Life's Pleasures Quote by Colman McCarthy

Pacifism, McCarthy suggests, is easiest when it costs nothing. The line lands because it takes a morally freighted identity and drags it into the realm of ordinary bodily appetite: you can call yourself a vegetarian at 10 a.m. and still order the steak at noon. By pairing “between wars” with “between meals,” he reframes peace not as a lofty conviction but as a default setting enforced by circumstance. No war, no test. No hunger, no temptation. The joke stings because it’s plausible.

The intent is less to mock pacifism than to indict its fair-weather version: the posture of nonviolence as social accessory, worn when the stakes are abstract and discarded when fear, revenge, or nationalism offers a more satisfying meal. McCarthy, an activist steeped in antiwar and nonviolent traditions, knows that public opinion reliably “discovers” peace after the bloodletting and “forgets” it the moment a new enemy is named. His metaphor makes that amnesia feel petty and animal: our principles shrink under pressure, our ethics conveniently timed.

Subtext: societies treat war the way many people treat diet - as something you manage rhetorically, not structurally. You say you’re against it, but you keep the pantry stocked: weapons budgets, violent policing, heroic war stories, a politics that rewards toughness. The line’s cynicism is strategic. It dares the listener to prove they’re not just a pacifist in the lull, but someone willing to stay “vegetarian” when the room starts smelling like cooked meat.