Iowa Chops Hockey

Hockey. That most masculine of all games. Warfare on ice. Brutal, fast, strategic, like a coordinated military strike. In light of all that, a namesake reveling in its own victimhood makes sense only in Suicidefoodistan.

Please note that, as with the other suicidal sports mascots we have profiled—the Beef and the T-Bones—the emblem of the Iowa Chops is not a fearsome beast. This is no razorback hog, feral and fierce. This is not a tusked boar. No, this pig is property, a penned and abused thing. A creature intended, explicitly, for food. It is a cut of meat, for crying out loud! Some Iowa Chops events are sponsored by the Iowa Pork Producers Association!

This is, of course, a classic case of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation. We bring it up often enough—like here, for example—that it's about time we started using a snazzy initialism. IAS is the inversion of predator/prey roles, the assumption by humans of characteristics of their food. As though absolution—or something—will be the reward for the masquerade. It is a sarcastic simulation of empathy. A sneering pretense. It's easy to understand why it's such a popular ploy.

In addition to the Chops, there is also a mascot named Pitchy the Pig, and a dance squad hideously named the Baby Backs. Meat! Meat! All is meat! We are meat! We make no distinction between ourselves and the flesh we eat! Is this hockey or a lost rite?













Addendum: Your 2008 Baby Backs!