Grandinite

Kate blew the lid off a story about the student newspaper at USask publishing a cartoon of Jesus fellating a pig, and it’s reached statospheric proportions, having been picked up by Canada.com and Fark.

It looks like plenty of readers of the cartoon are certainly choked about the subject matter – OMG! Jesus is fellating a pig! You’re going to hell! Of course, judgement day will have its place, but really, the cartoon, if it offends you, lets you experience what many muslims around the world have been feeling as a result of Allah being depicted as a terrorist.

“Oh, but there’s an element of truth to that” is a good objection – isn’t Islam a violent religion? Sure, some elements of it are, but most Muslims are generally peaceful people. If we take the ‘element of truth’ argument as justification for representing Allah as a terrorist, then the same logic applies in the element of truth in the Jesus-Swine cartoon: Christianity has submitted to corporate or capitalist ownership, be it through a constant message of prosperity and consumption, the Prayer of Jabez or whatever.

Yeah, the cartoon’s content is offensive, because Jesus is blowing a pig. Of course, just like Allah doesn’t literally have a bomb in his turban, Jesus doesn’t nor did he really blow pigs. That alone should be enough for people to see that it’s a metaphor, but the literalist mind can’t get past what’s in front of his eyes and find the real meaning behind the image.

But here’s where I disagree with Kate, when she writes:

Now, time to take this issue down another tangent – so far the controversy has been limited to the offense given to Christians. That raises an interesting, and as yet, unasked question – When are the cartoonists going to be called on the carpet to explain the hatred directed at so-called “capitalists”?

Well, my impressions are that the represenation of powerful people as pigs stems from Orwell’s Animal Farm, and is more of a commentary of everyday people becoming tyrants as they are corrupted by power. I mean, the annual Teddy Awards for government waste are handed out by a guy in a pig costume. Are we to assume he’s a capitalist pig?

The premise that “capitalism=bad” and that any group, any individual, any religion should have to disassociate themselves from business to attain moral purity is an intellectual embarrassment to begin with.

Ya can’t serve God and Mammon. Sure, the economy is a means to attaining certain ends, such as moving a person up through Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, but the difference is in ends. When God and Jesus beome a means for you to get more stuff, you’ve got your means-ends concept totally screwed up. The cartoon comments on the submission of Christianity to corruption. Google Benny Hinn, Jim Crouch and Jim Bakker to see how monetary considerations outweigh personal faith at the highest levels.

But the cartoon goes one step further – in choosing a pig to represent the businessman, they have chosen the time honored progaganda tool of dehumanization.

That these small-minded refugees of Marxism are receiving a heavily subsidized education at an institution funded by tax revenues generated in large part by the very “capitalists” they would portray as pigs, just adds injury to insult.

Back in Orwell’s day, pigs represented the communists, who promised comraderie and revolution only to become the very tyrants they sought to overthrow. Old Major, the key player in Animal Farm, was a freakin’ representation of Marxist ideas. After Old Major dies (like Lenin and Marx), the rest of the pigs rally and overthrow the farmer, who represents the capitalist, as he uses the labor of his animals to produce.

One strategy of the Fabian Socialists was to redefine certain representations and icons representative of the dominant ideology. Where pigs were political tyrants, they become capitalists. Up is down, left is right – it’s all right there in Brave New World.