Honor Pigs

Were you that raven perched in a rural Alabama pine observing me in this elevated blind hunting feral hogs with a scoped and loaded .270 rifle at hand and a copy of Call Sign Chaos by General James “Mad Dog” Mattis open across my knee, you would perhaps fail to perceive me as a dithering neurotic poetaster sketching half-baked notes towards a contemplative essay on the topic of honor, but so it is and so I am.

Following on topic, honor compels me to come clean: It wasn’t a raven. It was a common crow. And I say feral hogs, but they’re just overpopulous piggies. Also, General Mattis has publicly rejected the nickname “Mad Dog.” But whoop-di-doo, what a batch of grabbers for the opening paragraph. Preemptive deception followed by preemptive honesty: Does this constitute honor?

Look who thinks he’s Socrates in a tree stand. Let’s reset.

*     *     *

This was supposed to be an essay about honor and empathy. Then I thought, no, maybe honor and kindness. Then I went to waffling over maybe it should be honor and mercy. Or honor and grace. Or honor and compassion. Then I realized: every word following those “ands” is predicated on—or dependent on—honor.

Standing solo, the word evokes inflexible codes and protocols; dark robes and creased pants; crisp salutes and firm (even secret) handshakes; holding bold while others fold. But there is also honor in the bowing of the head; the bending of the knee; the moment of silence. The stepping aside.

To opine on the topic of honor is to risk coming off as a self-appointed prig and preacher. To compose the sermon is to imply I am specially blessed, dressed, and possessed to deliver it. “Let me tell you why the world needs more of this thing,” implies “Let me tell you why the world needs more of me.” Joan Didion once wrote that “the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious.” She prefaced this claim by quoting Lionel Trilling: “Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion." After further examining the work of self-appointed morality arbiters, Didion suspects “[t]here is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work.”

On my honor, I proceed with these admonitions in mind. Day to day I strive to operate at the level of honor I wish the rest of the world would, but I can neither claim nor set a sterling standard. I’d like to think my shortcomings in this department have been intermittent and relatively picayune, but the qualification itself sounds a tad “intrinsically insidious.” So, as I sit here awaiting the pigs, I do not pretend to exemplify honor, I intend to explore it. Or at least why it is on my mind.

*     *     *

When it comes to contemplation, an elevated hunting blind is my kinda ashram. For those unfamiliar, “blind” in this context is a term of art denoting a structure within which one lurks in nature while waiting to kill a critter. The waiting is when the contemplation happens. The mind free-associates as the eyes free-range-gaze. A ground-level blind will do, but surveying your surroundings from the perspective of a basketball hoop broadens the field of vision, thus enhancing the sense of omniscience.

I have hunted since I was a child. Raised on game and the pursuit of same. Squirrels and rabbits, but mostly deer. Whitetails. Once upon a time the deer were rare. It was a thrill to sight one, let alone “get” one. Now they are profuse back home. This winter a herd regularly passed through our yard, rearing on their hind legs to reach the last of the wizened crabapples and stripping the evergreen yew beneath the kitchen window. These days where I live it is not so difficult to get a deer. They can be had off the deck. Our freezer brims with venison. We eat it year ‘round, and rarely buy beef. But even as they overpopulate, I kill only two or three deer per year. This is because the hunting culture of my raising is based on a simple code of honor: you kill it, you eat it.

There were exceptions: When my brothers and I blasted grackles and left them to the worms and beetles it was because the birds were plucking the corn sprouts that fed the cattle that fed our family. When we armed ourselves with pitchforks and charged into the barn for what we coined a “rat-bash,” it was to knock a dent in the furry hordes stealing grain meant for those same cattle. I have shot hundreds of carp with a bow and arrow and tossed them ashore for the racoons, because the carp are invasive and crowding out the fishing holes of my childhood. These Alabama pigs I await? In a single year of makin’ bacon, they can octuple themselves. If you’ve ever raised pigs, as I have, you understand this is the environmental equivalent of releasing a replicant riot of rototillers upon the land.

You kill it, you eat it. On the hunt, you are on your honor. Abeyance of that code—laying waste to the grackles, the rats, the pigs—is still framed within the code. Honor is still part of the equation.

*     *     *

Now and then I embark on random jags of mental self-improvement that lead to my reading books like Call Sign Chaos. I have no military aims. Nor is it likely the military has any aims for me. It’s a little late in the game for me to become anyone’s general. The only meaningful gold stars I’ve received of late were peeled from sticker sheet by my wife as a jokey reward for executing some household chore without being asked. She giggled and said it was in fun, but a fella wonders.

No, I am reading Mattis because I am a soft-handed, soft-hearted, and often soft-headed writer who treasures the wisdom of dissolute songwriters and ragged poets and psychedelic dreamers but counterweights his keel with the wisdom of nurses and firefighters and investment bankers and tax accountants. In short, be you but a three-chord strummer, sitting with the story of a battle-hardened military man may make you a better bandleader. A little cross-disciplinary training keeps the arts program on track.

That said, I did not ascend the hunting blind with the goal of any specific self-improvement. I had no agenda beyond pruning the pork. I packed the book mainly to keep myself off my phone. The subject of honor—and the desire to essay on it—arose organically. Tangentially. Something to do with hunting, something to do with duty, something to do with a feeling of general unease related to creeping social dehiscence. I’m not compiling the definitive treatise, I’m just a cheesehead teasing out threads, attempting to weave some coherence against the solitude of several thousand unfamiliar acres.

*     *     *

I am in Alabama courtesy of my friend Andy. He’s put me up in a fine cabin, is doing the cooking, lent me the .270, and delivered me to the door of the blind in a four-wheeler. Compared to how I usually hunt—up a Wisconsin tree exposed to the elements—this pig-sniping situation is city-kid cushy: the blind fully enclosed, a latched door and windows that open and shut, my butt cradled in a camp chair. My book, my notepad, a thermos, and snacks all within arm’s reach. This level of comfort raises its own issues related to honor: Can I even call myself a hunter when in fact I’m just a comfortable wait-er? A coddled ambusher? A pampered pig persecuter?

For that matter, can I just sit here and call myself a philosopher?

Well, sure. Philosophizing and hunting are both forms of seeking, and what is seeking but admitting you are still short on whatever it is you are seeking, be it venison or enlightenment? There is also the idea that philosophy can—should—happen on the hoof and need not just on your caboose in the classroom. This is not to attack the academy, in fact, quite the opposite; in this the age of deriding the experts, I reckon we’re rounding into an age in which we’ll regret so blithely dismissing them.

That said, I possess a knee-jerk personal testiness related to the astringent administration of philosophy in the manner of what Neitzsche termed “conceptual mummifiers.” I once wrote a book about the French philosopher Montaigne from my perspective as a curious ground-level amateur. A doofus in barn boots, as the title put it. In hopes of engendering fulsome discussion and admittedly book sales, the publisher sent copies to several university philosophy departments with an invitation to expand the conversation to the streets. Exactly zero responded. I admit I am coloring with fat Crayons in comparison to those folks, but there was also the implication that they were not interested in dipping their toes in the common water of the public pool, which is a shame, because if I may claim a rich intellectual life it is thanks to, well, intellectuals. Professionals included. Although even as I type this I am reminded that social media and Substack and whatnot are recently rich with philosophers taking it to the streets. This suggests the fault lies not with the academicians but the academy.

*     *     *

In this book here on my lap General Mattis says group spirit binds warriors together in a necessary way that keeps them distinct from the civilian society they are bound to protect. I’d offer that this “group spirit” is honor in action. My most formal experience with honor in this respect has come through my decades as a volunteer firefighter and medical first responder. Firefighting is hardly warfighting, nor would I claim it as an equivalent comparison. But when we entered a burning building, we trusted that everyone on the hose would honor their training. That we would have each other’s backs. That we would attack and retreat in unison. I once broke this code and retreated to summon help on behalf of my two partners; all ended well, and after review I was told I made the right call in the instant, but in my heart an echo of doubt remains. The memory humbles me.

As medical first responders, honor dictates that the care we give on scene or in the back of an ambulance does not operate on a sliding scale depending on our perceptions of the patient. That we respect privacy. That we never abandon a patient.

In each of these examples, there is an enforcement mechanism in place. Acts of dishonor are formally punishable. But the enforcers are human, and so we are right back to honor. Honor as an ineffable, intangible thing. A thing that ultimately depends on a willingness to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing. When the pager goes off, I treasure the way we come together in common cause on behalf of fellow beings. And that’s the only recompense I can promise. That honor makes you feel better.

*     *     *

But what about those for whom honor is only useful as a trap? As a means of restraining the honorable and fooling the gullible? We are looping through an age of blatancy. Where the dishonorable dare society to stop them, relying on the hope that the time and trouble required to counter their nefarious productions (which replicate at the pace of pigs) will outweigh the average person’s need to simply survive the day. Meanwhile the dishonorable manufacture their own “group spirit” in part by dismantling or weakening institutions and practices predicated on honor, all the while waving or brandishing the emblems of honor—a neat perversion.

The insidious devaluation of honor has been hastened by our ability to project deception to unprecedented depths. Last week I was engaging in a customer service exchange with an agent I assumed to be a bot, until the agent responded with a typo: “Thank you so much for your patiene!” My initial reaction was upbeat: A typo! So this is a real person after all! Followed immediately by: Wait, what better way to fool me into thinking this is a real person than by programming the bot to sprinkle random typos?

The answer is irrelevant. The disease resides in the question arisen.

I keep returning to the idea that the only way to deal with deep-fake, be it blatant or surreptitious, organic or digital, remote or face-to-face, is to seek and practice honor. And center yourself among those who do the same.

*     *     *

A group of wild pigs is called a sounder. How I long to see a sounder. Preferably before dark. Unfortunately, no matter how intently I glass the edges of the field or snap my eyes to the sound of every palmetto breeze-rattle, or squint and will yonder brown bush to sprout a snout, the pigs refuse to present. The rifle remains leaned in a corner, the safety engaged, leaving me to sit, think, and read more Mattis, where I encounter a line that shifts my thinking from the philosophical and political to the personally pecuniary:

Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed, and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost.

Mattis is referring to war, but I’m considering how even my 401k is predicated on honor. Our American democracy, famously touted as the worst system of government except all those other ones, has nonetheless maintained a level of honor sufficient to attract the faith of nations, coin-of-the-realm-wise. In squandering that honor, we risk, as I heard someone say on a business show, outflows. At what point does overt grifting and self-interest at the top trickle down to my bottom line? At what point does my qualified trust in a system at least nominally predicated on honor slide into dumb naiveté? Is there honor in sticking with a system bound to stick it to you?

Part of what I’m wrassling with is the residual little kid in me who was taught by his honorable parents to follow the rules and now feels sad over the state of things. And if you ever want to feel dumb and powerless in the face of blatant rule-benders, try telling them they’ve made you sad. The emotion bespeaks what colloquially we rural rough boys referred to as a “weak-tit.”

I read enough history to know my ruminations are nothing new. But we are clearly navigating uncharted ways of getting away with stuff. The means of delivery are both broad and bespoke. We can track and taunt and terrorize each other like never before. An anonymous stranger can drain my IRA. If the pigs had thumbs and an insider deal with a defense contractor they could send a drone down my thermos. And all the laws in the nation won’t protect me if they’re not backed by humans of honor.

*     *     *

At is best, honor is idealism. At its worst it is compulsion. The code reflects the holder. I recently attended a baseball game with my buddy Boozy (whose own code helped him outlive his nickname) and we found ourselves seated one row below a drunken trio of loudmouth louts. They were a sallow bunch of skinnies, their evident ringleader going maybe 137 inappropriately tattooed pounds. He projected the aura of an off-brand energy drink. I secretly dubbed him Alpha Puppy.  Between screeching profanities at professional baseball players, making beer runs, and bragging about denying breast-reduction surgery to his girlfriend, Alpha Puppy obsessively lectured and threatened his two pals on the critical nature of respect. He was particularly aggrieved over some incident at his place of employment. Over and over, as his two companions nodded in vigorous agreement, Alpha Puppy declared that should he suffer further disrespect in any respect, “I’m clockin’ out, and we’re goin’ to the woods.”

After the fifth or sixth repetition of this phrase it dawned on Boozy and me that Alpha Puppy was not the sort of raconteur given to speaking figuratively, and in fact he was literally referring to resolving workplace conflicts via fistfight in a patch of saplings. In light of his slightness, I’m not sure how many times he actually dished out one of these woodsy thrashings, but as he invoked the phrase again and again what Boozy and I came to marvel at were the words, “I’m clockin’ out.” Here was a guy with moral fiber the equivalent of lint, and yet he lived by a code: By God, before I defend my honor by givin’ you a whuppin’ in the willows, I’m clockin’ out, because a man of honor doesn’t handle personal business on company time.

I reckon there’s a less-than-zero shot General Mattis could train Alpha Puppy up into a good soldier. A man of worthwhile honor. “In an age when cynicism too often passes for critical thinking,” writes Mattis, “it’s worthwhile to remember that young men and women who sign up for the military still fight for ideals.” I believe this less than I used to, but do not dismiss it, based on individuals I observe, serve beside, and join at the family reunion. Somewhere between Alpha Puppy’s trash talk and his dedication to company policy, there might lurk a trainable grunt. You know Mattis would fine-tune the young man’s ability to discern between honor and braggadocio—as he writes in Call Sign Chaos, “Rhetoric doesn’t solve conflicts.” In fairness to Alpha Puppy I imagine Mattis turning his steely gaze my way and saying, “Nor does a rambling navel-gazer of an essay.”

*     *     *

The hours pass. The pages turn. The pigs refuse to reveal themselves. The wind has picked up. I check the radar on my phone and it looks like I am in for it. A slim but intense stormfront is on course for a direct pass. The clouds are leaden and low, the land goes dusky-dark. I see no lightning but the thunder rumbles like a slow train rolling.

*     *     *

Once up on a time I attended a poetry reading at which an elbow-patched corduroy-blazer-wearing ponytailed turquoise-jewelry-festooned poetry professor fresh to the area and frankly working to impress the ladies read a piece purporting to be from the viewpoint of a rugged hunter. (To be fair, at the time I too had a ponytail, wrote bad poetry, and was frankly working to impress the ladies.) The poem was fine, if a little forced on the dirt-road pickup truck side of things, and I hung in there with him until the concluding line, in which the protagonist shone a spotlight in the deer’s eyes and shot it.

At the after-party I told the poet my people don’t call that man a hunter, we call him a poacher.

We were never close after that.

It has never been easier to be a poacher. Neither the regulations nor their enforcers can keep up with the technology available to the average all of us. Game cameras that ping your phone every time your dream buck shows up. Optics that render previously unthinkable longshots standard. Night vision stuff. Drones that spy from the sky. Today’s electronic fish finders are to yesterday’s as high-def television is to a malfunctioning kaleidoscope. Even when these items are used legally they so remove stalking, patience, and chance from the equation it beggars the very definition of the term, “hunting.”

In this I must address my own issues of honor. I have a couple of game cameras, but if we want to see the videos we have to hike to the back forty and trade out the SSD card. The footage we gather is more entertainment than recon, particularly the one where the buck turned his butt to the lens and pooped. The kids love it when I run that one backward.

I’m not one of those softies who hunt in a heated, insulated tiny house but mostly that’s because I lack the time and talents to make one and won’t spring to buy one. And even as I proudly freeze in my bare-bones open-air tree stand I am old enough to remember when they were new to the scene and seen as a form of cheating compared to stalking.

For as long as I have hunted, the unwritten law of the land is such that you don’t hunt your neighbor’s land and you don’t shoot across their fences, but if you wound a deer and track it to your neighbor’s  property line, custom allows access to retrieve the animal. It is also customary to request permission first. Once my redneck farmer neighbor followed a blood trail to the edge of his property, which abutted a fine lake house owned by a wealthy man who only used it on weekends. My neighbor drove up the wealthy man’s driveway and asked if he could track the animal. The wealthy man refused. My neighbor pressed his case politely but still the homeowner denied him.

“Well,” said my neighbor, shaking his head, “I hope you don’t treat all your neighbors like this…”

“Why’s that?” said the rich man.

“Because otherwise,” said my neighbor, pausing to take a long look up and down the man’s fine lake house, “who’s gonna help ya rebuild after the fire?”

Decades later, the lake house is still standing, but that man shoulda let that other man get his deer.

And yet: A season or two ago a polite young man who hunts adjacent to my property wounded the big buck he’d been watching on his cameras and requested permission to track it. Of course, I said. Unfortunately the blood trail dwindled and the deer could not be found. A few months later I got a text from the young man requesting permission to once again access the land because “I think I know where it is.” I again granted permission and asked him to share photos of the antlers if he was successful. When the photos arrived it appeared the deer was in a location not visible from any fenceline. I didn’t ask, but assumed it was located using a drone. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this, but it felt like things were shifting. This felt less like tracking and more like spying without asking. The body of the deer was of course picked over and deteriorated beyond use as food, so there was also the question of whether the hunter valued the deer or the trophy. If you kill it, you eat it, and if you pursue it this assiduously when it’s months past eating just to get the antlers, why did you really kill it?

But this is turning priggy and preachy, so I’ll confront the mirror. Here I am in Alabama, comfy with snacks, under the pretense of turning back the porcine tide. But of course I am not just some well-armed altruist. I don’t gotta fly Delta and drive six hours to go hunting. I can rise from my writing desk and be up a tree in under five. I have shot deer closer to our freezer than the distance from the front of the Aldi to the back of the Aldi.

So I can claim I am here to forfend the flora from the fauna, but in fact I could shoot three pigs an hour and no more stem their advance than throw that approaching thunderstorm into retreat by peeing at it. My motivations are clearly driven by loving to hunt. To wait, to anticipate, and to shoot. Have a pork loin or two, but definitely not eat everything I kill. I don’t feel guilt, because as a well-armed roughneck philosopher I know the crows and a legion of other carrion-eaters, from the feathered to the furry to the microscopic, do not recognize this definition of “waste.” But then, if so, does it not follow that if our Wisconsin deer have overpopulated to the point of gnawing off the yard shrubbery, shooting a few extra and leaving them to lie for the eagles and turkey vultures and beetles should be perfectly acceptable? In each instance there the element of justification is driven by—or measured against—honor.

It gets twisty, doesn’t it?

*     *     *

Finally the storm hits. There is that first big windy push, a scatter of leaves, the earthy whiff of wet soil, then a smattering of fat spatters, and then the sweeping diagonal veils of gray. Having been caught up in my reading and philosophizing I am slow to get at the windows, and manage to knock one from its hinge. Naturally it is the most windward facing exposure, so I have to hold it pressed in place with one hand while I raise and latch the rest with my other. But eventually the hatches are battened and I return to my camp chair. I squiggle into it a little bit, feeling the kid-like joy of being in a hideout, safe and dry while nature roars around.

And then just as quickly it is over. The gray veils thin and fade, the drumming and lashing taper to drips and drops, the sun cracks through the clouds, and I reopen the windows quickly because now, surely now, with this great barometric shift, the pigs will come a-sounderin’.

*     *     *

Last week I read that a group of NASA astronauts is banding together to promote civic responsibility. I chalk this up in part to several of their members having viewed the earth as a little blue ball—a soul-stirring perspective shift rendering humanity’s dishonorable actions chintzy indeed. I don’t know how their project’s gonna go, but it sure made me feel less lonely. Less sad. Astronauts are not weak-tits. And what astronauts know about honor is that lives depend on it. You’re in that capsule, you gotta trust that everyone else on the team is gonna play for the team. Honor is often proven in solitary. Doing the right thing when no one’s watching, as they say. But what these astronauts wish to revive—and I hunger for—is honor as a group activity.

As an amateur existentialist, I favor the story (mythos) over explanations and reason (logos), and it shows. Which is to say I’ve about wore out the whole pig-hunting-while-reading-military-memoirs thing. I don’t propose to tie all those threads up in a neat bow. Those were just the catalytics. Reading Mattis while sitting ten feet up and all alone in the middle of several thousand Alabama acres allegedly overrun with pigs hardly provides an astronaut’s view, but it has served as a light corollary.

It is tempting to brand these times as yet another reversion to W.H. Auden’s “low dishonest decade,” and thus it seems pointless to meander through an essay on honor and reach no solid conclusions. But solid conclusions are less the point than the sense that I’m not the only one on this little blue ball hungering for people of honor. Folks with a code who honor that code. Folks who do the right thing without hope of recompense.

I hunger for a shared ethic. Something to counter the micro-tribe slide, turn it back toward unity. Empathy, and other soft forces. Something quiet and strong to bind us together. To (Auden again) ensure the center holds. Honor manifested as trust. Honor as a form of soul.

*     *     *

The goldang pigs never did show. I returned to camp in the dark, short on pork chops and seeking men of honor. Andy was frying up some squirrel. You kill it, you eat it.

- end -