Neil Hamburger and the pig people

 

 

 

Some thoughts on Neil Hamburger and the pig people:

 

Hamburger is ultimately an idealist probably a Christian man gone berserk or maybe a post Marxist critic who ingested rotting mushrooms on his way back to town.. His vitriolic, condescending, brutal and acerbic performances are not the ranting of a cynic or an anarchist, nihilist, or even an opportunist. My take is that his blanket condemnation of pop culture belies an assaulted ethos and his revenge is his feeding of the pig people.

 

He is a recombinant Orwell. We are in the farm ready to be gassed.

 

His unrepenting satire can be sexist, ageist, elitist, and oh so perceptive.  He will deride powerful lusty women , the indulgences and narcissism of rock stars, he will ruthlessly humiliate hecklers, and drown out comments with coughs and gross body noises. We have in his performances  very, very, dark irony dressed in simple comic formulas.

 

He is a punk version of Aristophanes.

 

During his performance he will often moan in pain. How can one not if half decent witnessing the detritus and refuse of the pig pen called Western pop culture?

 

The crowd tends to be young. They laugh at elementary school level jokes about their ugly parents, women with high libidos, assorted addictions, the syphilitic dysfunction of the capitalist elite. He taps on deep class and generational resentments. He knows many of them hate what their parents have created: A political economic experiment in which all we are is the bare fat on the chrome floors. He performs a great social service by bringing the rich and powerful to roll in the pig pen they are part of and reduce them to the excrement that his audience is also delighting in. 

 

The fact that he has such contempt (or is it compassion ?) for his audience that he sees them as pig people and that they snort for more drives the point home.  No moral compass, no sense of elevation, no inherent value in human existence:  Just mindless consumerism, violence, promiscuity and narcissism are the predicted results from liberal markets.

 

He is right on time.

Only a man with a moral compass can point where the shit is in the human face.  His work is thoroughly committed to social satire and critique.  

 

 Enjoy the apple husks.

 

 

Alberto roman.