The mad ABCs of BSE

An alphabetical specter is haunting the American supermarket, the specter of BSE. You probably thought that BSE was sufficiently repellent when it meant "Bachelor of Science in Engineering." Now that it means Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy it scarcely bears contemplation, which is one of the reasons, though only one, that everybody calls it "Mad Cow Disease" instead.

The question — "Where does Mad Cow Disease come from?" — has a short answer and a longer one. The short answer, of course, is "Canada." It is the crude revenge of a disgruntled neighbor that doesn't like our Iraqi policy — or very much else about us for that matter. The longer answer involves PBC, or Planned Bovine Cannibalism. It turns out that the best brains in the barnyard have been being fed to the second best brains by the third best. This third group, some shadowy captains of industry generally referred to as "Agri-Business," has been mincing up the inner organs of beasts and fowls in an industrial-sized Cuissinart before blending them with equal quantities of alfalfa dust and wheat chaff into little pellets of prairie Alpo called BDS (Bovine Dietary Supplements).

Now the forced-feeding of herbivore ruminants with animal cerebellum strikes me as a no-brainer on the face of it, and I do have some experience with bovine diet. I grew up on a place in the country — a "place" being the realistic name for a rural property of substantial acreage and insubstantial economic potential which only bald prevarication could call a "farm" and only a romantic imagination a "ranch." On this place we raised cattle or rather, to use the technical term, we "ran" cattle. Though I'm an English professor I cannot explain this sense of the verb "run," unless it refers to the hustling gait required of scrawny cattle that must scrounge around acres of igneous moraine and oak sprouts for a few wisps of grass to eat. These cows were lean and mean — but also clean. When they finally got to the dinner table, they wouldn't kill you, though their tensile strength encouraged you to reach for the sweet potatoes instead, just as God intended.

It may be difficult to find a silver lining to this encephalopathic cloud, but if there is one, it is linguistic. I refer to the name "Mad Cow Disease" itself, a name that happily exemplifies the incorrigible restlessness of the English vocabulary, especially in its North American forms. An obtuse Canadian rancher was merely the tool of the Hegelian dialectic of history that determined that Mad Cow Disease must come to America, since only American English could reap its full verbal absurdity. This animal malady first became prominent in England, and my linguistic analysis requires that you know that the primary meaning of the word "mad" in British English remains "crazy," as in "madman," while in American the word most commonly means "angry" — confirming, incidentally, the ancient Stoic definition of wrath as "temporary insanity." One possible effect of the consumption of chopped cerebellum by cows is the spongification of the diner's brain. Most of us are familiar with the metaphorical mushing of our brains, but with the cows stricken with BSE the experience is, alas, entirely literal. A cow with a mushed brain is one crazed cow, and that's really all the Brits meant by "Mad Cow". In his immortal "American Language" H. L. Menken reproaches the notorious linguistic timidity of Englishmen thus: "Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans . . . at once gave it the far more original name of highball." So in America "Mad Cow" has become "original" only through the most arbitrary of semantic accidents.

There is something feeble and passive about a cow that is merely brain-damaged, whereas one that is really fuming is quite amusing — at least from the linguistic point of view. In his last radio show Garrison Keillor was able to do a hilarious riff on the "Angry Milk Cow" epidemic in the Midwest. It reminded me that in my youth there was a dairy giant, Borden's, whose advertising bovine mascots were bull Elmer and cow Elsie, who mooed from billboards nationwide that Borden's produced "milk from contented cows." An upstart rival dairy countered as follows: "Our cows are not contented. They strive to do better." Even Fox News Channel's recent suit against Al Franken over the phrase "fair and balanced" didn't cause as much scornful hilarity toward a would-be plaintiff as that threatened by Borden's. These folks don't seem to be around much any more, though Elmer, who quite some time ago was shipped off to the glue factory, is in his glutinous form still well known to many. Ending one's days in a vat of boiling collagen ought to be enough to make any cow mad, but fury is to be reserved for the unknowing victims of the "Agri-Business," otherwise known as consumers. For them, getting mad about Mad Cow Disease is an inadequate response; they have a right to be outraged out of their minds. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English.