Company’s ‘pork bullets’ profoundly poor idea

Call it the redneck trifecta: stupidity, weaponry, bigotry.

A North Idaho company hit all three recently with its marketing of what I am calling “pork bullets” – a bit of business that is so dumb, in such a multicolored mosaic of ways, that it’s exhausting to untangle them all.

Pork bullets are boxes of ammo that a Dalton Gardens man has painted – or perhaps merely claimed to paint – with a pork-infused product. The bullets have a name and the company that makes them has a name, and I am not going to use their names, because I want to help them as little as possible.

“With (pork bullets), you don’t just kill an Islamist terrorist, you also send him to hell,” the company said in a news release earlier this month. “That should give would-be martyrs something to think about before they launch an attack. If it ever becomes necessary to defend yourself and those around you our ammo works on two levels.”

How many of these people does it take to screw in a light bulb, do you think?

These bullets are an offense to people and pigs. One of their slogans is “Put some ham in MoHAMed.” Conflating the worst individuals with a whole group is the very definition of bigotry – though these kinds of folks tend not to get confused by the differences between, say, Westboro Baptist and Anders Breivik and Mother Teresa. But it is a measure of the manufacturers’ obtuseness that he considers this simple fun. A novelty product, not unlike hand buzzers or Fartless Chili.

“We’re having some fun with it,” said the company’s owner, Brendon Hill. “There’s something to be said about using sarcasm to reveal truth about something that is false or a lie, and we’re focusing on the absolute lie they tell that murdering people is good.”

Murdering people is not good, in other words. What a wonderful irony that this truth is being relayed to us with bullets. Beyond that though, the whole premise of these pork bullets is wrong. Hill seems to think that touching pork is “haram,” or unclean, but this is wrong. Muslims don’t eat pork, though the practice certainly isn’t limited to them. Jews avoid pork, too; the Bible, in Leviticus, relates the story of the Lord ordering Moses and Aaron not to eat the pig because it is unclean.

But there doesn’t seem to be a Quranic prohibition against being shot with a bullet that some ignoramus covered in pork-infused paint.

Hill has said in interviews that he and some of his buddies cooked up the idea for pork bullets one night around a campfire. Imagine the high-toned, truth-revealing nature of that discussion. They were talking about the plans to build a Muslim community center near Ground Zero – remember the horror of that? The “Ground Zero Mosque”? They found these plans insensitive, this possible Islamic community center, and out of their hurt feelings came the pork bullets.

Good fun. By lumping all Muslims together – those who are American citizens living in New York City with terrorists who attacked the country – these guys were just having some fun. Just some fun-loving North Idaho dudes out in the woods, setting things on fire, talking about nonwhites and their insensitivity and the best bullets to use against them …

Loads and loads of fun.

The pork bullets, of course, are catnip for us in the media. They’ve been covered everywhere from World News Daily – the crank-world home of birtherism and angrily rationalized racism – to ABC News. Hill has given interviews, presumably under the presumption that no publicity is bad publicity.

“We realize we’ve hit an emotional thread, and I’d loosely define this as a red-state/blue-state issue,” Hill told ABC. “That’s where our customers are coming from and in that demographic, our product is a way to push back against political correctness. It’s the proverbial middle finger back to political correctness.”

Remember the proverb about giving the middle finger to political correctness? I believe it’s in Leviticus.

The company’s Facebook page now has more than 9,000 “likes.” It recently has posted updates about having trouble keeping up with orders – and announcing that it had added 3XL shirts to its product line.

A few weeks back, the Washington Times reported that the company’s Facebook likes indicated that the bullets were “resonating with the public.” Just for the purposes of comparison: Vinnie from Dick’s has 12,500 likes on Facebook.

Do you know Vinnie? He’s the good-natured, usually smiling guy who hangs around Dick’s and other downtown places, counting his change. Someone started a Facebook page about him – literally titled “Vinnie from Dick’s.”

It should make all of us happy to know that more people have liked it than have liked pork bullets. And Vinnie’s not even giving the proverbial finger to anyone.

Not everyone appreciates this truth-revealing finger. Opposition to the pork bullets has flooded in as the company has gotten media attention. The company posted a complaint on its Facebook page recently, saying that “the left hates us.”

Boy, I sure hope that’s not true.

I hope it’s more than just the left.