Pigs and Politics II: The Pork Barrel

While most of the talk this presidential election cycle has been about "earmarks" (itself a term related to agriculture in that an "earmark" is made to show ownership of cattle, pigs and sheep), what's really being argued over is traditional "pork barrel" politics. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the modern sense of the term--spending used to benefit constituents of a given politician in return for votes or campaign contributions--to the 1870s, when references to "pork" were common in Congress. It cites the Defiance (Ohio) Democrat in 1873 for first referring to the "many previous visits to the public pork-barrel." The term is decidedly American in origin.

Today's photo (found on Flickr) was taken by Bill Barber at Yorktown and depicts soldiers' rations: salt pork, beans, and hard tack. It's amazingly difficult to find a photo of an actual barrel of pork, as that means of preservation which led to so much interesting language ("scraping the bottom of the barrel" and so on) has long disappeared.

Pigs & Politics

I was out of town when the whole pointless "lipstick on a pig" controversy (I hate to use a word that actually dignifies what was one of the more banal moments in contemporary American politics) occurred. By means of making up the omission, there is a brief post on Gawker (here) that was sent to me by a number of friends. It addresses some of the recent ways the epithet "pig" has been hurled by and at women...

Tigers & Piglets: An Urban Legend Explained

One of my students sent me an e-mail over the break with photos of a tigress nursing piglets in little tiger costumes. According to the e-mail, forwarded under the title "A lesson in world peace among divergent cultures (and religions)," this scene took place at a zoo in California. Before the images and the "story," it reads: "Once more my faith in animals grows stronger. We could learn so much from them. Imagine!" After the photos, this version of the e-mail ends with "Now, please tell me one more time... Why can't the rest of the world get along?"

I told my student that I'd seen these before and wanted to check out the story. Thankfully, Snopes.com came to the rescue yet again, letting me know that these were real photos, but with an inaccurate description. You can read the full story here, but in brief, I received an even more recent e-mail than the one Snopes addressed; they discuss one that made the rounds in which the tigress was supposedly given these piglets as a treatment for depression after losing her own cubs. As it turns out, these images come from the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand, where this is apparently a common form of visual entertainment for zoo patrons.

There have been a lot of problems at, and concerns about this zoo: the Animal Welfare Institute has noted that this zoo has been investigated for illegally breeding and selling its tigers for use in Chinese medicines and that somewhere around 80 to 100 tigers died at the zoo due to an outbreak of avian influenza. I guess this type of creation of a story and a heavily-forwarded e-mail around an image isn't all that surprising--just look at how much has been made out of Barack Obama's decision to be a good guest on a visit to Kenya.

Pig Cars and Pork-Barrel Political Protest

The graphic design company Sagmeister, Inc. completed this project for True Majority (the social justice group led by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's fame). The pig-shaped van, complete with trailing piglets, compares the Pentagon budget with that for education and foreign aid, obviously advocating more funds for the latter than the former. There are a couple of great pictures of these vehicles, which light up at night, here on the Sagmeister site as well. Thanks to Lisa for finding this and sending it along.