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In This Issue

• The Monkey Election College
• The Goshen, CT County Fair
• Freak Babies: Gotta Catch 'Em All
• Interview with author Louis Silverstein
• Animals, Placentae and You
• Letters to the Feditor
• 114th Street Rat Rock Exploration
• Bodacious the Rebel Bull
• Fed Arts Review: Columbia Unbecoming
• Mary Had a Little Lamb... with Potatoes
• John Jay Pet Deathmatch
• A Letter to the Columbia Gospel Choir
• DARE: 8 Ways to Say No
• Ice Bitch Comic
• Guide to Naming Suburban Housing Developments
• THEY WATCH

Alice Xie

Matt Holden

Woah! A scary bull!

The typical state fair is a muddy, horrifying celebration of our society's ability to shame, injure, and kill the Other. We laugh at midgets and bearded women and make them combat each other in pillow-fights on planks above pools of sewage. Then we wait in line and snicker at the narrow lexicon of the carnie providing roller-coaster safety precautions. Next, we cheer as people in hats perform fetishistic rope/spur torture on scared farm animals. Is the state fair not a candy-coated apple of suffering? Justice hears the laments of the wronged and makes demands upon the goodness within us all.

May it shame us humans that an animal, whom we thought incapable of moral reasoning, answered that call so loudly. I refer of course to Bodacious, recognized by his cowboy oppressors as the World's Most Dangerous Bull. Bodacious saw calves roped and dragged across rodeo arenas by their necks. He saw horses pinched and sliced by excruciatingly tight flank straps, punched and kicked by hat-wearing idiots before bucking contests, pierced and punctured by spurs.

Bodacious himself, like most rodeo bulls, was held in rodeo pens for hours in intense heat, pummeled by rodeo staff, and endured 5000-volt electric cattle-prod shots to the testicles, all in an effort to rile him up so as to make him appear "wild."

According to the Primus song later written about his life, Bodacious stepped onto the national stage in 1993, when bull-rider Tuff Hedeman rode him for a full eight seconds to claim some sort of backwater cruelty championship. Bodacious must have seemed, to an observer doubtful of good in the world, resigned to the average bovine life of pain marked by periodic humiliation beneath denim-clad torturers. In old age, he would most likely be sold to a beef processing plant and eventually be eaten in fast food meal deals dished out to the same fat morons who laughed at him at the rodeo.

If you were a bull in such a situation, you would probably be so scared and sad that you'd just flail and cry until the big bad cowboy man fell off you. You would never speak up for yourself, let alone all your fellow bovine-kind. Bodacious, on the other hand, somehow found it within his heart to speak through action. The message, like a volcanic eruption up from the Hell to which we think we condemn the Other: "Get the fuck off me." Not only did Bodacious buck his legs up behind him, as cowboys and bestial torture fans expected, but he also began to whip his thick head and neck backward to catch cowboys on their lunges forward and smash their stupid, evil faces into mush. Didn't see that coming, did you, boys? Thought that the spirit of justice was yours to manipulate, did you? Take a horn to the eye, you bastards, because freedom rises-right into your God-damned faces.

Equipped with his special reverse-neck-bucking move, Bodacious was a new bull when he was slotted to face Tuff Hedeman once again in the bull-riding championships in 1995. "Tuff" wasn't so tough after all; Bodacious smashed his face into a bloody pulp, as virtue demanded. Try to conceive of the retaliatory significance of Bodacious's act, a bull fucking up a human face: the destruction of that physical structure which manifests the vicious human intellect, the structure which most clearly differentiates humanity from its long-snouted "inferiors." The next time Hedeman was scheduled to face Bodacious, who thoroughly demolished 129 of 135 cowboys faced, "Tuff" backed out. Instead, another rider, Scott Breding, put on a face mask and took Hedeman's place. Bodacious blasted through the face mask and shattered Breding's eye socket. Bodacious was "retired" by his owners (as if being attacked and infuriated is a constructive bovine career as opposed to just eating grass, having sex, and sitting around looking cool) "in the interest of cowboy safety" by his supposedly compassionate "owners" Sammy and Carolyn Andrews.

His oppressors now found a way to get rich off Bodacious without shocking him in the balls. Instead, they extracted sperm from them in order to breed more bulls into their world of Wild West Wickedness. For his insolence, they took his children. Bodacious also became a merchandising powerhouse, with "Bodacious: Master of Disaster" videotapes and T-shirts gleefully touting his "Most Dangerous" status in a subtle attempt to dampen the fear he inspired, a la Che Guevara. Bodacious died on May 16, 2000, perhaps one of the only American bulls to die of old age, and he was eulogized by the people he fought and hated his entire life. But his spirit lives on, ironically enough, in us, with the animal urges we fail to suppress. In moments of kinship with the beast-soul, we wish for the revolution; we sit in the stands at the rodeo, gulp our pink lemonade, giggle at the clowns, wave to the photogenic cowboy, and then for just a split second, deep down inside, when we see the chute open, we hope the bull puts a horn right through that fucker's face. We hail Bodacious, Most Subversive of Bulls.