The Turkey Pardon Is One of America’s Most Miserable Traditions
At least it’s bipartisan?
In the 1987 film Running Man, which made a pretty good guess at what TV was going to be like in our weird, unpleasant future, criminals (called Runners) are hunted on a television game show by professional killers (called Stalkers) for the amusement of the studio audience. To give the game some actual stakes, the producers show a highlight reel of the previous year’s winners: Whitman, Price, and Haddad, who eluded the Stalkers, received a full pardon for their alleged crimes, and are now spending the rest of their carefree lives on a tropical island. At the climax of the film, our hero (a falsely accused Runner played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) comes across three charred corpses in a warehouse as he’s trying to elude a Stalker named Fireball, and learns the real fate of Whitman, Price, and Haddad.
Anyway, every year I forget about the damn Turkey Pardon until it’s suddenly all over Twitter or whatever, and it never fails to genuinely upset me. The sheer, horrifying magnitude of animal suffering that this dumb tradition somehow glosses over is, for me, and many ethical vegans, always in the background —…
