“Like Pigs”

México del Norte
Jorge Mújica Murias
mexicodelnorte@yahoo.com.mx

English is such a complicated language. Among its many unexplainable things there are a bunch of words to describe pigs. Boar, cob roller, hog, piggy, piglet, porker, porky, shoat, sow, swine, whether is plural or singular, wild or domesticated, male of female, more or less a pig is a pig.

And calling someone a pig, with any of the dozen words describing the animal, is an insult. Every time a pig comes to the conversation and every time someone is compared to a pig, the person is being insulted. “Eat like a pig”, “Snore like a pig”, “sweat like a pig”, “Smell like a pig” are not nice things to say to anyone.

Even “nice” and non-insulting phrases related to pigs are insults. From “Happy like a pig in mud”, to “Out of place like a pig in Teheran” are bad references. The famous “Mexican Swine Flu” outbreak a couple years ago was renamed “H1N1” to avoid insulting a whole country.

The other way around, references to pigs became very popular in the United States, starting with the feminist movement in the 1960’s, against police officers and “macho” types. George Harrison brought it to international fame in a song in The Beatles White Album, and Abbie Hoffman campaigned for “Pigasus”, an actual pig, for Presidential Candidate of the International Youth Party, the “yippies”. Both Abbie and Pigasus ended up in jail after “insulting” the presidential figure.

Interestingly enough, a sports team at the Arkansas University, the Razorbacks, have the only pig mascot in the whole country.


Like Animals


Maybe Republican state legislator Virgil Peck, from Kansas, enjoys some kind of familiarity or closeness with pigs, or maybe he admires the Razorbacks’ mascot, or he might have being raised by police officers and he is unaware of the insulting side of the term.

A couple weeks ago Virgil Peck made a comment, during a legislative hearing were culling the roaming wild boar population was being discussed via shooting them from a helicopter, stating that “If this works with these immigrants, maybe we just found a solution to illegal immigration”.

Reactions were immediate. In an open letter to the Republican majority legislators of the State, DeeDee García Blase, founder and President of Somos Republicans, a Republican group created to try to convince Latinos that Republicans are not that bad, stated that nobody should forget how Hitler started dehumanizing Jews by calling them “rats”, so Germans were supportive when their deportations started. “If Mister Peck wants to favor the deportation of undocumented immigrants he should state so, but calling for them to be shot from a helicopter and to kill them like animals is to look at them exactly like animals. It is the worst kind of hate we can conceive.” “They can call them ‘illegals’ or ‘undocumented’, but the have a common relationship to us all: they are human beings.”

The Republican Party spokesperson, Mike O’Neal, and the State’s Republican speaker Arlen Siegfried, responded immediately. “We agree the comment was impropriated. We met with Peck and received a sincere apology. He accepted his mistake, apologized in public and committed to be more careful with his comments in the future.” For the sake of it, they added that “civility and decor are important in the State’s Assembly, and everybody is advised to be careful in their legislative speeches. Representative Peck is a valuable member of this legislative body and accepts his responsibility. We hope he does not make any more mistakes in his judgment in the future.”

But a reference to armed violence against anyone is not a “civility” and “décor” problem. A couple months ago a crazed US citizen killed several people and wounded federal congresswoman Gabby Gifford alter Sarah Palin published a political map of “targets”, and less than a month alter that former Minuteman Shawna Forde was sentenced to death for the cold blood killing of nine year-old Brisenia Flores in Arizona.

The current political situation and the immigration debate are not adequate for “jokes” or “speech mistakes.” A politician who proposes shooting immigrants like pigs is just a pig perpetrating a hate crime, and should be hold legally responsible for it.