In the John Maus Interview by Smetnjak (starting @4:06), you can hear John Maus talk a little about the historical and political significance of the town he's from: Austin, Minnesota.
What John says is true. There is indeed something unique that can be said about the situation the world faces today when you look at the strange place in question. Him bringing up the Spam workers strike might suggest that those events of the mid-80s had some kind of an impact on his character, perhaps even his music. Certainly songs like "OLD TOWN" and "HEAD FOR THE COUNTRY" can be read as hymns to AUSTIN, or SPAM town USA, as it is sometimes known."Smetnjak: You are still living in the Midwest.
John Maus: Yeah, yeah, I live in the country in Minnesota, about 2 hours south of the nearest city. I mean it's a strange place. I mean I think it perhaps speaks uniquely to the whole political situation of our generation in the sense that when I was a kid, about '86, there was one of the last standoffs between old New Deal, if you're familiar with this term, labor and Reagan. There was a strike in the town. And the one factory in my town is the place that makes Spam. You know, Spam? That's what they do there, and so there was a standoff and of course labor was crushed and the whole town transformed overnight to like a refugee camp, cuz they brought in all the Third World labor to blow out hog brains for $3/hour or whatever. So it's an interesting story. I get the impression you guys are interested in politics... I talk about that, but yeah I live there [...]"
I can testify to the fact that he speaks the truth because I also spent a large part of my childhood in this strange place. There is so much to unpack there. I even met a child meatpacker. You also probably didn't hear about that Supreme Court case, Johnson v. the United States, which was decided last year in Johnson's favor. Johnson is a neo-Nazi who was active in SPAM Town who founded the "Aryan Liberation Movement" and was arrested after the FBI caught him amassing firearms, plotting to assassinate left-wing activists, and bomb the Mexican consulate in Saint Paul, although he was never charged as a terrorist but as an "armed career criminal". Anyway, that's a bit beside the point, but you get the idea. It is a strange place.
I decided to explore this history and its associated themes in a short story which I recently published. It's called "MEATPACKER JACK" and you can read it for free at my blog on wordpress: https://danielkbuntovnik.wordpress.com/ ... cker-jack/
"MEATPACKER JACK" brings together several main themes, including weed legalization, immigrants' rights, and animal rights. Here is a blurb:
More than 110 years after muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair first published The Jungle, the USA’s meatpacking industry still brutally exploits immigrant labor and profits at the expense of the well-being and dignity of workers, consumers, and animals. Unfortunately, the muck must thus still be raked — so in comes “MEATPACKER JACK”, a short story which weaves together threads of immigrant and animal rights, cannabis legalization, and anti-racism struggles to paint a sordid tale of extreme social justice in the 21st century.
Jack McGillicuddy is one of the last English-speaking workers remaining at Quality Ham Handlers, Inc., the company responsible for slaughtering the hogs used to make SHAM, “the minty meat” (a luncheon meat made from shiso [a culinary herb of the mint family] and ham). To escape the lingering effects of the drudgerous work, Jack and thousands like him spend much of their precious free time indulging in illegal drugs whose legitimate medicinal and recreational properties are all too often ignored by politicians working hand-in-glove with the prison industrial complex to criminalize communities of color. But something extraordinary happens when, after a mysterious woman appears on Jack’s television set one night, disrupting the nightly news in a broadcast signal intrusion, Jack is inspired to stand up to Mr. Kroemblin, the unjust head supervisor of Quality Ham Handlers, and his oppressive urine drug screening demands.
“MEATPACKER JACK” may or may not be loosely inspired by the history of SPAM, a luncehon meat produced by the Hormel Foods Corporation and its proxy Quality Pork Processors, one of the largest U.S. pork producers. The companies were profiled by Mother Jones magazine after their production demands caused workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains to develop a new type of neurological disease two decades after the National Guard was deployed to crush a 1985-1986 workers’ strike immortalized in the 1990 documentary film American Dream and more recently they made headlines when a video released by the animal rights group Compassion Over Killing documented numerous violations of Department of Agriculture regulations, such as pigs covered in feces and pus-leaking abscesses being prepared for consumption.
