The Year of the Pig
Sunday, January 7, 2007 at 07:28AM I love pigs. On the hoof, they are OK, but I love them after they are butchered. I understand that they are considered "unclean" in some religions. I've been told that in Judaism, the reason for not eating pork is mostly an ethical prohibition, that it isn't right to raise something just to eat it. Cows have a useful life giving milk, chickens lay eggs, and so on, but pigs can only be of use once they die, so we raise them to kill them. I understand that how that would be seen as unethical. It's sort of like embryonic stem cell research.
In Islam, pork and anything derived from pigs and the pigs themselves are unclean, or haraam (حرام). I was thinking about this and of course the numerous, mostly tongue in cheek suggestions about using pigs to thwart the advances, aggressive and otherwise of the Religion of Peace. What is needed is an equally strong, but tastier, countervailing faith, the Religion of Pork, as it were. In the last few days a strange trend developed: a number of newsworthy tidbits have drifted over my internet transom, as though some Metaphysical Porcine Being were trying to recruit me for the role of Piggy Prophet (peace, or perhaps mustard, be upon me.) Let me share them with you, and just see if you end up loving Wilbur as much as I do.
This is a story out of Georgia: 1,100-Pound "Hogzilla" Killed by Hunter Near Atlanta. There are so many aspects of this story that just scream "It's the South, Stupid!" From discharging weapons in a suburban neighborhood for the purposes of maintaining the balance of nature, to hauling the carcass to a truck weigh station and then figuring out how to string up a half-ton hog from a tree in your front yard... I mean, this is just great. For that extra touch, I loved the close up of the boar's equipment (slide 6), although I will say as someone knowledgeable in these matters, if they had taken the picture in profile while the boar was on its side, I'd be getting more of those emails about my photoshopping abilities.
It just doesn't get any better than this. Then, somewhere in a Houston suburb, a lone pig farmer is fighting his own front against the spread of the Caliphate: Residents Use Pig Races to Deter Building of Mosque. Now, as I read this, I thought, if I were completely ignorant, I would frankly be disgusted by the obvious bigotry of the residents. The Katy Islamic Association bought the land legally. It was zoned for use. The current residents wouldn't be nearly as put out if a Christian church were being built, right? Well, these people may actually be bigots, but just because you're a bigot doesn't mean that there isn't very good reason not to want a mosque in your neighborhood. Just like you may not want Muslim schools in your athletic league (please see here and here: the story that started this blog). The real tip off will be if CAIR and other Wahhabi front organizations get involved in this. So far they are keeping their profile low. Unfortunately, the chances are excellent that the Islamic Center that is planned for this location is receiving substantial funding from the Wahhabi lobby. You have to look far and wide to find a Muslim school or mosque that isn't. 
Do I agree with the tactics of the pig farmer? Uh, no. I think that I would instead offer my property to the Mormon Church on condition that the build a monster temple there and send their best and brightest missionaries next door. Choir practice on Friday.
Pigs may yet be the agents of restoring all that is good in these United States. Pigs and guns, at least as Mike Adams employs them in Welcome to Integrity 101. A testament to character-building qualities of firearms and feral hogs.
For the haraam (حرام) trifecta (hogs, huntin', and unclad women), Amarillo's the place you ought to be. This is is by John Kelso of the Austin American-Statesman:
AMARILLO — The most politically incorrect man in the state of Texas?
My nominee would be Charles Johnson III, 52, who comes from a wealthy oil and gas family in this Texas Panhandle city.
How many other guys can you name who have traveled all the way to New Guinea to deliver Amarillo Hooters T-shirts to the female natives? This is the side of big oil nobody talks about.
Johnson has documented this with several snapshots of himself standing next to some of these native women wearing Hooters shirts. The photos have a National Geographic air to them, until you notice the shirts.
In one of the photos, a New Guinea woman is carrying a live hog under her arm.
"She was nursing that pig when we saw her," recalled the jovial Johnson, who, as you have probably guessed by now, is single. "A lot of women in New Guinea nurse their pigs to fatten 'em up."
In one photo, Johnson is shown with one of the natives while he is decked out in a leopard fez and bowling shirt.
"I told them that's what chieftans in Texas wore, and they treated me with a lot of respect," Johnson said.
I asked Johnson who took these photos of him with the New Guinea natives. "My mother," he said. I don't think he was kidding.
You can tell Charles Johnson when you see him coming down the road in Amarillo. He's the one with the huge stuffed hog riding in the sidecar of his BSA motorcycle.
"I was in Bulgaria and I shot a big 450-pound hog," explained Johnson, 52, an investments business guy who has visited 165 countries around the world. "I had my taxidermist down in Kerrville stuff him with foam rubber. I stuff him in my sidecar and take him barhopping. He probably has a lot more fun dead than alive. We put dollar bills in his hooves for the girls in the strip clubs."
When he's not raising hell in foreign countries, Johnson is raising hell in his hometown of Amarillo. In the fall he and his running buddy, Bill Fellers Jr., put on a topless dove hunt on Johnson's farm — located next to the Clements maximum-security prison here.
"It makes the (prison) guards real nervous,' said Fellers, who is in the oil and gas exploration business and is also single. For the hunt, Johnson and friends hire three or four topless dancers who retrieve the birds as they're shot down.
The dancers who work the hunt have "nothing on but their sneakers," Johnson said. "When they bring a dove back, they get a dollar."
Fellers says the topless dove hunt irritates some of the wives of the men who go on the hunt. In fact, one year when the wives got wind of the upcoming date of the topless dove hunt, they made their husbands take them to the Amarillo symphony instead.
Fellers and Johnson made hay out of this, though, by text-messaging photos of the topless dancers at the dove hunt to the guys who had been dragged to the symphony.
"They'd be sitting there in the symphony with their cell phones, and their wives would say, 'What's that, honey?' " Fellers said.
Perhaps the apex of Johnson's politically incorrect career occurred when he brought a 378-pound Dallas transvestite named Rhapsody as his date to his 20th high school reunion in Amarillo.
"She was a great date. Drank a whole fifth of vodka," Johnson said.
"Just to feed her would have been enough," Fellers added.
But it did not set well with the ladies who were putting on the reunion. "I still get (garbage) from the women who were organizing it," Johnson said.
Johnson has a little something to offend everybody, including the animal rights people. His beautiful 1927-vintage brick home in Amarillo is littered with stuffed animals. But he takes it one step further. For example, he has a stuffed baboon on display at home in a baby coffin, smoking a hookah.
Then there was the time Johnson and Fellers played chicken-head golf by cutting the heads off chickens and using them as balls. "Sometimes you have to make do with what you have, and we didn't have any balls," Fellers explained.
Or the time Johnson visited a bar in Manila called the Hobbit House that was staffed entirely by dwarfs, bouncers and all.
But that's another story.
Reader Comments (5)
Mustard be upon you.
The "Hogzilla" story was featured on (I think) the Discovery Channel. It is a hoax. Sounds like Mr. Johnson ought to be... but isn't.