Kuroiishi

The Black Stone is the object at the center of Clem and Jody’s proposed theft-and-substitution scheme: they intend to remove it by helicopter and leave a hog pen in its place. The plan makes a sacred landmark both a target for spectacle and a possible prop in the pair’s relentless commerce in outrage.

The Proposed Substitution

Clem and Jody imagine stealing the Black Stone by helicopter and substituting a hog pen. They train the hogs to jeer at arriving pilgrims, and try, unsuccessfully, to teach them to sing “Three cheers for the Red White and Blue.” The plan combines an attack on a revered pilgrimage object with a deliberately comic performance for the people who come to see it.

The scheme belongs to a wider routine of provocations that Clem describes as a punishing workload: among other stunts, he says he must dispossess a shantytown, take heroin, urinate on the Black Stone, and make the call to prayer while dressed in a hog suit. His complaint frames the Stone not as an isolated target but as one item in a sequence of calculated outrages, in which religious symbols and public rituals become material for a performance.

Commercial World and Political Theater

The proposed theft is set against Clem and Jody’s broader business in counterfeit and adulterated goods. Their ventures range from selling compromised medicines and unsafe equipment to pursuing a shipment of whale-derived lubricant quarantined in Tierra del Fuego. In that context, the Black Stone scheme extends the same logic of exploitation from merchandise to a sacred object: value lies in what can be stolen, substituted, or made to serve a profitable spectacle.

Clem and Jody also pose as Russian agents whose supposed purpose is to make the United States look bad. They claim to be conspiring to kidnap the Stone, while their other schemes and public provocations draw crowds hoping to witness an exceptional American outrage. The narrative therefore presents the plan as part of a world where political allegiance, religious symbolism, and commercial enterprise are all enlisted in performances whose aims are unstable and self-serving.

Significance

The Black Stone’s role is defined by the attempted substitution, not by any account of its physical appearance or history. In the scheme, a revered object is treated as replaceable by a hog enclosure, and the pilgrimage surrounding it becomes an audience for staged insult. The contrast exposes the distance between the Stone’s sacred significance to pilgrims and the instrumental use Clem and Jody make of it—as a target, a prop, and another opportunity to manufacture outrage.