Author: darrelplant

A story appeared the other day in the Washington Post about a perennial problem in Islamabad where wild boars foray into the city looking for food among the trash during the winter.

Something about the tone of the piece struck me as a little off. I mean, sure, Muslims don’t eat pork, but are wild pigs really “many Muslims’ worst nightmare” as author Nicholas Brulliard writes in the first sentence? Would it be the “worst nightmare” of Jews? Their religious views and dietary restrictions ragarding pigs are essentially the same, but I have to wonder if an infestation of pigs in Tel Aviv would be portrayed as “many Jews’ worst nightmare” or if the opinion of a brickmaker who lived near one of the ravines the pigs came from would be said to avoid “even making eye contact with one” despite his claim of not being afraid of them. Who gets into a staredown with a wild boar, in the first place?

On the other hand, there’s this video of a bunch of guys at IQRA University watching some rather fast boars looking for a way out of a parking lot. They’ve got sticks—presumably in case the hogs come their way—but they don’t seem any more afraid than you might be when several hundred-pound-plus pigs are racing around at twenty miles an hour.

It almost seems like the story’s a set-up for some sort of bright boy in the Pentagon to come up with a sort of reverse-“Operation Dumbo Drop”, where pregnant pigs are parachuted from planes into Pakistani ravines in some sort of destabilization effort. Predictably, the anti-Islamic racist web sites are all over the story with jokes about how it’s too bad for the pigs that they have to live near Muslims, that Muslims are jealous because they can’t have as many “piglets” each year, etc.

Of course, if they (or the folks at the Washington Post) bothered to read, they’d know that The New Yorker sent Ian Frazier to cover stories of wild boar infestations in the US some six years ago.

As I leaned over the map and studied it with Joe Corn, suddenly my attention swerved. This map, with its intricate little counties and occasional whole states shaded green to highlight the potential disease-vector threat of wild hogs, reminded me of the red state — blue state map of America. At first glance, the states that voted for George Bush in 2004 and the states marked on this map as having feral hogs seemed to be one and the same. I mentioned this oddity to Joe Corn, who, scientist-like, declined to comment beyond the area of his expertise.

Afterward, I could not get this strange correspondence out of my mind. I compiled ’04 red state — blue state data and matched it with SCWDS hog-population information on the map of that year. I found my first impression to be essentially correct. The presence of feral hogs in a state is a strong indicator of its support for Bush in ’04. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight states with feral hogs voted for Bush. That’s more than four-fifths; states that went for Kerry, by contrast, were feral-hog states less than a fifth of the time.

The solidly feral-hog South was, of course, solidly for Bush. The small islands there without wild hogs — Little Rock, Raleigh-Durham — voted for Kerry. Democrats who predicted a Kerry win in Florida in ’04 might have been less confident had they known that all of Florida’s sixty-seven counties, even its urban ones, have feral hogs. Texas, a gimme for Bush, is the state in the Union with the most feral hogs. Estimates of the feral-hog population in Texas are more than a million and a half, though nobody knows for sure. To go along with its high feral-hog numbers, Texas produced more than four and a half million votes for Bush in ’04, the second-largest total of any state.

…

A prominent feature of the red state-blue state map is the sweep of red coming up from Texas and the South through the center of the country. Experts say that feral hogs are starting to do the same. They have increased their numbers in Oklahoma and appeared in counties in Kansas and Nebraska, where they weren’t previously. An A.P. news story from last year described packs of wild pigs tearing up yards and destroying crops in Sumner County, in south-central Kansas. People there speculated that the pigs were formerly domestic animals that had been turned loose when hog prices crashed some years before. Sumner County preferred Bush to Kerry in ’04 by a margin of sixty-eight per cent to thirty-one per cent.

Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has once again posted the Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, and despite my lack of blogging, I was asked once again to contribute my best post of the year. Plenty of good stuff in there, though.

Could there have been a more stunning contrast in newly-minted national leaders than we were presented with by George H. W. Bush in the US and Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia?

Bush, despite his short stint as Director of Central Intelligence, wasn’t considered to be much of a brain trust. Sure, compared to his son, George W.; his choice for vice president, Dan “potatoe” Quayle; and the addled old man he’d served under for the previous eight years, Ronald Reagan, Bush didn’t seem like a complete idiot. Havel, on the other hand, was an actual thinker and writer, who’d been agitating against Communist rule of his country for a quarter of a century.

I’d been hoping to make a Christmastime trip to Prague with Barbara for my 50th birthday earlier this month but didn’t manage to put it together. It would have been an even greater honor to have been there as the Czech Republic notes the passing of Havel this week, just before the end of Zappadan.

Happy Birthday to Calvin Trillin, who has another birthday today. I have to wonder if he’s spending it somewhere in the area, since he’s speaking in Boise on Thursday.

On an unrelated note, best wishes to the man who lost in a landslide: George McGovern, who fell outside the library bearing his name in South Dakota last week. The thing that always goes unsaid in news reports is that the guy he lost to was so corrupt that he had to leave the White House before he was removed from office and that even his attorney general went to jail.

Libertarian nutjob Dave Lister writes another long opinion piece for The Oregonian, this time on the Occupy movement compared to the 1932 Bonus Expeditionary Force. As usual, it’s riddled with errors, lies, and wacky conclusions, but it’s also just historically inaccurate. Not that I expect anything else from someone like Lister. The paper’s already run a couple of letters in response, so I guess they’re probably not going to run mine:

Dave Lister’s comparison of 1932’s Bonus Army to the Occupy movement is colored by the rosy lens of time and shows a stunning lack of knowledge of actual history.

Contemporary news accounts of the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF) occupation of Washington DC show that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and others claimed the protestors ranks were full of criminals and subversives, and that crime in the District of Columbia spiked during the occupation (DC Police Superintendent General Pelham Glassford refuted those charges). Army Chief of Staff Douglas Macarthur was convinced—despite the reports of his own intelligence unit—that the marchers were part of a Communist conspiracy to undermine the United States. Even before the marchers reached Washington, the federal government asked states to help stop their advance because the existing camp “constituted the gravest health menace in the history of the city” (New York Times, June 10, 1932, page 1).

The truth is that BEF was made up of men without much money (which is why they wanted their bonuses), without jobs, in the first years of what became known as the Great Depression. Their camp wasn’t some fantasy vision of a Boy Scout Jamboree with veterans; it was cobbled together out of whatever materials and scraps they could gather. The country was full of other ramshackle encampments (Hoovervilles), with the primary difference being that the members of the BEF were owed money by the US government and they massed together in larger numbers to try to make their point.

An article in The New York Times discusses how—in the face of reports that poverty in the US has exploded—the Census Bureau is planning to release “a long-promised alternate measure meant to do a better job of counting the resources the needy have and the bills they have to pay.” The new method of counting the poor will reportedly eliminate half the rise in poverty since 2006 by counting safety-net programs that “have played a large and mostly overlooked role in restraining hardship.”

This is nothing more than a shell game: changing the metric by which poverty is measured in order to say that there aren’t as many poor people. Whenever you reset any previously arbitrary measure to a new arbitrary measure, it becomes difficult if not impossible to judge progress over a long time.

More importantly, counting money and other aid given to the poor as a part of the measure of whether or not they are poor sort of misses the point that if they didn’t have those programs, they would, indeed be poor. It’s like claiming that people living in a famine zone aren’t in danger of starvation because they’re getting food aid. Sure, but what if the food stops?

This change is nothing more than an outgrowth of the Republican mantra that if the “poor” have refrigerators and cell phones then they can’t really be poor.