Brien Comerford can be counted on to take the bait. All kinds of bait. Whenever animals, the environment, or vegetarianism come up in a publication, he’s sure to fire off a letter. Over the last dozen years he’s written 15 to 30 missives a week lashing out at what he considers the mistreatment of animals. “I love to write, so I just decided I’m going to respond to whatever I read. It’s like a stimulus/response,” he says. “I feel my blood pressure go up, and I just have to respond.”
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Comerford says his tactic for getting published is going for emotional appeal over “intellectual brilliance.” So he sputters like Jeremiah racking his brain for just the right invective. The world’s resources are threatened by the “tyrannical domination of sausage czars and poultry promulgators,” he declared in a 2001 letter to the Reader, adding a la Jesse Jackson that such practices are a “further indication of a mental aberration delighting in its abominations.” He’s railed against “meat moguls and poultry profiteers butchering beasts,” and in regard to cockfighting he’s written that “anthropocentric proponents of the atrocity exhibition are emblematic of impoverished mentalities.” That last bit prompted a response in the Reader’s letters from a Brian Cox, who argued that this was the “finest evidence I’ve seen yet that access to a thesaurus should be regulated.” But maybe Cox missed the point. Maybe such indignant diction deserves its own brand of bemused approbation.
An inveterate name-dropper in support of the cause, Comerford can rattle off lists of prominent Christian vegetarians, among them John Wesley, Salvation Army founder William Booth, 17th-century Dominican saint Martin de Porres, and Seventh-day Adventist Church founder Ellen G. White. He also finds inspiration in the work and lives of vegetarian musicians, prowling the Web to determine who’s keeping the faith: R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe dropped the ball when he succumbed to a craving for chicken, and Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush also let him down. Though Comerford likes their music, he’s stopped listening to it because of their meat eating. Applying this standard to the best of his ability, he estimates that two-thirds of the 4,000 recordings in his “little discontented world” are gathering dust.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
