A Nation Wallows

You know we live in a great country when the Fred saga is only the latest "swine-of-unusual-size" story. In 2004, in southern Georgia, hunters claimed to have bagged the quasi-mythical "Hogzilla," a 12-foot, 1,000-pound super-swine. These claims were difficult to verify--the hunters had hurriedly buried the beast--but the National Geographic Channel thought enough of the tale to gin up a documentary. Hogzilla's loamy rest will be disturbed once more. A couple of enterprising Georgia hayseeds currently are trying to make a horror movie, "The Legend of Hogzilla." Mr. Corman, you're wanted on the set.

So, that's a National Geographic documentary, a horror film and a major media sensation in the space of three years. It's hard not to trip over the symbolism of grossly overfed hogs being the subject of intense American fascination, or is it empathy?

The Fred story is crystalline pop perfection--instantly ubiquitous, utterly ephemeral, absurdist and profound. Take the matter of hunting. Hunting is one of those bright lines that divides blue and red: Blue-staters can't fathom the attraction of killing an animal for sport; red-staters despise the tree-hugging animal rights "extremists" who would defame this traditional pastime. For presidential candidates, hunting is a conservative litmus test. Witness Mitt Romney's pathetic recent attempt to portray himself as a lifelong hunter. "I've always been a rodent and rabbit hunter, small varmints, if you will," Romney said at a news conference in April. When you say "varmints," governor, do you, in fact, mean "critters"?

My year will only be complete when we see Hillary Clinton in a blaze-orange vest.

But, as the Fred episode fairly illustrates, hunting today is a sick satire of the sport as it was in the days when Teddy Roosevelt took to the field. The number of hunters is declining rapidly, for all the reasons you'd expect. Increasingly, hunting is confined to private game "reserves" that cater to well-to-do sportsmen, a reversion to the royal game lands of England. In these confined areas, the principle of fair chase is a joke.

In December 2003, two years before he blasted his friend in the face at a Texas reserve, Dick Cheney went wing shooting at a Pennsylvania hunting club, where gamekeepers released 500 pen-raised pheasants in front of his party. Cheney is credited with shooting 70 of these birds like so many colorfully plumaged skeet.

And so at the intersection of our reckless meat-based food system, our swinish media obsessions, our weird nostalgia for tradition-affirming blood lust, there lies an enormous dead pig. What a country.