Pig Castrator

Natalie Terezi Rei Watts

On swine and the dismantling of fascist authority. Content warning for a lot of what you’d expect given the title; 18+.

The start of the new year opened with a pig’s head being dropped on the threshold of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s garage. It rested in a seep of fake blood; graffiti netted the garage door, unignorable declarations of the desire to rid of rent and bring the people “EVERYTHING!”.

It was only natural that this became a point of flailing leftist infighting over whether it was an op or not. But what slipped the eyes of most people is not the matter of argued artificiality (staging a truly anarchist message sends an anarchist message to the people regardless; contrast with the anarcho-Bidenism from the insurrections of last year) or, in the eyes of liberals, an needless gesture (because everything is ineffectual when your politics champion ineffectuality), but the message that a severed pig’s head sends to the bourgeois electees and their cohorts. This is not a matter of simple pig-politician/police association and guillotine implication; it’s ripping the dick off of fascism.

To dial back: this is about hogs. Fat ones, thick ones, wrinkled ones, ones that are generally unpleasant to see and ones that are probably deeply infirm. Hogs that may be dead and hogs that should not be kept up for this long. If there’s one thing fascists love it’s a nice hog, and they pull their pork with pleasure over getting a juicy cut from the marginalized and proletariat classes. Deleuze and Guattari were apt in their assessment that nationalism “gets a lot of people aroused”; fascists, if I may be so crude, crank it raw.

But pigs take on a double meaning in the assemblages of control and domination. As much as a hog is the symbol of the greedy, the voracious, the turgid, a hog is also the symbol of livestock. Commodity. Red meat. The hogs are sent to the slaughter and their splattered remains are packaged up neat and tidy to be sold to the grocer for later eating (or to be fucked again, if David Cameron has his say). Here the hogs aren’t the tumescent oppressors but rather the oppressed they screw to get their porkers puffed. And if it seems contradictory that swine would both be the fucked and the ones doing the fucking, consider how much politicians love sucking their own dicks before the public.

So what does this mean of the beheaded pig; a beheading in representation of revolution, no less? Freud ascribed castration anxiety to the fear of having one’s dick chopped off, specifically in boys during a phase of youth psychoanalytic theory plastered in Oedipal hogwash and reactionary blather (as they did with everything else). The most worthwhile information to be drawn from it is that castration, as always, is a signifier for emasculation, but more crucially than emasculation as a simple mutilation is emasculation as an attack on identity — a symbol for the removal of manhood. And what do fascists love more than hypermasculinity? They retreat to bunks of gender strictures and oppressive family ideals to squeeze it in testosterone-soaked solitude, praying they’ll be vindicated for really loving the way other men fuck their wives. To them the dick (both physical and metaphysical) is a status symbol — an icon that they’ll have their way and that anyone who counterposes will be crushed under its girth, with those who have thinner knobs not being worthy of the lauded role of societal cuckery. They wag libido around as a testeric war machine.

As such, decapitating a pig cuts multiple definitions of a head off.

Once the fascist realizes that their reactionary ideal of masculinity is worthless they’ll cry out that actions like these are worthless, that they’re done by cowards who can’t show their faces and that it’s shameful for the anarchist to not confront them in polite decor (as if the neoliberal structure of debate-election is anything more than a free-for-all political cumsock). But that’s the moment of their collapse; because they realize that the hog they oh so flaunted is not as sturdy as it seems, and that, more likely than not, it could be easily deboned. They take to braggadocious rigidity and nonchalant disregard as their defense but these are mere shadows projected from the two-inch deflated microchode. What Freud described was less an accurate model for individuation but rather an unwitting mirror of himself — how he, the psychological oppressor of his era, really did not want someone to rip his dick off.

As the political destabilization of the United States continues it is inevitable that more and more hogs will be found extirpated and their owners in anguish that they can’t keep screwing the proletariat over. The events at Capitol Hill are a unique case where one side of fuckers tried to steal the oppressive phallic apparatus from the other, embrace it as their own, and give it a good sloppy. Neither side involved wants the phallus to be lost, and such they fling themselves to it like flies to rotten meat. For the meat is rotten, and the putrefaction well underway. The body without organs that is the American state is losing its strongest sexual-patriotic icon, and the fires of the pig roast are growing dim. Let’s get the job done and slice the penis clean, shall we?