VEGANGELICA

Hehe, BADFASTBUSA, yes, I agree there is at least one John Denver song that gives me the creeps. I managed to survive listening to it as a child, but some of the subjects in the song weren't so lucky! Even as a kid, before I attained my current state of Veggiedom, "Grandma's Feather Bed" seemed a macabre celebration of animal slaughter and chilling childhood acceptance of it, since the tykes are completely unperturbed by the death upon which they feast and sleep, as John Denver describes when he pines away for those times when...

"We'd have chicken pie and country ham,
homemade butter on the bread.
But the best darn thing about Grandma's house
was her great big feather bed.
It was nine feet wide, and six feet high, soft as a downy chick
It was made from the feathers of forty-eleven geese."

Now, I don't know about others, but I never felt particularly lulled to sleep as a child by knowing that I was resting on the feathers plucked from forty-eleven corpses! As an adult I find this callous ode to country butchery even more disturbing.

Also, doesn't it strike anyone as just a teensy bit odd that the kids are dragging into bed a cute "piggy we stole from the shed" whom they will probably soon feast upon as a "country ham?" I have never understood how people could claim to enjoy an animal's presence and then, betraying whatever trust she must have had in them, turn around and kill and eat her as a table treat! Even as a child I realized through songs such as John Denver's "Grandma's Feather Bed" that I was a sheep living in a human wolf pack. Probably understandably, I was quite shy as a child due to this.
--Erica