In Defense of Pieing

In Defense of Pieing
When they go low, we go pie.
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
April 1, 2019

Bernard Henri Levy

French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy holds a microphone after being struck in the face with a pie by leftist activists during the presentation of his documentary in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 10, 2017. (AP Photo)
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Nobody keeps track of the victims of pie violence, but in Germany, their numbers seem to be climbing. In 2016, a member of the guerrilla movement Torte für Menschenfeinde (“pies for misanthropes”) snuck up on the left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht before a rally to protest her anti-immigrant turn, smearing her face and her good name with chocolate cream. More recently, an operative by the nom de guerre of Julia Pie slung a giant cupcake frosted with shaving foam at right-winger Beatrix von Storch. Pie—the person—was fined €150, but refused to pay on principle. She served two weeks of prison time for the infraction instead.

The conditions for cake warfare in Germany are good: The country’s parliamentary democracy allows for a broad range of political targets, and ammunition is rich and plentiful, with an abundance of Black Forest cakes, linzer tarts, and apple, pear, and cherry strudels. Yet these criteria aren’t the be-all end-all of Tortalerkrieg. Around the world, and across a range of culinary and political traditions, we’d all do well to treat the haters among us to a little more sugar.

Pieing is a particularly fitting form of political action in our troubled times. It is as ridiculous as its victims are malicious. It is guaranteed to go viral, especially when set to music, like a mazurka or a nice waltz. Pieing is safe for work, suitable for children, and highly unlikely to cause long-term damage to its victims (besides, perhaps, Pie-TSD.) It’s more Marx Brothers than Engels; more slapstick than ice-pick. It combats hateful speech not with no-platforming, but with butter, cream and sugar. What, dear liberals, could be more civil?

More fundamentally, political pieing scratches an itch that simple comedy or outright violence can’t reach. In its fruity excess and flaky glory, it is a punishment that befits the crime of treating democracy like a farce. In a global political moment when tin-pot Twitter personalities seem to have installed themselves into every high office, pieing can take on the clowns in a language they might understand.

In words Michelle Obama might appreciate: “When they go low, we go pie.”

Patriots won’t be surprised to hear that pieing is as American as, well, you know. It was popularized by Laurel and Hardy’s classic skits, then reemerged as a symbol of the counterculture in the 1970s, when Tom Forcade—the man best known for starting High Times magazine—walloped Otto Larsen, the chairman of Lyndon Johnson’s commission on obscenity and pornography. Forcade’s followers successfully pied William F. Buckley, Phyllis Schlafly, Howard Hunt, and Andy Warhol; the anarchist Biotic Baking Brigade, the famous “pieman” Aron Kay and compatriots in the International Patisserie Brigade and Al-Pieda later defiled the faces of Ann Coulter, Bill Gates, Milton Friedman, and the king of Sweden. PETA, for its part, has stayed true to its principles, enlisting a supporter to throw a pastry filled with tofu at a Canadian minister to protest seal hunting.

The French have a particular penchant for pieing. They even have a word for it: entartage, which translates roughly to “entartment.” Among the most high-value targets of entartage is the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, whose misadventures have been compiled into a delectable series of YouTube videos (the pies change; the expression on his face does not.) Lévy, who was instrumental in convincing France to invade Libya and has gone on the record defending director and child rapist Roman Polanski, was struck for the first time in 1985 and has subsequently been pied in bookstores, universities, airports, and the Cannes Film Festival. In 2017, activists in Belgrade threw cake to avenge his position on the war in Yugoslavia. His repeated misfortunes inspired a popular song by the singer Renaud titled “L’entarté,” or “the entarted.”
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More recently, an Australian teenager named Will Connolly took a deconstructionist approach when he cracked a single raw egg on the back of MP Fraser Anning’s head after the politician declared, not 24 hours after the shootings in two New Zealand mosques, that immigration from Muslim countries was to blame. The politician retaliated by punching the kid twice—which earned the teen more admirers still. “This egg has united people,” Connolly told reporters. Fans of his have raised over $50,000 through crowdfunding for legal fees—and “more eggs.” Connolly plans to send the money to the families of the victims.

The targets of pieings often have reactionary tendencies, but they’re not necessarily all on the right: Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was egged in early March by a Brexit supporter (given Corbyn’s muddled position on the European Union, he ought to be pummeled from multiple fronts, and with mincemeat). Generally, though, the entarted share certain qualities: smugness, vanity, wealth, and entitlement. And for every face, there is a pie. It is a culinary fact that Ted Cruz’s face was reverse-engineered to accommodate a heaping portion of bananas Foster. Ivanka’s Daddy’s-little-grifter pout just begs for a sliver of key lime.

As for Jordan Peterson, the options are multiple and tantalizing. A manly pork pie for his masculine, man-bearded face? A feminizing cherry glaze to soften his edges? Maybe his self-serious aura can only really be tempered by Kiev cake—a delicacy made popular by the Soviet Karl Marx Confectionary Factory (now Roshen) that should remind all of us, in every buttercream-filled bite, of the repression, deprivation, and intellectual narrow-mindedness that state socialism can loose upon the world.

It’s a real shame Richard Spencer got out of the fascism racket before anyone had a chance to get to him with a tray of Zwetschgenkuchen. What was so satisfying about him getting punched on camera? Not pain. No: The sucker punch landed while Spencer was explaining to a reporter the significance of the white-nationalist meme of Pepe the frog. That’s behavior only a pie can dignify.