Hogwatch

I love the word 'hog'. It's so splendidly archaic. It has a number of applications - go the whole hog, hog the limelight, one can be a hog if one insists on troughing food long past the point of satiety [an activity I have a particularly snouty affection for]... living high on the hog, hog heaven... as well, of course, as describing an animal which has given so much to farming and language, the pig.

The last month and a bit has seen the word 'hogwash' jump to new prominence, well, in my head anyway. First punnishly, in 'Hogfather', the Terry Pratchett adaptation that ran on Sky 1 over Christmas, or 'Hogswatch', as the season is known in the book/film, in which a group of interdimensional miserabilists known as 'Auditors' take out a contract on 'the Hogfather', a Santalike, with the projected aim of removing belief from the universe to 'tidy it up', which Death, as a fellow anthropomorphic personification, takes skeletal steps to stop, for reasons which become obvious... illustrating that for all the potboiler aspects of some of TP's works he's also communicating some important ideas about imagination, in an excellently disk-like self-justificatory/deeply important to the future of what we laughingly call civilisation manner...

Then hogwash appeared again, in two articles this week, one in which - superbly - the Canadian pig farmer accused of mass murder dismissed the charges as 'hogwash'... which probably has more resonance with him than it does for the news media headline writers of the (hogocentric) world, who fell upon the juxtaposition with, well, hoggish glee... (I make the 'hogocentric' distinction as there are peoples of earth that disdain the pig diet, which is fair enough, I don't eat cat, as I've observed in previous hog, er, blogposts... But 'no hocus pocus, I focus on the facts', as Killah Priest once observed, and...) the fact is that the expression was expressed by a pig farmer, as a figure of speech with direct practical meaning to the user, which is so neat that it practically makes me skip for joy.

The other article this week, on a North American who without a doubt is responsible for the deaths of innocent people [discuss any aspect of the preceding clause], came as Dick Cheney 'was asked to respond to some Republicans in Congress who "are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures".' His fob was: 'hogwash'...
The article unfortunately doesn't relate which particular premise Dick 'Lon' Cheney considered to be nonsense, perhaps we'll never know. I don't have much skipping to do about 'the war on Iraq' [as discrete from 'the war on terror']; perhaps Hogwash is a new Halliburton product for the freedom-revelling people of Iraq. I love the idea that the people fighting Americans across Central Asia are fighting 'democracy', as opposed to 'a country that invaded another country'.

I thought I'd join in with the use of 'hogwash' as a term denoting my opinion of something's nonce-sense as, once more, the Observer columnist Nick Cohen annoys me beyond measure [see my 'looking Islamism in the eye' post...] in this article on How the Left Lost its Way, where he absurdly suggests that people on The Great Anti-War March worldwide on 15th Februrary 2003 were actually marching in support of a 'fascist regime'... no, no, no, nonono! We were marching to express the notion that the war was wrong, badly thought through, a huge mistake in the making, a colonial throwback, unevolved conflict resolution and not in the slightest little bit about bringing freedom to the people of Iraq, unless by this is meant 'the freedom to give all your oil to the west'. Fascism should not be simply applied in terms of totalitarian regimes, uniforms, nice boots, etc; it is, as Mussolini suggested, and he should know, better termed 'corporatism', given that it is a convergence of state and industrial power. The anti-war march was a culmination of a mass-realisation that in the west we live highly ordered lives geared towards maintaining a slow churn of the money mill. It was an expression that this in itself is not an acceptable basis on which to assume the role of arbiters of the world, far less to actually go and, like, kill other people for being repressed. It was a cry for help from a depressed civilisation and it was answered with a silence which exposed the lie of our democracy. Then we all got properly depressed and started blowing ourselves up.

Mr Cohen 'pro-war lefty', [see this article I liked because it uses the phrases 'pro-war lefties' and 'belligerati'] also suggests that a focus on this self-regard, 'opposing' American foreign policy, to simplify it for the sake of argument, has left us 'blind to the evils of militant Islam'. Hogwash! The only thing blinding 'us' is the log in our own eye [a log felled illegally in South America]. Armed people with a grievance change ideologies like underwear, it's the'militant' bit we [whoever that may signify historically and contemporaneously] should be concerned about. [In fact, if you want a bit more circularity to this piece, a quote from Pratchett again [although it could be Neil Gaiman] from Good Omens, 'Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.'] Loath as I am to use as subjective a word as 'evil' here, yes, blowing yourself up on a bus can be seen as evil; it surely follows that flattening an entire country to effect regime change is fairly hardline 'evil' behaviour - and pretty fascistic too, if we use Hitler as a model of impositional politics.

Anway, methods of control may differ... Words are one of the most effective. I'm satisfied that religious people are in general doing more damage to themselves than any external attack might. How about finishing up this paean to piggery-related rhetoric with a roll-around in 'Truth vs hogwash' ?