There’s only one topic on the latte foam-flecked lips of America’s caffeine-stoked gibbering classes this month: the war between children and pigs.
It started when newspapers printed pictures of 11-year-old Alabamian Jamison Stone leaning on the carcass of the 1,051-pound superhog he shot eight times with a .50-caliber handgun. After chasing it for three hours. If you haven’t seen the photo, 1,051 pounds of dead pig bears an uncanny resemblance to a Godzilla turd. Except with a snout.
This distresses me. I love big animals. I’m fascinated by the fact that North America once swarmed with megafauna: giant lions, humongous mastadons, ginormous sabre-toothed tigers, elephant-size sloths and bears so big they used trees for toothpicks.
These amazing superbeasts still haunt America. Their enormous spirits animate our insatiable craze for gigantism and hyperbole. I’m not saying there’s a direct link between the jumbo-sloth and the Hummer and KFC’s cheesy-chicken mashed potato bowls and the American tendency to use the word “awesome” to mean “nice” or “quite well, thank you” and the fact that the average American now takes up the same space as 12 average-size Africans. Okay, so I am. I think we eat giant-pig portions and drive around in giant sloth-sized Hummers to fill the mammoth-sized holes in our hearts.
So what do we do when American nature (so much bigger and better than regular nature) tries to redress the balance by evolving a literally awesome 1,051-pound wonder-pig? We shoot the bitch.
This is just wrong. The world doesn’t have enough 1,051-pound pigs. The world can never have enough 1,051-pound pigs.
If we left the 1,051-pound pigs alone and didn’t send 11-year-olds armed with .50-caliber handguns out to kill them, maybe they’d evolve into 10-ton, 100-foot-tall T-rex-sized megapigs. Wouldn’t that rule? Wouldn’t that be like a major tourist attraction? So does anybody else think a dead 1,051-pound pig is 1,051 pounds of incredible sadness?
Hey, you know what we can have too much of? Eleven-year-olds with .50-caliber handguns. Don’t get me wrong. If it came down to a life-or-death struggle between 1,051-pound pigs and 11-year-old boys, I’d be with the brats all the way. Go humans. Kill pigs.
But that’s not what’s happening. Giant pigs aren’t tunneling up in the middle of soccer games and snatching kids away to their subterranean lairs and injecting them with pig venom so they can lay pig eggs in them. Even in Alabama. As far as we know. Maybe they’ll start. To even things up. Evolution’s a bitch.
This would no doubt bring a smile to the cruel, thin lips of the white dudes I was hanging out with earlier this week at a gun show. Alongside Hitler posters (“When I come back, no more Mr. Nice Guy”), swastika armbands, Nazi beer steins and a newspaper with the headline WHEN WE ARE NUKED, they were selling exactly the sort of ordnance America’s youth need to protect themselves from the swinish menace. Including the apparently ubiquitous so-called “terrorist” black rifles (complete with bayonet mounts).
But that stuff’s for pussies. And those guys I see on TV sitting in sheds popping hogs through slits with guns so big they make Dirty Harry’s Magnum look like a vagina? Wimps. Real men hunt pigs with knives. For real (in Texas, quel surprise).
Meanwhile every presidential candidate, Democrat and Republican, will at some stage during this current campaign effetely wave a rifle around while wearing a hat with earflaps in a desperate attempt to convince the hunting demographic that they don’t think there’s anything psychosexually sick about the Freudian stew of fascism, machismo and penis envy that infests American gun culture.
Because there isn’t. It’s normal. And perfectly healthy. It’s the rest of the industrialized world that’s the freakshow.