Of Pigs and Wolves Copyright (C) 91-95 Ted Holden Once upon a time, there existed a giant and majestic land, in which man and nature and the land itself existed with a remarkable harmoniousness. No one family of beast sought to totally exterminate any other, and even the men who inhabited the land, other than for ritual practices which might have frightened the beasts on occasion, somehow managed to live in harmony with the rest. This harmony was disturbed by the coming of the white man. Aside from everything else, the white man brought with him herds of cattle and swine and, noticing that wolves and pumas constituted a danger to these, proceeded to kill every wolf and every puma anywhere remotely close to inhabited areas. Deer populations soon soared out of control. At length, even the American red-neck with his annual hunting seasons was not able to constrain the deer herds, and men began to suffer from Lyme disease even in large cities, and run into deer in their own garages and driveways. The white man was not incapable of learning from his mistakes; environmental whackos began to re-release wolves, even tackling and biting deer themselves to show the wolves, who had long since forgotten such techniques, what was expected of them. There lived in upstate New York at this time, a yuppie farmer by the name of Greenberg, a refugee from the rat race who had cashed it all in and set to growing grapes and raising swine and, amongst these later, were three little pigs named Dick, John, and Spiro. Between these three and farmer Greenberg, there began to be an unbridgeable gulf over the perception of danger from wolves. In fact, Dick and John and Spiro were beginning to view wolves with quite a lot of alarm. A crisis occurred when Farmer Greenberg found the remains of a hog which had been rather clumsily butchered and two-thirds of the way eaten. "I'll be damned!" said Greenberg, "Who'd have thought pigs would take mating rights and struggles for dominance that seriously?!!" Greenberg set off to a local bookstore to purchase several animal psychology books, hoping to teach his hogs to live more peaceably amongst themselves. Dick and John and Spiro convened a meeting amongst themselves and several other of the more politically active pigs. "One big, bad wolf we could handle." said Dick, "But that's not what we're dealing with here. What we've got here is the entire god-damned international wolf conspiracy, and I'm starting to believe that that idiot yuppie Greenberg isn't going to be much help to us. And one thing's for DAMNED sure, we're not gonna survive much longer in this stupid pig pen!" Despite much debate at an overly long meeting, however, the pigs were not able to arrive at a general plan of action and each of them set about making his own preparations. John, having had a certain amount of experience in this sort of thing as a young lawyer on a Wall Street bond firm, began issuing large numbers of municipal junk bonds, "moral obligation" bonds, or COPs (Certificates of Participation) as they are sometimes known. Representing these certificates as having no legal standing but as being of such magical nature that Farmer Greenberg and the other pigs would feel "morally obligated" to pay interest on them in perpetuity, John was able to convince a number of S&L's, one large bank, and three pension funds to purchase them and, with the giant sums of money thus attained, proceeded to have the CNM (Capone, Nitty, and McGurn) Construction Company build for him a gigantic housing project about two miles down from Greenberg's farm. Unfortunately, CNM was not one of the more scrupulous contracting firms which John could have chosen. The building complex which quickly arose, while fancy enough from the outside with glass, exterior elevators, and other mall-type modern touches much in evidence, and certainly large enough, was mostly made of straw and could not have been said to have been structurally sound. Worse than that was the clientele which the project quickly attracted. Wall Street insiders very quickly learned what Greenberg and the other pigs thought of Certificates of Participation from the subsequent lawsuits and, seeking to recoup some of their expenses, leased the project to New York City (all except for the penthouse which they allowed John to retain). Inside of two months, the place was a total shambles, with flourishing drug markets on every floor, pass-by shootings on the elevators, and a social life which resembled nothing so much as one continual gang fight. John took up with one of the worst of the factions and, this is sad to relate, began to drink, to indulge in unsafe sex, to engage in every sort of vice, and to use so many drugs that, when the inevitable end came and the wolves blew the building apart and snacked him along with all the other tenants of the project, they were stoned out of their minds for two months. Which gave Spiro time to put his plan into action. Spiro figured that appeals to greed, such as John had favored, were a reasonable enough way to conduct business, but that there were simply too many people in it. Hatred on the other hand, had been out of vogue and, in fact, politically incorrect for so long that there seemed to actually be a positive need for some aggressive and bright young urban porker to resurrect it. For this purpose, of course, the wolves would be viewed as merely a force of nature; the real villains would be the home-front slackers, those pigs not sufficiently imbued with anti-wolf fervor, Greenberg, the environmental whackos who had released the wolves, and all the wolf-sympathizers. Spiro began to amass huge sums of money from the lecture circuit and from speeches at $1000-a-plate fund-raising dinners, at which he would castigate the above mentioned groups as "nattering nabobs of negativism", rotten apples, and other such calumnies to the roar of the crowds. Spiro and his faction used this financing scheme to have CNM construct for them (out of wood this time) a giant skinhead hall in a circular form around a huge oak tree on the edge of Greenberg's property, the entire thing being roughly modeled after classical mythological descriptions of Aasegard. The hall was replete with camouflage netting, shooting ports, and observation posts, and the area surrounding it was heavily booby-trapped. Knives, truncheons, and small arms of every variety were in plentiful supply on racks on all the walls, and copies of SOLDIER OF FORTUNE were lying about on reading tables. The wolves, naturally enough, avoided all of this and went back to eating deer for awhile and, in fact, sent their representatives, flowers in hand, to attempt to sue for peace. Hatred, however, once started, is difficult to simply turn off. Spiro's gangs sent the two wolf emissaries fleeing back into the woods under a hail of lead and, shortly, there being no external focus to maintain the good vibes, divided into factions amongst themselves, and began going at it with all of the above mentioned paraphernalia. In the shooting which ensued, an electrical circuit was hit, the building went up in flames, and all which the wolves found it necessary to provide at their own expense was the barbecue sauce. "Both of those idiots were off base!" thought Dick to himself, a copy of Nietzsche's works in his trotters. "Greed and hatred may be well and good for boys and amateurs, but what a man needs in this world is P-O-W-E-R. Dick set out to get himself some. Cleverly disguised as a third-world potentate, he met with Pentagon and State Department officials, producing photographs from Somalia, Ethiopia, Japanese prison camps, and the Bataan death march and explained that these were the fat and well-off in his nation, and that he needed immediate infusions of M1-A1 tanks, F-16's, F-20's, AWACs radar systems, and other equipment to keep such desperate people in line. Deals were signed, financing was arranged at one of the large New York banks, and US Army Corps of Engineers personnel began constructing air strips and a fortified system of reinforced concrete and brick bunkers, hardened silos and hangers, radar installations, pill-boxes, and other artillery emplacements at a site about five miles upriver from farmer Greenberg's barn. The wolves, seeing all of this were dumbfounded. They ceased even hunting deer, and began to sulk and whimper and commiserate amongst themselves, and to garner a meager subsistence begging leftover French fries from the late crew at McDonald's. Indeed, they wouldn't have lasted much longer had fate not intervened. Hanukkah had arrived, and it chanced that farmer Greenberg's father, a veteran of the invasions of Tinian, Iwo-Jima, and Saipan, was visiting. "I can handle the industrial collapse and the service economy, and the S&L scandal, and the banking scandal, and all of that..." said old Sollie Greenberg, but when the wolves in this country start acting afraid of one god-damned stupid pig, that's more than a man can bear to see. I'm gonna show you boys how we used to deal with fortified positions like that in 1945!" The wolves perked up. Sollie shortly had them mixing gasoline and creosote and other ingredients in the correct proportions; high pressure pumps, hoses, and armored shielding were bolted and welded onto three of the Greenberg tractors, and, to make a long story short, they fried Dick inside his fortifications and blew him and all of his partisans and followers to hell. In all of these dealings, as usual, the middle class pig and the taxpayer pig, the so to speak, had been abandoned and left totally to his own devices. Trapped between the predations of the wolves and the machinations of Dick, John, and Spiro, a number of these had simply abandoned any thoughts of civilized existence and gone to live in the forest. One such pig, Oswald, was rooting for underground viands and berries about a week after Dick's demise, when he stumbled headlong into three wolves. Oswald crossed himself, knelt, began to recite the Lord's prayer, and figured this was it, and was thunderstruck to see one of the wolves cross HIMSELF, exclaim "Madre de Dios!" and bolt off through the forest in terror while the two other wolves began to tremble and shake and finally ran off screaming incoherently in different directions. "What the hell?" thought Oswald. He ran off to the little pond behind the Greenberg spread and peered at his reflection in the water. What he saw was an evil, powerful looking creature with big, sharp-looking tusks and matted, razorback fur. In all the time in the forest, he had simply reverted. "Isn't that a hell of a note?" thought Oswald. "That's all any of those idiots ever needed." Farmer Greenberg had watched the wolves' assault on Dick's fortifications and was impressed with how quickly they learned things beyond simply killing deer. He very quickly managed to teach a number of them to plough, to mend fences, and to perform other useful functions around the farm. "The more I think about it..." he said to his father, "I don't really like pigs all that much, and out of two or three hundred of em, you're always gonna get three really serious assholes." As of the last anybody had heard, Greenberg had become the only Jewish wolf farmer in upstate New York, and was making all kinds of money selling wolves via mail order to farms in other parts of the country.