the cavorting pig

Infinite Thought is in San Francisco. Checks out some socialist realism, quotes:


'No nation has ever treated the pig as cruelly, as barbarously, as diabolically as the U.S. But you will never find a pig sign or sculpture where the pig isn’t smiling. So the question is – is this unanimous smile the successful result of the big lie? Or, examined a little closer, aren’t those smiles more in the nature of grimaces? Aren’t the mass of happy cartoon pigs really like the damned in Memlinc’s paintings, except that they are denied even the faculty of frowning or crying out as the demons poke them with their tridents – or, the case of the poor American pig, stun them with their tasers? There’s an interesting connection to be made to feminism – Ellen Willis, in the eighties, suggested the idea of a smile strike by women. The idea never really got off the ground, but I think that the omni-depicted smiling pig is, perhaps, engaged in something like it – such exaggerated smiles are put on the pig, so happy is the cavorting pig, that I suspect a strike-like aspect, a sort of kabuki piggism in which the smiles are coded, in their exaggeration, to mean the opposite. Charlotte’s Pig, Wilbur, was, in a sense, a last, romantic feudal pig before the meat corporations took over the pig’s life – perhaps, indeed, the Wilbur, or the Empress of Blandings, stands to pigdom as Robinson Crusoe stood to the ideology of the classical economists. Marx would immediately understand the smiling pig for what it was.'