At the Bar. Money on Dicks.

I’m sitting at a bar at Burbank Airport as I write this. I’m waiting to board a flight to JFK. Today some crazy man in Brooklyn gunned down two cops as they sat in their squad car near the “Tompkins House Public Development” in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Apparently online he said that today he was going to “put wings on pigs” which is actually a fairly complicated statement, from a semiotic point of view. It is actually kind of a cool statement down at the semiotic level. Here “put wings” means to kill, right? Which comes from this cartoon idea that when something dies its ghost soul leaves its body dressed as an angel, in a sort of neo-classical Roman toga and playing a harp. And clearly, “pigs” here just means cops. That is not a complicates association if it is one you already know. I just looked around on my phone for five minutes and couldn’t reliably figure out how it is derived, so like all of language, it makes perfect sense once you no longer have to think about it. Anyway, I like to try to write-off crazy, violence-obsessed, gun-loving, douchebags (of every sort and regardless of which side of the badge they stand on) as plainly and simply stupid, but as an English major I am saddened by this “put wings on pigs” thing because it is actually a pretty successful turn of phrase. I have always contended that a really good phrase is one that we feel like we already know. I feel like I already know this one (really good songs are this way too, I think that is what makes them stick in your brain: they stick in your brain because they lock into empty slots that have always just been waiting there. This is how proteins work too.). I really hope that it does not end up on t-shirts.

The last thing we need is more people being dicks to one another.

I am, by the way, in favor of using vocabulary like “being a dick” or “acting like a douche-bag” in intelligent conversation when it is used to point out that someone is objectively no longer participating in a larger dialogue, but rather just being pedantic, reactionary, stupid, or simply whoring for ratings.

In this way, FOX NEWS is usually just behaving like “a bunch of moist douchebags”. Similarly, the Reverend Al Sharpton is generally “just being a big’ol dick all the time”. I keep trying to explain to my professors that I feel it is perfectly acceptable to write my research papers this way. Quite often though they respond by being “douchey dicks” about my grade.

It is completely true that all this cop-on-not-a-cop violence needs to stop, just as it is as completely true that all this crazy-person-on-cop violence needs to stop. But how much do you want to make a bet that over the next couple of weeks we aren’t actually going to be talking about any of that?  How much do you want to make a bet that we’re all just going to be “dicks” to each other?

My money is on dicks.

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