THE HOG IS OUT OF THE TUNNEL or THE FAT IS IN THE FRYER (1)

We have gone from irrational exuberance not so long ago to excessive fear…
Roger Lister, Chief Credit Officer, DBRS Ltd.

But as the animals outside gazed at the scene, it seemed to them that some strange thing was happening. What was it that had altered in the faces of the pigs?...Some of them had five chins, some had four, some had three…a violent quarrel was in progress. There were shoutings, bangings on the table, sharp suspicious glances, furious denials…No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell, Animal Farm

Look. Listen. Exciting, surprising news in the field of paleontology. Apparently, 251 million years ago, 95% of all living species were flicked off the Earth’s shoulders like so many fleas, when the volcanoes decided it was their time to rule. With the violent series of volcanic eruptions, every large predator was dropped dead in its tracks, leaving the conditions perfect and fecund for a million year rise of…the pigs. Yes, dear reader, lystrosaurs, or pigs, had free run of the Earth and all its plant life. There was undisturbed grubbing, gobbling, and gorging, as these slobbering beasts thrust their snouts and tusks into every crevice, rooting around with greedy abandon. How did these swine survive while nearly every other large beast was doomed to a ashen death? “We can only speculate,” says Paul Wignall, professor of paleonenvironment (U. of Leeds), “but perhaps its ability to burrow and hibernate protected it from the worst periods.” (2) Of course, all this is speculative and based on reconstructions from fossils, etc. And, as for the eventual fall of the pig, no one quite knows how they let slip from their trotters what could only have been a stranglehold on the planet and all its abundance.

Now, in my knowledge and acquaintance with men of science, there is nothing that any would possibly like more, other than a blow job from a giant fighting iguana of the Triassic period or a custom built pygmy skull footstool, than the chance to study an era or event in progress, rather than being damned to backward looking deduction and the inconsistencies and guesswork that it engenders. Well. This past week, fortuitously and without prejudice, the opportunity fell from the sky, as thick as a rain of spears, and with much misery, forlorn moaning, and even a little grunting. Yes, the bailout of AIG, the failure of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the merger of Merrill Lynch & Co. with the Bank of America, the death throes of Morgan Stanley, and the mother of the doomsday, the collapse of Fannie May and Freddie Mac, all eerily conjure up the age of the lystrosaur, and most certainly constitute a real time case study of ‘the pigs that ruled the world’.

Yes. The porcine era is upon us. It is unreeling like a stock ticker right before our eyes. The U.S. banking crisis and the squealing crescendo that accompanies it have proven beyond a doubt that we are living in the age of swine, and indeed, the fat is in the fryer and the the captive audience to the Wall Street debacle will also pick up the tab. By my calculations, as of today, with current bail-out funds totaling $705 billion, and another $700 billion promised over the next two years, the tab stands at somewhere around $1.4 trillion. That’s about $4600 per American. So it goes.

But whither the pigs—those five-chinned brutes, giddy with irrational exuberance now doomed to fear—in all of this. Well, I suspect even the king pigs may lose a chin or two, but they will still be pigs, for that is their nature. And they will survive, as they have always done, even as they did in 1929, by digging deep burrows and hunkering down, until the ash and fire subsides. Everyone else is on his own. The crisis has far reaching implications, and rightly the US government must do something. But this crisis is not a freak hazard like volcanoes in the past, a cruel trick of Nature, or a whim of fortune. No, this has been manufactured and driven by the primary victims, the investment corporations, but will be visited on all at a price that has yet to be determined.

Permit me to digress. It reminds me of something that I can’t let go; something twisted that has stuck in me like a barbed hook and has planted in me an unholy fear of all that happens in a barnyard. You see, when I was a boy of about five or six, my parents took me on a working vacation in Nova Scotia. The idea was that we would go and experience life on an idyllic farm and all its joys first hand. As it turned out, it was actually more of an indentured servitude, and by the end, we were only too happy to escape with our lives. The farmer was an oily haired, cruel, ape of a man with deeply rotted teeth from gargling gasoline. Even the rats shuddered in this man’s shadow. The instant we set foot on his property, he seized our clothing and sold it to a passing rag and bone man who wouldn’t look us in the eye and darkly muttered something about burial in a potter’s field. When the peddler tried to negotiate the purchase of our car, the farmer flew into a rage and beat him with the sharp edge of a shovel, screaming there would be plenty of time for that later, after the feast…

I will spare you the details—the whippings and weird screams in the night—it was long ago, and, my father is now nearly able to walk upright and the welts on our backs are but crosshatchings of fine scars. But there is a point here. We had endured more than enough gruel and the farmer and his family had spent the last three days supplementing our labour by slashing at us with a six foot, braided bull whip soaked in canola oil and poking us with sharp pointed sticks whenever we went near the main house. Strange and unfathomably vile things were happening here; something beyond the ken of god fearing people. So, on the third day of our slave-vacation, my father began jabbering in a state that can only be described as righteous anger and we knew it was time to leave. Deep in the night, we broke our manacles and managed to pry a board from the abandoned stable where the farmer and his wife kept us and crept out into the moonlight. My mother convinced my father that discretion was the better part of valour; to wit, beating the soles of the farmer and his wife’s feet with an axe handle, before feeding them to the animals would raise too many ugly and confusing questions in a town full of half-wits and whisky forgers. No, we would get in our chrome green Chrysler station wagon and leave that god-forsaken place without even shaking the dust off of our shoes.

But before we left, I took one last look in the barn, and there, in the flickering light of a kerosene lantern, was the farmer, and bare-chested, doing, what for me was the unspeakable: he was butchering a pig. Now, for those unfamiliar with where pork bellies come from, let me explain. It is a serious enterprise and not for the squeamish. To correctly butcher a pig, one must first stun the beast with what is known as a captive bolt pistol. Using compressed air, a bolt gun fires a heavy stainless steel rod to deliver a shallow but forceful blow to the forehead of the beast. In a pinch, a sharp blow from a hammer will do. Once stunned, the pig is hauled into the air by the hind legs to facilitate the bleeding-out process. Bleeding-out requires the pig to be ‘stuck’ in the chest and it is necessary in order to avoid the spoiling of the meat. The bleeding can take several minutes and produces copious amounts of blood. Some twitching and continued motion will occur even if the pig is dead. When the pig is bled, the butcher removes the pig’s hair, which can be done by either placing the carcass in boiling water and then scraping off the hard bristles or using a blow torch to burn off the hair. Skinning will also work. At this point, the pig is gutted, inedible parts removed, and the edible parts cut and preserved. Though I was spared seeing these final steps—my father packed me into the wagon and we burned through the gate and down the highway, the needle pushing 120 and the headlights off for the first 50 km—needless to say, in my young, fragile mind, what I had seen in the flickering light was so horrible that it has eclipsed every other memory of that place and is seared into my brain.

But where am I going with this gruesome rant? I guess the point is this. The hogs are out of the tunnel now and we are all witnessing the slaughter. Yes, the captive pistol has shot its bolt, there is blood seeping under the doors of many Wall Street banks these days, many carcasses are being boiled and scraped, and there will be more of this before the end. And the beasts are looking in at the windows, wondering when all those men became pigs and vice versa. But the explanations of what has transpired, despite the blathering about economics and the market place, don’t ring true. They may be right, but they are not honest, because I have not heard one person state it unequivocally: this mess is about greed. Banks loan money for one reason: profit. Few banks are interested in simply helping people or extending sympathy to the needy—try defaulting on a loan—that is the job of the churches and the state. There is no help for the wicked borrower who cannot make his payments on time, and no government subsidized bail-outs. No sir, you are as pitied as a stray dog with the mange, and they will take everything—your house, your car, furniture—all and sundry. They have done this on each and every mortgage that has been foreclosed, not to mention, terminally gouged the borrowers throughout. Beyond this, hedge funds and short sellers have run rough shod. Many have won and won big, even those who are currently losing. Now, in an age of deregulation and letting markets decide, many people who should have known better, are suffering for their greed, but it is ultimately the average citizen who will pay. Yes, the pigs have been at the trough and there is no feed left, but they must be bled or fed. Enter the taxpayer. To save themselves they will have to cough up the funds to keep these investment banks afloat, the markets stable, credit available and the livelihoods of thousands upon thousands possible.

I am neither an economist nor a farmer, but I can tell you this: I know a pig when I see one, and a slaughter speaks for itself. It makes me angry, just as I am sure that many others are angered. There is something unjust and seriously perverse when financial giants throw themselves on the mercy of the people they have squeezed their nickels from in the first place. But I expect that for most, this indignation will fade. When all the clamor dies down, little will be learned: after all, there will always be greed and it will remain unbridled. It is systemic and necessary to the whole capitalist system, and it is not in the immediate interests of the cadre of Wall Street lever-pullers and profiteers to change it. Yes, with respect to George Orwell, swine walk among us, and this will always be so. The pigs are dead, long live the pigs.

1. Thompson, Hunter S. Songs of the Doomed, Pocket Books, New York: 1990.
2. The Globe and Mail, Social Studies, Sept. 17, 2008.