ACCOLADES FOR PIG FARM DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
A ham-fisted, plagiaristic rip-off
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Famous English Author
I agree
- Eric Arthur Blair, Famous English Author
Me too
- Alexander Hamilton, Famous American Author
Defamatory slime
- Devin “Slapp” Ooze, Litigious Congressman, Gerrymandered Congressional District
Five Fists!
- Pacca Piece, Military Coordinator North American Operations, Antifa®
CHAPTER ONE
A Long-Expected Party
Once Upon a Time – On a Dark and Stormy Night – A Long, Long Time Ago – In a Planetary System Half a Solar System Away –
Full Stop. Who are we kidding? In reality, it was bright and warm and calm. In the not so distant past. And our putative heroes were nominal adults.
The Board of Directors of Cain-R-Plubes, Inc., a large vertically integrated pork producer, were having their quarterly meeting. Somewhere east of Dallas, west of Houston and north of San Antonio. Far, far away from their farms, pigsties and slaughterhouses in Missouri, Mississippi and South Carolina. On the outside deck of an upscale restaurant. Where their Hispanic servers had been serving – platters of BEEF! Kobe® filet mignons, to be precise. Graced with Caspian caviar, and accompanied by first-growth Bordeauxs and dark chocolate truffles from an Italian chocolatier.
The twenty-one Directors, most of them, were grunting and squealing with satisfaction. And slurping up the backwashes of wine remaining in their Trump® branded wineglasses.
Alice was getting tired of sitting at the table. As the only female Director. With nothing to do, other than nod and occasionally wring her hands. She glanced, again, at the quarterly report in front of her, full of colorful graphs and pictures, but no words. What’s the use of a quarterly report, Alice wondered, that had no words?
“The truffles tasted like shit,” Mack Mann, the august plain-spoken Director sitting next to Alice, said through his teeth.
Alice uncomfortably nodded. She didn’t like the word shit, but the truffles did taste like crap. She ate two of them anyway; Alice was nothing if not polite.
“Ready for the song and dance?” Mann said, again through his teeth.
The Chairman (and CEO) stood up cleared his throat. Though it wasn’t obvious he had a throat, layered as it was by folds of sagging skin. “Time for the company hymn!” he cheerily announced. He raised his pale, bat-winged arms, hummed a note, and the Directors, a cappella, sang:
All that is gold glitters
All who wander are lost
Those without purpose whither
So we’ve cut a deal with Faust!
Wealth is a sign of virtue
So says Faust’s prophet Osteen
Look up his sermons on YouTube
And you will see what we mean
Kumbaya!
The last word was derisively shouted, and everyone laughed. Except Alice and Mack Mann. Plubes was ungodly profitable, Alice acknowledged (to herself), but she still thought it was a stupid song. With only two verses. And no chorus!
The Chairman (also CEO) glanced at the public entrance to the deck, where a cache of nervous managers had lined up. “Exeter, you’re first!” the all gut and no butt Chairman shouted, before adjusting his chair to better accommodate his paunch and double-checking his plush chair cushion. (Despite his girth, he had very little natural padding on his sit bones.)
Trevor Exeter was Plubes’s reproduction expediter. Wales-born, Oxford-educated, usually imperturbable, he now looked awkward. He took several steps towards the table, then hesitated. He asked, “Where do I stand?” There wasn’t a lectern or a speaker’s podium, and all of the seats at the table were occupied. There wasn’t even a flat screen for Powerpoint® presentations.
“Not behind me,” The Chairman/CEO said.
“I need to read your lips,” tweed-jacketed Dr. Claque Van Trapp said as smoke from his tobacco pipe curled out of his nose. (Heavily invested in his image as the most erudite Director, his first degree, an A.D. in Cosmetology, no longer appeared on his CV.)
“I-need-to see-the-whites of-your-eyes,” Haph Nelson, a former high-school lightweight wrestler and frustrated arm-chair warrior, said in burst mode.
“Noah me,” drawled Flip Kracker, a former frat boy, turned county prosector, turned impeached county prosecutor, turned counselor for the rich and famous.
“Nor me,” the remaining Directors – other than Alice and Mack Mann – said in unison.
So Exeter stood behind Alice. Alice was REALLY getting tired of being the only female on the Board. She heard Exeter nervously shuffle papers. Then he said, “Ah, hmm, yes, okay, erhm.”
“Get it out, man!” cried hulking Rupert Ufuk Beenuts, who recently had been expelled by Forbes from the ranks of the world’s billionaires. (He was suing Forbes for defamation.)
“Yes,” Exeter said. “Okay. Well.” Alice heard his papers shuffle again. “Might as well get right to it. We have reproduction expense issues. Which, despite our profitability, are impacting that profitability. Something we now have to worry about, given that our lead as the most efficient pork producer is eroding.
“Historically, we have shunned artificial insemination,” Exeter continued. “On the basis it violated the biblical injunction against spilling seed. Even if the spilled seed was animal seed, and a machine masturbated the animal. Blah, blah.”
“Stop, STOP,” cried Director Rickie Graitt with a grin. A college sophomore and current frat boy, still coated by an ample layer of baby fat, Graitt was on the Board for one reason only – his dad was Plubes’s largest shareholder. Graitt pulled an enormous condom out from under the table and pulled it over his head. “Big-ie-nuf-for-a-WALE-penis!” he exclaimed through the latex.
All of the Directors, except Alice and Mack Mann, guffawed.
“I see you have anticipated my presentation,” Exeter said. “Now, to continue . . .”
“Are you mocking our religion?” Dr. Claque Van Trapp said as more pipe smoke rolled out of his nose. (Van Trapp’s lengthy CV claimed he had earned an MTS – Master in Theological Studies – at Harvard, when he actually had acquired STDs as a jarhead, a misunderstanding Van Trapp intended to blame on typos if it was ever exposed.)
“Why would I do that?” Exeter said. “To continue. It is true that an unanticipated benefit of our historical reproductive practices was the cornering of a market niche populated by people who eat meat but who also believe animals have the right to fornicate pre-slaughter. The so-called freedom-to-intra-species-copulate crowd. But the size of this niche constitutes less than one percent of the total market for meat.”
“You ahr mockin’ ah religion!” Flip Kracker, former frat boy, drawled.
Current frat boy laughed so hard he sucked condom latex down his throat.
Exeter said, “No” to former frat boy, ignoring current frat boy’s predicament. “Moreover, we have over-emphasized testosterone in the breeding of our boars,” Exeter said. “Most of them gore each other to death before they have their first opportunity to – – – fuck.”
Alice blushed.
“Survival of the fittest!” The Chairman (and Chief Executive Officer) proclaimed.
Exeter looked the rest of the Directors in the eye – except Alice, whom he was standing behind, and current frat boy, whom he was deliberately ignoring. “Further, moreover,” Exeter continued, “the litters delivered by our sows are 98% male. Do you have any idea how much it costs to castrate 98% of our piglets?”
Haph Nelson, the former lightweight high-school wrestler and wanna-be soldier, pounded the table with his fist, then, like an assault rifle on automatic mode, spewed, “Tax-es-paid-down-reg-e-va-sion-up-sales-up-em-ploy-ees-down-by-an-y-stan-dard-amaz-ing-Jee-sus-tric-kle-down-God-Bur-is-ma-hoax-witch-hunt-deep-state-drain-the-swamp-lock-her-up-send-her-back-bbbaarrrrrrrrtttt!”
“What?” Exeter asked.
The Chairman (last time – he also was the CEO) rapped the table with his gavel and proclaimed, “Off with your head!”
“What?” Exeter said.
“Just kidding,” The Chairman said. “You’re fired. Next!”
Devisha Jackson, Plubes’s lanky lead veterinarian, shook like an elongated ebony leaf in a summer thunderstorm. She assumed Exeter’s vacated space behind Alice, as Exeter, stunned, slowly drifted away.
“Start,” The Chairman said as he rapped his gavel.
“All of our pigs at our Mississippi farms are infected with a virulent new strain of swine encephalitis,” Jackson meekly stated.
Rupert Ufuk Beenuts, the former (per Forbes) billionaire, leaned forward and cried, “Speak up, man!” (Beenuts liked people to speak up, as long as you didn’t criticize him. He had twenty-two pending defamation suits.)
Jackson, louder but with a quiver in her voice, said, “All of our pigs at our Mississippi farms are infected with a virulent new strain of swine encephalitis.”
“Impossible!” Flip Kracker, former frat boy, objected.
“And it’s spread to our employees,” Jackson stated.
The Chairman rapped the table with his gavel and proclaimed, “Off with your HEAD!”
A brown rabbit with pink eyes hopped on the table, and no one, except Alice, seemed to notice it.
“What?” Jackson said to The Chairman.
“Oh dear, oh dear,” the brown rabbit said as it TOOK a watch out of its waistcoat pocket and scurried past Alice.
“I SAID,” The Chairman shouted to Jackson, ignoring the talking brown rabbit, “OFF with your HEAD!”
But just then a huge white boar, with big white tusks, ample flesh, and a thick, wide rump, jumped on top of the table.
“WOW,” The Chairman immediately marveled.
“WOW!” former frat boy simultaneously exclaimed.
The brown rabbit hopped across the length of the table as the white boar pursued it.
“Ahbaaawow,” current frat boy cried as he pulled the condom’s latex out of his throat.
The brown rabbit hopped off the table and the boar leaped after it.
“Seed-off-spring-my-god-wow-we-need-his-fuck-ing-sperm!” Haph Nelson spewed.
All of the Directors leaped from their seats to chase the boar. Including, caught up in the excitement, Alice. And the human stampede carried along with it the two managers who had just been fired.
“Slow down!” current frat boy pleaded when he stumbled while pulling the condom OFF his head.
The Board’s Directors caught up with the boar when the boar, snorting, was burrowing down a large rabbit hole adjacent to a rusting, abandoned ammonium nitrate plant.
“What an extraordinary set of HAMS,” The Chairman marveled.
When the boar’s HAMS disappeared down the hole, The Chairman immediately jumped in after it – HEAD first. But the hole’s entrance suddenly constricted, gripping The Chairman by his pot belly and halting his fall. The Chairman’s legs thrashed, and his pants slipped down, partially exposing his own withered and pathetic set of hams.
“Well, butter his butt and call it a biscuit,” former frat boy drawled.
“Pull the man out, you lazy fucks!” cried hulking Rupert Ufuk Beenuts from the very front of the pack.
Alice, near the rear, thought Beenuts was being VERY rude. “You’re right behind him. What don’t YOU do it?”
Beenuts growled at Alice, and Alice became VERY intimidated. “I’ll grab one leg, only if you grab the other,” Beenuts snapped at Alice. So Alice went to the front of the pack, grabbed one of The Chairman’s legs, and they both pulled. There was a loud PLOP as The Chairman popped out, and both Alice and Beenuts fell on their ass.
“What do we do now?” current frat boy, panting for oxygen, wondered.
“DRINK ME,” a large globular pitcher with a smiling face said. It was sitting on a table that no one had noticed until now, and contained an oleaginous purple fluid. Twenty-three Dixie® cups were also on the table.
“Drink what?” Alice innocently asked.
“Flavor-Aid®,” the pitcher said.
Alice did not trust the pitcher and its friendly, smiling face, but the twenty other Directors apparently did. Each quickly grabbed a Dixie®, drank the Flavor-Aid®, and watched their flabby midriffs shrink into six-packs. Then they dived, head first, down the rabbit hole, one right after the other.
Trevor Exeter and Devisha Jackson, the two fired managers, looked to Alice for guidance. “Until you receive your formal termination letters,” Alice said, “and, maybe, a severance package, you’re still employees. Probably. So I suppose.” So they too drank the Flavor-Aid®. It tasted like Lysol®, Alice thought, but their excess body fat dissipated, they liked their rehabbed physiques, and they followed their antagonists head first, Alice last, down the rabbit hole.