Simba Is The 1%

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Mom got the Blu-Ray for The Lion King. She says it’s her favorite Disney movie, mostly because of the “Circle of Life” song. I can’t argue. That’s a damn fine song.

Only thing is, the characters in the movie don’t seem to actually believe it. For all the lip service they pay to the Great Circle of Life, you start to think that some animals, to paraphrase Orwell, seem more connected in the circle than others. And then the movie starts to look a lot like a failed Equal Hyena Rights campaign.

Think about it. In the beginning the hyenas are inexplicably relegated to some foodless wasteland. When they’re in the wasteland the king’s all “Not my problem,” but if they get hungry and come to the place where all the other animals are allowed to hunt and eat each other, the lions call it poaching and FUCK THEM UP until they go back to their barren world of exile. Why the distinction? Are we all connected by the Great Circle of Life unless we’re hyenas? What’d the hyenas do to deserve that?

So they get desperate and try to ally themselves with Scar, because he says he’s going to let them be part of the Pridelands again and more to the point god dammit they’re HUNGRY.* So they have themselves a revolution, which has a rocky start because Scar is not really about Hyena Rights so much as It’s Good To Be The King,** and then Simba comes back and is all WHAT IS THIS SHIT and sets fire to everything and presumably after he takes his place as king he dumps them back in their wasteland, and everything’s all status quo again. Which is great, unless you’re a hyena.

Poor suckers. I’d suggest they try more civil disobedience next time, but that’s a bit tricky when the people in power will just eat you. Sorry, hyenas.


*If you listen to the countermelody they sing in “Be Prepared” after they did their little goose-step, it’s kind of heartbreaking. He gets them on their side by saying they’ll never go hungry again, and then while he's carrying on about how he deserves to be recognized as the most awesome king and he'll show everyone, you hear them singing “We’ll have food / lots of food / we repeat / endless meat!”

**Yeah, the drought. If this world has no god, that means it’s a really unfortunate coincidence and all the lions’ll say that just goes to show hyenas bring drought. If it’s theistic, then apparently God’s top priority is starving hyenas, and all his other concerns—such as feeding ALL THE OTHER ANIMALS—comes a distant second.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

One thing that makes people uncomfortable about hyenas is how much their females look like males and how much their males look like females.
It seems to me like it would be the same mental mechanisms that would react when people are uncomfortable about other human beings like transfolk/the intersexed/bisexuals/asexuals who in some way exist outside of traditional gender assumptions.
People don't like to have those boundaries blurred, because they want to be able to rely on them for stability and security, but they don't always think about at whose expense.
I know not everyone who disliked hyenas is a heterosexist bastard, but at the same time, if people can get comfortable with hermaphroditic traits of hyenas, maybe they won't seem to "unnatural" to people when they run into them in other humans.

Hyenas were often reviled by religious authorities, and presented as having demonic associations, because said authorities loved scapegoats that couldn't realistically fight back.
That the same religious authorities also presented other human beings as having demonic associations, again, doesn't prove that someone who dislikes hyenas is even religious.
But if someone is willing to go to the trouble to understand that hyenas play an important role in their ecosystem and that a lot of myths about them based on superficial criteria don't check out from up close, they've developed the same mechanisms that are required to understand that some of the human beings those authorities also demonized may have also played a relevant role in human society, in their own way.

Now for the goosestepping, there's the common misconception that the events leading up to WW2 happened because of something specific to the German character.
After all, they had to have all been sadists or fools unlike any of the rest of us here and now could ever be, even as our society continues to march right back toward fascism today.
It's been demonstrated that human beings can have the same failings in other countries and many decades later.
More than ever, I think it's important for people to understand how far the downtrodden can't be pushed, and how easy it is for the powerful to take advantage of people's unconscious and desperation to manipulate their motivations, no matter when or where they were born.

Which brings us all the way back to the 99% protesters of OWS.
One of the reasons for which RL hyenas are reviled is that they're supposed to be "scavengers", which people find "disgusting" because they eat meat that someone else has already killed before, even though that's what everyone who eats meat and doesn't hunt does.
Not only did the lion already commit the most violent act in those cases by killing the prey in question, and not only do they (unlike hyenas) throw their own children off cliffs so they only have to raise the strongest (now *that's* some Randian pragmatism right there for you!).
But by eating part of an animal that's already been killed, the hyena doesn't have to kill another animal that day, so that animal gets to live, and isn't that one of the 3 Rs, waste not want not, as Quark so well in The Ascent?
Then, there's the fact that in actuality lions do their share of scavenging and hyenas do their share of hunting, and the ways in which human morality can't be applied to animals in the first place.
Naturally the movie demands a certain level of suspension of disbelief, as many movies do.

But when you get into how many of the kind of people who showed up at OWS were, and that a lot more of the people they were representing by being there, were *also* reviled for their "filthy" low class occupations or lack thereof - in a word, for *scavenging*.
In that context I feel like the devaluation of the hyenas's plight risks coming at the cost of dehumanizing the 99%, already out there protesting because it's been dehumanized enough in the first place, and whose lives I believe are also more noble they receive credit for, in the context of how brave the people who live them have to be to get up and continue to face obstacles for their "pack". As for the greater cruelty of the "lions"...

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I think people also just find hyenas to be less aesthetically compatible--in short, they don't look or sound quite as impressive or glorious to most humans. But I am always amazed at how often people ascribe cultural mores to animals--scavenging, sexual characteristics, etc, get filtered through the morality.

The trouble with OWS is it's a one-way analogy: we may tell fables that are based on our economy, but if you to start with an ecological model and use it to justify social constructs, you're definitely rationalizing on some level--the justification of the 1% is another iteration of Social Darwinism, which is a corruption of a solid biological model. So animal stories and actual animals--two different things, and people are unclear on that. (Like I said further up the page, it says a lot about humans that we equate an interspecies ecosystem with a social structure--and put the one animal that eats all the others in the same position as "king.")

As for the Nazis, I'd say it's a defense mechanism--we have to distance ourselves from people who might commit atrocities. Of course, we're all human, so statistically with the right factors the same sort of thing could happen anywhere. But nobody wants to believe that about themselves. People have to tell themselves the others are defective so they don't have to worry that the same thing could happen again. It's shortsighted, but understandable.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I can't think of much to add to that, other than that I appreciate the thought you put into your response.