Last week I checked my email, only to find a most interesting letter from my ex-boyfriend from Arizona. This email depicted two unlikely events – unlikely in the sense that they were not only abnormal occurrences, but both were tied to his encounter with the swine species. The ex informed me that he’d just returned from a hunting trip where he shot a 440 lb. feral pig and he’d also met the most powerful pig in the county: President George W. Bush.
Feral pigs in Texas descended from introductions of European wild hogs for sporting purposes and from escaped domestic swine that established feral populations. George W. Bush is also from Texas, but unlike the feral species, somehow this one creature has arisen to unprecedented war-mongering and economy-debilitating powers. See George Orwell’s Animal Farm mixed with 1984.
As a homeland security-loving, states rights advocating, small-town Southern Baptist NRA member, my darling ex loves his gun collection and considers hunting one of his fondest hobbies. He goes with the men of his family or by himself, escaping into the wilderness of the Southwest to shoot, camp and whittle.
Everybody who knows me well was rather surprised to see me with this ex. I am a staunch New York feminist majoring in environmental policy and have never been one to censor my liberal opinions or zeal for northeastern society. I just happened to spend my summer doing an internship out west, and I confess I was highly intrigued by the vast differences I found between our versions of American culture.
At first my ex’s passion for hunting freaked me out, but as he was a hot firefighter, I bit my tongue and gave him a chance. Soon enough, I learned to appreciate his way of life, guns included. The West afforded me other hobbies I’d never experienced in the East: we jet skied in a pristine lake surrounded by saguaro cacti, cuddled at drive-in movies and danced the two-step in his kitchen to George Straight.
He’d never been east of Nebraska, so I would tell him stories about the rest of the world as we sat in the back of his pick-up watching breath-taking desert sunsets. Then we’d discuss oil drilling in Alaska, United States involvement in Israel and the pros and cons of the Second Amendment in rural versus urban settings, never quite agreeing, never tiring of getting our unique points across.
I listened with newfound sympathy to the story of how people in a close community were not able to open a copper mine that would’ve revitalized the local economy because of an endangered owl that shared the same land. In response, the hillbillies went and shot all the owls they found so they would no longer be a problem. I eventually betrayed my own tree-hugging soul and learned to shoot yucca plants and Corona bottles with an AK-47, and by the time I quit my Americorps internship, I’d become a rattlesnake-eating, gun-toting, saloon-hopping, rodeo-loving individual.
Did my political affiliations change? Not at all. Did my tolerance for other lifestyles progress? Certainly.
Therefore, after a great summer in Arizona, hunting really doesn’t scare me anymore. As long as my ex had a permit and was having fun, I am glad he shot that pig. Big, big pig.
As for the other pig, did I begin liking Bush after months of good lovin’ from a conservative? Never! I’d given in enough by not caring about dead animals, so I tried to make my dear meet me half way on my liberal plateau. I flew my ex to New York and Boston in the fall, feeding him Peter Lugar’s steak and North End veal, all the while holding his hand and subtly trying to cajole him into believing the joys of municipal egalitarianism.
My friends argued against creationism with him on the subway, we mistakenly ended up in a gay bar in Hells Kitchen and he fell asleep on my lap while I enthusiastically watched “Bowling for Columbine.” I wanted him to realize that liberal hippies, as he called us, also have justified views. The same way he likes his rights to hunt and own guns, I think people should have a right to welfare, healthcare, good public schools, a separation of church and state, marriage regardless of their sexual orientation and women’s needs to be able to make bodily choices on our own. Bush would not agree with me, but would my boyfriend?
It was the ultimate test of our strange compatibility, which in retrospect, I see failed miserably. Now I hear that my ex happily shook the president’s hand after a speech Bush delivered at Mesa Community College. I cower in fear of this little piggy making it all the way home to the White House a year from now, with the votes of people like my ex, who are influenced more heavily by a warm handshake than months of my secular humanist propaganda. Shoot one pig, elect another.
Despite the fact that all of our contradictory political views eventually wore away at our relationship, it’s worth giving parts of the other side of the political spectrum a chance, swine related or not. I believe that a person’s opinion should not be skewed by what their peers or political party delineate for them, but rather what their life experiences teach them and the intelligible arguments they encounter. Every opinion is circumstantial, everyone has something to teach. Despite my intense liberalism, I learned a lot from a conservative who could argue his points well. I’m sure he would agree that in the long run, respecting one out of two pigs isn’t all that bad.