Reserved for the Dons

Rod Dreher's tender sensibilities are shocked by the fact that the Sundance Film Festival is all a-twitter (or all a-neigh) over a film, Zoo, about an underground of folks who are into sex with barnyard animals, one of whom was killed while being buggered by a horse.

I once spent several months in a Brazilian fishing village where the young men routinely called one another barrão, which in context meant "sow bugger." The difference is that no one sought to enshrine this adolescent hi jinks as great transgressive art. Some carnal people have always managed to bugger pretty much anything that moves, and some things that don't. Only occasionally do they think they are contributors to human enlightenment when they make art about it.

As I said in Rod's combox, you can't make this stuff up, just as during Watergate I realized that political novelist Alan Drury, as good as he was, could never have thought up those events, either. Who could have thought this movie up? Maybe Jules Feiffer, who wrote Little Murders in which Elliot Gould plays a photographer who does art pictures of dog turds. Maybe Fellini when in Satyricon mode. Anyone from Oxford University:

A student up at St. John's
Attempted to bugger the swans.
'No no', said the porter,
'Ye buggers me daughter.
The swans is reserved for the dons'.

We could use Savonarola, perhaps, but he's long dead.