Fat Buddies Ribs & BBQ

Even though these chums are fat and jolly—so fat and so very jolly—let us remember the context that surrounds suicidefoodist imagery like the fog of stink that rises from industrial hog manure lagoons. The pigs are happy, and it is their impending death that brings them happiness. That, and their admirable obesity. They are hat-wearing meat piles with legs. But they know that just makes them more prized menu selections. This is what makes their life—oh, pathos!—worth living.

We turn now to a brief examination of the tagline. "So good it'll make you squeal!" A classic case of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation. The sounds of your contentment will mirror the panicked squeals of the beings your meal used to be. How can anybody function in such an intellectually chaotic atmosphere?

All told—the unhappy pairing of the words and graphics: repugnant. If there has ever been a less seductive barbecue logo, one less likely to bring 'em through the doors and put 'em in the seats, we haven't seen it. And we're not sure we would want to. But we must. Our hard slog to the bottom, to the worst of the worst, is not yet concluded. We have important work yet to do.

Jughead and the National Buffalo Wing Festival

Forsythe P. (Jughead) Jones—icon of wholesome American gluttony—shows up to give us a textbook example of IAS, a concept we haven't delved into much since this piece from 2009.

By masquerading as a chicken whose life is devoted to dying (and who eats chicken and who has a chicken for a head), our eternal teenager is enacting a time-honored ritual wherein people assume the role of "food" animals.

With this purportedly humorous inversion—human and commodity trading places—Jughead endeavors to deflect some of the blame he has earned through a lifetime of relentless consumption. Oh, the uncounted burgers he has forced down his elastic gullet at Pop Tate's! But here, on the grounds of the National Buffalo Wing Festival, he imagines he has taken on the role of victim (the phenomenon is known, after all, as Ironic Aggressor Sublimation). Oh, of course it's a pose, one that underscores the total domination exerted by the human overclass.

(Thanks to Dr. Robert for reminding us of what was under our very noses the whole time.)









Addendum: There's also this, from the same issue, harkening back to a theme we've been tracking since 2007.

Kansas City T-Bones

From the grim stockyards and meat processing plants of the heartland come the Kansas City T-Bones. They’re not only the perfect counterparts to the Omaha Beef football squad, they’re also another textbook example of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation, a doctrine even we are growing tired of explaining.

The identification with the victim—and not merely a victim, but a slaughtered and butchered victim, an Edible Martyr—appears illogical. Aren’t sports designations meant to inspire unity within and dread without? The Giants must be mighty, the Vikings ruthless, and the Lions without fear. And the T-Bones? What of the T-Bones?

They must be… dead? Mere parts, disembodied and utterly nonthreatening! Where is the appeal? How does such a name stoke fan loyalty or the necessary killer instict among the players?

Look beyond sport. The meaning of the T-Bones cannot be found on the diamond. It exists solely within the cult of suicidefoodism, where man’s vaunted, yet precarious authority must be defended, reinforced, endlessly celebrated. By assuming the guise of the defeated, the T-Bones proclaim their belief that their supremacy is self-evident—a statement only the victor can afford to make.

Still, to the unbeliever, the T-Bones name is a failure, transparent in its desperation.

Strike One: The T-Bones mascot is named Sizzle, a moniker intended to invoke the victim. Why then is he shown at bat, with such grit and determination? Are we meant to quail at the sight of this, this food? It arouses only pity. And disgust.

Strike Two: T-Bones merchandise can be purchased in the online "meat locker." The T-Bones don't go all-out with the dead animal theme, the way the Omaha Beef do, but it's still unsettling.

Strike Three: The T-Bones children’s club is the bizarrely apostrophed 'Lil Chops. We will never understand the urge to cast children in the role of foodstuffs. (See here and here.)

T-Bones? Yer out!




(Thanks to Dr. Ted for the referral.)

Eat Your Children: a digression

Halloween costumes are a cherished part of autumn. Children's spirits soar as they experiment with make-believe and the assumption of new identities. It's a way of making real a small and friendly magic. And who hasn't oohed and aahed over little ones dressed for the season as teddy bears or tigers or kitty cats? (For our first Halloween, so many long, tedious years ago, we were a humble, brown mouse.)

But these are not that kind of costume. No, when you dress your child in these costumes, the magic quickly curdles. You are pretending for your baby, imagining she is food, meat, a dead and cooked animal.















It won't escape your attention that these costumes—featured on Martha Stewart's television show and website—are specifically not depictions of living beings. That livid red lobster is fresh from the boil. And the plucked turkey is wearing those paper shoes, the dead-turkey equivalent of heavy rouge on a corpse. The babies are even posed on platters, swaddled in garnish!

In that modest, unassuming way of ours, we refer to this as Ironic Aggressor Sublimation, and we've discussed it before (here, for instance). It's the supposedly hilarious identification with animals classified as victims, inferiors who could never threaten our status. It is never less than a laugh riot!

"It's a morbid thing."

Addendum (2/12/08): Another one. So cute! Hey, it's not like they feel pain or anything. (Image source.)


Addendum 2 (5/03/08) Of course, some people don't need to imagine their food babies as animals at all. For them, it's enough that they simply be identified as human chefs. No, wait. This is making less and less sense. (Photo courtesy of Dr. William.)






Addendum 3 (3/02/09): You may also choose to eat your child in sandwich form.











Addendum 4 (9/12/09): Or just cut out the middleman and eat a baby made from meat. Can you remember a time before you had ever seen this? Neither can we.



Addendum 5 (2/21/10): Children are edible in many, many forms.













Addendum 6 (12/26/10): Another example of the Grandmother Effect in action?

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!

Lil' Gobblers Turkey Bites

We've got some kind of garbled messaging going on. To wit, who are the lil' gobblers, exactly?

In a nod to the much-discussed doctrine of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation (last mentioned here), consumer and consumed are deliberately confused, creating a mish-mash of signifiers. That is, are the lil' gobblers the (no longer gobbling) turkeys or the little eaters in Mr. and Mrs. America's brood?

However we interpret the semantic muddle, the turkey's content. Waving a wing at the proceedings, the turkey is poised and cheerful. So what if the gobbler is to be gobbled? It's an accomplishment—is it not?—to be chunked and breaded thus, and fed to children.

Happy Thanksgiving to all the gobblers everywhere.







Addendum: Reminisce with the line-up of Thanksgivings gone by: 2009, 2008, and 2007.

Sir Loin and the Omaha Beef

What happens when a suicidal animal with a theatrical streak finds himself jobless and locked out of the storied Nebraska stockyards? He sews himself a costume and puts on a show!

Calling himself Sir Loin (groan), our star steer fires up the crowds at home games of the Omaha Beef (groan) indoor football franchise.

With his showmanship, he manages to turn the sport into one big party! It's a celebration of himself as a succulent, edible god!

The form-fitting outfit! The almost simian leer! Sir Loin (groan) is a role model for depraved "food" animals everywhere. Nothing can get in his way. Not his shockingly low self-esteem, not his status as a third-class citizen, nothing.

(Could the composition of this shot possibly be coincidental? The sculpted physique—more than a thousand beefy pounds of American meat on the hoof—marching before the Burger King sun!)

As an aside, this is the most extreme example of Ironic Aggressor Sublimation we have ever seen. (Please! No more!) Compare "Omaha Beef" with a superficially similar professional sports outfit, the Chicago Bulls. Yes, in both, a bull or steer is the mascot, but while the Beef emphasize their victim status (indeed, their very food-ness), the Bulls' name stands for power and virility.

Even within the Beef's league—and its Billings Outlaws, its River City Rage, and its Wichita Wild—the Beef stand alone as passive patsies.







And it's not just the team and their shameless Sir Loin (groan). No, it's the Omaha Prime (groan) dancers, the Rump Roasters (groan) and Meatheads (groan) fan groups, the Meat Wagon (groan) bus trips, and the Meat Wrapper (groan) newsletter. The entire enterprise is a fantasy of suicidefoodism!

(Image source.)

Cy-Fair Houston Chamber of Congress

The Chamber of Congress of the Cypress Fairbanks region (the Houston metro area) hosts an annual event known as the Chamber Herd. As near as we can figure, "young people" raise animals, then the Chamber buys them and passes the meat (their website carefully points out that it is "processed" meat—no whole carcasses rotting in the sun for these folks!) on to "local ministries."

Well, sure. It all sounds above-board.

The bovines in the graphic could be loving caricatures of actual members of the Cy-Fair Houston Chamber of Commerce (CFHCC). They're just so specific, so reflective of the individuality suicidefoodists like to say is uniquely human.

The bull on the left—doesn't he remind you of your old boss, the one who would occasionally make the tamest dirty jokes using that splendidly courtly language? The longhorn in the center is a dead-ringer for your father-in-law—that guy can be a little… particular, but he'd lend you his last dollar. And surely you recognize the cow on the right—it's your grad school mentor. Always talking department politics, and with that wicked sense of humor!

We've seen Ironic Aggressor Sublimation before—it's a theme we find fascinating—but the CFHCC has taken it to a new and disquieting place. Why would they wish to 1) individuate animals who are treated as nothing more than commodities to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, or 2) identify with chattel by presenting it as not so different from themselves? (They're all just members of the herd, after all!)

And while we're asking questions, why are the cowboy boots wearing hats?

Oregon Fryer Commission

Greetings from the Beaver State! The smiling chicken of the Oregon Fryer Commission wants you to enjoy everything Oregon has to offer. Well, not everything, maybe. Mostly he just wants you to eat some chickens.

Also affiliated with the Oregon Fryer Commission is Chicken Scratch University. (As of this writing, it is unclear whether CSU is an actual accredited institution of higher learning.)

Again, our smiling Oregon chicken—here beneath a scholarly mortarboard. As a figurehead, nothing could be more suicidefoodistically pure. The presence of the chicken reminds us of the fun we're having. What's college without a little slaughter? Come on—you were young once. (Of course, the chicken will be young forever, never to be granted a gentle old age.)

While the only "course" offered via the CSU website is "Chicken 101," electives include "Cutting Wings into Drumettes" and "Cutting Up a Whole Chicken." Having a chicken overseeing such chickenshit is de rigueur.

No, it doesn't make a lick of sense. And, yes, it is a cliché so basic (and so base) that it is practically invisible.

When the BMOC (Big Man of the Coop) isn't posing for brochures and teaching guts (literally!), he's out pressing the flesh and talking up CSU with the kids.

In this candid shot, he shows his CSU spirit (go, Fryers!) with three lads and (we assume) an alumnus. The chicken hats are another instance of the Ironic Aggressor Sublimation we have previously analyzed. They might also be props in a nasty bit of hazing.




















Addendum: Perhaps the former Wise Poultry chicken and CSU's chicken belong to some of the same professional organizations? But doesn't the Wise bird look a little more... serious about this whole academic business? Or maybe it's just the bowtie.









Addendum 2 (4/19/08): And then there's the alert prof from MBA Smart Chicken. A chicken with an MBA?