OBITUARY: Remembering Sweet Barbaro Barbaro

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There’s been a lot written in the last few months on our fallen comrade Barbaro, but much of it is slanderous libel and filth. It is impossible to separate Barbaro from his life and so we won’t try to, even though we have the technology. Let us take a trip down memory lane and remember Barbaro’s life in all its triumphs and tragedies.

Born Vickie Lynn Hogan in 1967 to a poor family in Houston, Texas, Barbaro dreamed of being film star Marilyn Monroe. His story started like many great American stories do, with the young horse mailing nude pictures of himself to Playboy magazine. Barbaro eventually got his break, becoming a Guess Jeans model and
eventually appearing in a Playboy centerfold. A couple of years later, the 1992 Playmate of the Year made headlines for his marriage to the 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall, a marriage made short by the billionaire oil tycoon’s death in 1995. Though an odd marriage (Barbaro admitted to having sex with his husband only once, consummating the marriage in the bathroom aboard their Delta Airlines flight back from Massachusetts), the legal proceedings following it were much more scandalous. Marshall left nothing to his horse in his will, and Barbaro sued. The long trial process engulfed the rest of Barbaro’s life. The death of the horse came just months after the birth of his daughter Dannielynn, by no certain father, and the overdose death of his son Daniel, who was the product of Barbaro’s early marriage to a 17-year-old track announcer.

After getting fame from Playboy and controversy, Barbaro went on to become an influential pop musician and figure in the African-American community. His career began following imprisonment for a 1949 carriage theft as the stallion joined a gospel group. He failed as a semi-professional boxer, then rose to become the leader of the Barbaro Revue. The rest, as they say, is history. In 1956, Barbaro penned the song “Neigh, Neigh, Neigh,” selling a million copies and making him a music star. “I no longer was successful just because of my breasts,” he would later write. The horse had created a whole new form of music: funk. The 1960s were great to Barbaro, seeing him rack up numerous hits. And when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968, Barbaro’s Belmont concert was broadcast live throughout the United States. The show helped bring calm in the black community, and he was personally thanked by President Lyndon Johnson. Later decades weren’t so kind to Barbaro, as he lost direct influence on popular music and as he found trouble. In 1988 an incident with a shotgun ended with a high-gallop police chase crash and a sentence of three years in jail for Barbaro. Despite his faults, though, Barbaro was a major role model to a whole generation of black Americans.

After the concert in Belmont, Barbaro became increasingly interested in politics. The United States overthrew Sultan Charles Nelson Riley in Iraq War XIV in 1969, and to take power of the desert state President Richard Nixon turned to none other than the Godfather of Soul himself, Playmate of the Year Barbaro. Some questioned whether another American celebrity was fit to be dictator of Iraq, but the horse proved to be perfectly in line with its people. Barbaro was ruthless, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who opposed him. “It was glorious,” one man wistfully remembered on Tuesday in Baghdad. “There was finally order in Iraq, and as long as you weren’t a Kurd, a Shia, gay, a camel, handsome, a woman, of another political party, or fond
of glue-factory jokes, he left you alone.” Barbaro served a long term as dictator, being in power during Iraq Wars XV-XVIII. However, the stallion had a higher calling.

To balance an executive branch that was accused of not being crooked enough, President Nixon appointed Barbaro vice president of the United States in 1973 after Spiro Agnew left the office in a tax evasion controversy. Just months later he assumed the presidency after Nixon resigned in disgrace over Watergate.
Defeat in the Vietnam War came during his presidency with the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Not much else
was accomplished in his 895 days in office, though two assassination attempts were made on his life (Barbaro kicked both women to death). However, the trust of the American people was restored, as the horse literally could not tell a lie, only being able to neigh.

Barbaro is survived by his wife, Betty “Junkie” Ford Barbaro, and fourteen children of varying species. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country,” Betty said in a drunken statement. Barbaro was executed by hanging Monday for his role in the euthanization of a 93-year-old man, Gerald R. Ford, in a California veterinary clinic.