"pig" as policeman

[Jonathan Lighter]

Memory may be at fault, but it seems to me that Rubin liked to claim that his "political party" (the "Youth International Party," a name coined post-facto) had thousands of of revolutionary members among the youth of America. In reality, the Yippies had no formal political or other charter and no platform except "the Revolution."  To the extent that the "party" existed at all, it was an association of maybe a dozen close friends and partners. I wonder who read their newspaper.

  The Yippies' most trenchant political statement as a party was to "run" a piglet named Pigasus in the 1968 Presidential election, on the claim that America "needed a real pig president."  Rubin made public appearances with Pigasus. After Nixon won, Pigasus was, according to Rubin, slaughtered and eaten.

  JL


Evan Morris <words1 at WORD-DETECTIVE.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Evan Morris
Subject: Re: "pig" as policeman
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In what sense were the Yippies a "hoax"? They had an office, a core
membership far beyond Hoffman and Rubin (some of whom are still around),
and eventually a newspaper. If you count people like Aaron Kay and Dana
Beal (and you probably should), the organization still exists.



Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> There have been a few brief exchanges about this on the list. I am surprised (nay, astounded) that no one has connected the 1960's and later use of the word to the once infamous Black Panther Party, which not only encouraged and popularized this usage, but seems to have independently coined and reintroduced it to the American vocabulary. High-school and college kids are still using it, as are a million others.
>
> When the term surfaced in the news in 1968, it was first in connection with the Panthers and then other political radicals, notably Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman.
>
> No one who doesn't remember the period 1967-1973 in America can readily imagine the _Zeitgeist_.
>
> Here's the earliest ex. of the Panthers' use I've discovered - not atypical of Panther rhetoric and philosophy, esp. in the arts :
>
> 1968 _Black Panther_ (Oakland, Calif.) (May 18), in Clayborne Carson & Philip S. Foner _The Black Panthers Speak_ (Phila..: Lippincott, 1970) 18: We draw pictures of our brothers with stoner guns with one bullet going through forty pigs and taking out their intestines along the way....pictures of pigs hanging by their tongues wrapped with barbed wire connected to your local power plant.
>
> A little later that year, "Yippie" "co-founder" (the organization was a hoax) Hoffman expressed his view that "pig" was the "perfect" term for police, though "not insulting enough."
>
> Former Panther official David Hilliard recalls that a novelty postcard received by Eldridge Cleaver satirizing the '60's catch-phrase, "Support Your Local Police," illustrated with a cartoon of a hog, suggested the use of the word (_Huey: Spirit of the Panther_, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006, p. 52). The creator of the postcard is, of course, unknown.
>
> JL
>
>
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--
Evan Morris
words1 at word-detective.com
www.word-detective.com

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