam or a long line, it is much more frightening and dangerous than that. Some people use it to describe the experience of being caught in a corporate or governmental bureaucracy, a phone chain or a system of impenetrable regulations and systems in which the individual can never escape or triumph.
It is always meant to describe something that is irrational, frustrating, or frightening.
___
Franz Kafka died in June of 1924, he was a German language writer of novels and short stories, according to Wickipedia, he is regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Most of his works explore the themes and narratives of alienation, “physical and psychological brutality, parent-child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, labyrinths of bureaucracy, and mystical transformations.”
If he wished to illustrate his idea very powerfully in fiction, as he often did, he might well have written the story of the New York Carriage Horses. If you spent any time in the labyrinth that is the assault on the New York Carriage Horses, and you have read any of the works of Kafka (I think especially of The Metamorphosis), then you may come to the mystical and jarring revelation of the carriage horse story:
This is Kafka’s vision, this is his story, this is his prophecy. It is a story in which the individual is trapped in a hopeless labyrinth of irrationality, terror, cruelty and bureaucracy. This is the story that he wrote about. One afternoon, sitting in the New York stables, wondering for my life what this irrational controversy is really about, I felt disoriented. I was in the labyrinth, in the maze, inside of a Frank Kafka story. I saw it clearly, I suddenly understood what it really meant when something is called kafkaesque. What Kafka so brilliantly imagined in his time has become true in ours. I wondered if this was real or if I had wandered into a mystical space of my own tortured imagination.
In his famous work Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka writes“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” This is very much the feeling I got when I attempted to penetrate the thick cloud of accusations and arguments the animal rights movement has used against the carriage horses. I encounter one lie after another, one distortion after another, a great dearth of facts, truth or empathy.
It was not as if there were some truth in their arguments, the truly frightening thing about the campaign to banish the horses is that there is virtually no truth to their arguments, almost all of which have been refused or rejected by a host of observers, experts, writers, veterinarians, animal lovers, independent organizations. It is as if they are not assaulting real human beings, but inanimate one-dimensional cardboard objects without feeling or ethics of any kind. In de-humanizing the carriage drivers so ruthlessly, they had lost their own humanity.
I felt sometimes as if I were drowning in a sea of rage and irrationality, in a deep, dark and swirling tempest from which there was no escape, no light, no resolution.
I felt as if I were a New York carriage driver.
I would be in full support of you if I hadnt seen some awful video of skeletal horses and abuse of very ill collapsed horses. How do you answer this? Also New York is incredibly hot in Summertime isnt it? You think its fair to the horses?
No of course not I’ve had animals all of my life and taken good care of them. I’ve never once said it’s good to work animals in the heat, which is why I respect my neighbors for not doing it. All I know is my Amish neighbors who take care of the animals I have no idea what other Amish people do and I’m not about to devote my life to go to into Mexico and watch horses killed so I can write vicious and nasty letters to strangers. I work for a living.
. Your question is insulting and ignorant you have no idea what I am like and are too lazy to find out. I see my neighbors and their horses every day and they treat them well. That’s all I know and I will not lie about it to people like you who seem to live seem to live in loes, hatred and self righteousness I never let my animals outside in the lextreme heat. They always have shelter if they need it and cold fresh water. I don’t need a lecture from some pompous stranger in order to do that.
This is why so many people have come to hate the animal rights movement which is a tragedy for animals. I know now that nothing will stop your lies and assumptions, but I will not stop trying. Call kinds of people of different orders in color abuse their animals around here, but none of them have ever been bothered by the people who should be monitoring it My neighbor does not abuse his animals.And I will never lie about my neighbor in order to appease people as dishonest as you .Take care.