Truth or Consequences

Well, here’s something interesting and non-political to talk about; gossip! It is always important to engage in gossip before all the facts are known, because once we know what actually happened we become either historians or conspiracy theorists, instead of gossips. It is also important to be one of the first gossips to gossip in order to influence the direction of speculation within your circle of inquiring minds. This makes you appear well connected and wise, which is an important part of status in most tribes. Gossip is a critical element of human communication and social bonding since it requires no actual investment of effort in research or critical thinking and is almost as much fun as sex, even more so for people who don’t like sex.

So, without further ado, how about that Tiger Woods? Tiger Woods is great to gossip about because he is probably the single most famous person in the world. Even if you don’t play golf, drink Gatorade or reside in civilization, you know about Tiger and his unlikely story of achievement and the billion dollar industry he has become. Everybody loves Tiger, even if he is a foul-mouthed, egocentric elitist who spends way more time signing advertising contracts than he does signing autographs for his adoring fans. By virtue of being .7874 shots per round better than any other golfer in the world, perhaps in combination with his boyish charm and multi-racial, international origins, Tiger commands the respect and affection of literally billions of humans, who possibly see him as an avatar of their own potential for god-like fame and fortune.

Anyway, what we know is this; Tiger left (or returned to) his house in his Cadillac Escalade in the wee hours of the Friday morning after Thanksgiving and promptly ran into a fire hydrant and a tree. This is all anyone can currently say with assurance, but that is by itself pretty fertile ground for speculation. Where was such a celebrity going at 2:30 in the morning with no shoes? How did he run off the road before even leaving the neighborhood? Why does a guy worth a billion dollars drive an Escalade? These are all very tantalizing questions, but we are presented with even more fodder for speculation by what is alleged to have occurred. First we are led to believe his Swedish model wife saved him from impending doom by breaking the window out of the vehicle and somehow extricating him before he bled to death, or the car exploded or the cops showed up, or something. All of this heroism is, of course, fine, and has nothing to do with me, but those who respect and admire Mr. Woods or follow his exploits on the links might wonder if he will ever recover from this brush with death and if he can at some point in the distant future be expected to resume his pursuit of every standing record in golf history.

Fortunately, he was treated and released from the local emergency room with what were described as “minor injuries”, primarily facial lacerations, that is, scratches. Since Mr. Woods and his wife have declined to provide statements to the police the only information the curious public has to filter through are statements from Mr. Wood’s public relations team, a neighbor’s brief call to 911 and all the hearsay from TMZ.com., and the hearsay is quite interesting. If you are inclined to believe the more negative and vicious rumors, Tiger was chased from his home by his lovely wife after she scratched his face in a brief assault and then grabbed (what else?) a golf club and proceeded to pursue him down the driveway and out into the street amassing a Mickleson-esque stroke total before Tiger drove into a tree, something he often also does during the U.S. Open. At this point, Tiger apparently emerged from the vehicle dazed and confused, possibly medicated, and sat down on the curb. I can completely understand.

This little drama was supposedly precipitated by Mrs. Woods’ belief that Tiger was involved in an extra-marital dalliance with a rather attractive 34 year-old New York woman whose occupation is variously cited as Club VIP Manager, Night Club Hostess or 9/11 Widow, depending on the source. Tiger may have gotten her confused with the Club Pro, or not, but there is little doubt that she can properly grip a shaft, though it is possible she may have a tendency to hook. In all fairness, however, Ms. Uchitel has denied having any involvement with Mr. Woods whom she has “only met a couple of times”, probably having crossing paths at all the fan events Tiger is known to frequent. As far as I know, the sole source for this salacious info is the National Inquirer, which has been wrong in the past, especially about Bigfoot, so I’m not sure I would accept their representations as fact. Mrs. Woods may well have the straight-up 411 about the situation, but unless you were there, how do you really know?

Tiger does, of course, have a real problem that deserves our empathy. He is a 33 year-old guy with a cute smile and the best body a legion of personal trainers can create. He has a net worth that starts with a “B” and spends most of his time traveling the world without the company of his wife and children. I suspect he routinely encounters a stream of rather comely young women who make no secret of the fact that they would like to catch the eye of the Tiger. I am not endorsing anyone’s moral failures, but temptation is compounded by opportunity, which is why most intelligent, faithful men studiously avoid putting themselves in situations where weakness of character will translate into behavioral failure, something Tiger may have practical difficulty doing. I do not know Mr. Woods and he could well love his wife dearly and be a man of great resolve, but it is small wonder that Mrs. Woods might be inclined to believe the worst when presented with the unlikely coincidence of the club hostess and the golf champion staying in the same hotel in Melbourne, Australia. Most women would probably find it to merit at least a good wedge shot.

Now, some may ask why any of this personal stuff is any business of anyone except Tiger and his wife, but that ignores the truth of modern celebrity economics. While we are only legally entitled to whatever information the Public Records laws of the State of Florida provide for, there is a massive industry built around the Tiger Woods persona and each of us contribute to the financial wellbeing of his family each and every time we drink Gatorade, buy any Nike product or use a Gillette razor. Tiger’s utility in marketing these products is based upon our perception of him as someone we respect, admire or envy. We wouldn’t know what we thought about Tiger if we didn’t have some sort of information to consider. Perhaps we don’t have a right to knowledge of the most intimate details of his life, but Tiger and his reputation are just like any other product we are being sold; fairness requires that we at least have a list of the ingredients. This is the Faustian bargain that all celebrities make, knowingly or not, and I have no sympathy for those who would accept the obscene compensation generated by their celebrity status and simultaneously bemoan the loss of privacy and the public’s insatiable thirst for the trivia of their lives. Strippers get paid for getting naked; it’s the way the world works.

In the end, after all the knowing laughter subsides and the ignorant masses move on to some other adored victim, there are still perhaps at least a couple of real lessons to be drawn from this hilarious public relations disaster. One of these is that lying never works. Even if you technically get away with it in the short term, the threat of future discovery will always be hanging over you, and most people, especially wives, have a pretty good instinct for what is probably true. Lying is entirely too much work if done right; keeping the story straight in the face of emerging facts requires proactive effort and keen awareness of changing circumstances, traits many American significantly lack. The other issue is that, despite the prevalence of untruthfulness in our society, most people just don’t respect liars. People will generally forgive almost any flaw in their idols if it is owned up to and the consequences are accepted, but bullshit always stinks. When you make your living from public adoration, mea culpa is a far better response than fuck you.

Of perhaps the greatest comfort to most of us is the knowledge that a private jet and a 155 foot yacht cannot protect you from domestic discord or a seven-iron swung in anger. Everybody has to go home at some point, no matter how grand the home may be. There is, after all, some basic fairness in the world, despite the widening differences in class and the seemingly magical lives of the privileged few. If the very rich are truly happier than most of the rest of us, which is apparently questionable, it is surely only because they have more things to distract them from their unhappiness. Tiger can go climb the Matterhorn with all the Hooters calendar girls or buy a weekend trip to the International Space Station with ten of his best friends, but none of that will compensate for the enduring pain of a damaged relationship with the mother of his children. The fundamentals of life, love and death remain unchanged by income; no amount of cash can buy you into being something that you aren’t, and there are no diamonds big enough to fill the holes left by betrayal and the collapse of a dream.

Anatomy of a Murder

Once again, the people who claim to love America the most conspire to portray one of our greatest strengths as a weakness of spineless Liberals that will bring destruction raining down upon us. In this instance it is trial by jury that is under assault by the hyper-patriots, who apparently believe that any adherence to principle is a show of weakness that will be exploited by our implacable enemies. In this instance, the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four lesser known conspirators for their involvement in the murderous attack on the World Trade Center has become a point of contention with the Fox News crowd. Apparently Al Qaeda scum like the Sheikh don’t deserve fair trials, and the risks of letting these morally challenged mass murderers have their day in court outweigh the value of our nation’s hard won freedoms.

I will be the first to concede that the whole issue of where these douche-bags fall on the defendant spectrum is legally complex, but in my simple mind it boils down to a clear binary choice; either they are prisoners of war and are entitled to whatever legal protections that affords them, or they are just common criminals who happen to allegedly be the most despicable of mass murderers, but who are, nonetheless, entitled to the tender ministrations of the American justice system. There would not appear to be any third option, as favored by self-proclaimed true patriots, which is characterized by dragging the accused out in the alley and shooting them without benefit of legal process. I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and those other walking turds are candidates for Citizen of the Year, but our courts deal with thousands of miscreants each year who are every bit as wretched as the five accused, if just not as notorious.

One of the issues raised by those opposed to open trial for these gentlemen is the risk that they will make the process a platform for their political views, as if killing those who disagree with you can be characterized as a political view. My reaction to this is, so what? We are bombarded daily with inane political messages masquerading as news, fact or entertainment; the only difference would be that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s will be slightly more ridiculous and offensive than most. But guess what; nobody has to watch or listen if they aren’t so inclined. However, you can be sure every ignorant and vituperative statement will be endlessly repeated and analyzed by our stalwart news media, including Hannity, O’Reilly and Van Susteren. I have for some time been laboring under the impression that our nation has long since determined that the risk of dangerous ideas pales in comparison to the risk of allowing government to sensor what people can say, even accused criminals. I hope I am still correct.

As the voices of ignorance and intolerance become increasingly shrill, I have less and less enthusiasm for writing pages and pages of imagined refutation and find myself drawn more to whimsical musing upon odd sea creatures and introspective analysis of my own human failures. I even find myself watching Keith Olbermann less because I just can’t stand the air of indignation and hostility, even when I agree with the commentator. I am getting weary of the constant metaphysical war for America’s soul and I suspect that many Americans have beaten me to the punch by ceasing to pay any attention a long time ago. It is, nonetheless, critically important that we remain actively committed to the founding principles of this nation, even when it is inconvenient, painful or dangerous. If we compromise our principles for asses like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then he wins and we all lose.

Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful

And speaking of disasters, my two favorite righteous women, Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, have again erupted into the consciousness of the nation, courtesy of that faithful public watchdog, the national media. Like herpes, there seems to be no cure for this social disease and even the haven of NPR is not safe from its debilitating effects. Ms. Palin is on the verge of publishing a book, which, according to excerpts, basically blames John McCain and an envious press for all her woes. I have not, and will not, read this dreadful tome, ghost-written by Josef Goebbels apparently, being content to condemn Ms. Palin based upon rumor and personal ignorance of the facts, much as she herself typically handles important issues. Ms. Prejean is currently making the rounds of that bastion of intellectual substance, the talk-show circuit, attempting to explain the concurrence of her biblical beliefs with boob-jobs and masturbation videos, as if such edification was truly necessary. These lovely ladies are, alas, just two further examples of how things go wrong when intellect and ego are not properly correlated.

But, as Coach Lee Corso says, not so fast. As much immature pleasure as I get from deriding these hapless nitwits, I have to concede that a modicum of self-reflection makes me a bit uneasy with my own sarcastic delight. Truth is, I am not quite as happy when reviling the pompous ignorance of Rush Limbaugh or the hopeless obliviousness of John Boehner, but throw Michelle Bachman into the mix and I may burst my spleen laughing at her deranged rantings. The dependent variable here is, of course, gender, with perhaps a second and even more telling variable of relative attractiveness, and I have to ask myself some hard questions about what’s going on down there in the garbage dump at the bottom of my skull and whether I am being objective and equitable when hating on all these mentally defenseless microcephalics.
As a general rule, people are uncomfortable with differences; they are uncomfortable dealing with them and uncomfortable discussing them. Some people will even deny that differences exist, between races or genders or household cleansers, for example, because if you allow for the possibility of a difference, then you allow for the possibility of a comparison and inevitably someone will conclude that one thing is smarter, stronger, more durable, more stable, more exciting, more moral or more delicious than another. Being thoroughly committed to the concept of genetic determinism (perhaps, as I am sometimes accused, to the point of irrationality), I believe there are real, empirically demonstrable differences between men and women, both physiologically and behaviorally. No one would dispute that men are, on average, discernibly taller and heavier than women, but if you suggest that there are differences in the genders in the manner in which information is processed or in emotional predilections, you may be confronted with a howl of dismay. Unfortunately, the howl of dismay has over the years virtually become my mating call, so I am not particularly adverse to it; nonetheless, it is necessary for an objective person to filter through their own prejudices to arrive at a fair estimation of the value of someone else’s ideas.

My conclusion is that there is some common knowledge here masquerading as dirty little secrets. First, people like Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean probably really don’t get a fair shake when it comes to intellectual credibility simply because they are women. Americans, including most American women, don’t take women as seriously as men as political or social leaders because those are roles which are seen as requiring typically masculine virtues such as decisiveness, emotional detachment, intellectual objectivity and the ability to be a real bastard. When you think about the fact that hotbeds of Islamic paternalism like Pakistan and Bangladesh have elected female heads of government, but in 2008 in America more Democrats (including me) chose the black guy with little experience and no record to speak of over the Lady of Steel, something notable is occurring. Women won’t even consistently vote for women, which confuses me greatly, and industry, government, academics, athletics and the arts remain irrefutably to some extent male-dominated enterprises.

Second, if you are a physically attractive woman, you are going to get even less respect. This contention is a little more subjective, perhaps, and I don’t have any sociological research to reference, but I do have a theory, and an opinion; or maybe a theory about an opinion about a theory. The fact is (according to me) that there is a part of the male brain that continually evaluates all females encountered for their potential as a mate. This mental undressing, far from being some perverted deviance, is an effort of the brain to determine the extent to which genes are properly expressed as an index of their utility in creating healthy, survivable progeny, should the opportunity arise. I will not go so far as to say this is a completely conscious process in all men, or that women don’t have their own evaluation sub-routine, but there is virtually no man who hasn’t at some point had his head snatched around by that unseen force to rotate in the direction of a female entering his visual field. This is more often the case when the brain, through analysis of peripheral visual data, has already made an unconscious preliminary determination that there are potentially really good genes present. Despite the scorn heaped upon males by women for this failure, it is truly an autonomic nervous response which requires great discipline to control. The point is, if you are female and hot, most men are too busy watching your pretty lips moving and visualizing different types of underwear to pay any attention to what you are saying. This problem is compounded by the tendency of many attractive women to exploit this erotic hypnosis when dealing with male counterparts in social and business situations. Conversely, many women don’t support attractive women in serious undertakings because they are envious and want to find something wrong with them. Their thinking is something along the lines of, “sure, she’s hot, but she dresses like a skank and she don’t know shit about world oil markets”. For those of us of average appearance and average accomplishment, it is really discouraging to see beautiful people running everything, so, let’s be real; if Margret Thatcher looked like Sophia Loren, do you think she would ever have been the Prime Minister? But perhaps more interestingly, would she ever have aspired to be?

And finally, if you are a woman and have been discovered at some video beaver stroking, you are pretty much toast form a credibility perspective, despite the fact that you are just the kind of woman that men adore and most women would really envy your liberation and freedom of self-expression and might even want to do the same type of thing if they weren’t afraid of exactly the kind of embarrassment Carrie Prejean is experiencing right now. Throw in a boob-job and you are automatically assumed to be a promiscuous mental light-weight, which is still, in 2009, perhaps the most crushing indictment of a woman’s character possible. Just for the record, I do not believe gender-based rules of sexual conduct any longer have merit from a survival perspective and are, therefore, a useless vestige of more primitive times, but the world is not completely up to speed with me on that one.

So here I am; one the one hand, I truly believe that people like Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean are inane aggregations of whiny vanity, self-serving denial, ignorance, hypocrisy, and irrationality; pretty much everything wrong with humanity, but I have to question whether I have dismissed them without adequate reflection because of genetic and cultural predispositions that have nothing to do with rationality and objectivity. A suicidally depressed Virginia Woolf wrote that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. The meaning of these words can be expanded to all pursuits; women generally have to be in a situation where their ability to seek personal or professional fulfillment doesn’t depend on the prerequisite of being taken seriously; women often have to prove the competence that in men is mostly taken for granted. This, no doubt, sucks; so, I probably should read Sarah Palin’s book, if only as an act of atonement, but since she didn’t actually write it, I’ll give myself a pass, but I will watch Carrie Prejean’s home videos when they make the Internet; I’m only human, after all.

2012

Ok, let’s go ahead and address this important issue; the world is definitely going to end in 2012. I know it is true because NASA denies it. NASA denies that there is a face on Mars and NASA denies that people we don’t know and would otherwise never have heard of, people desperate for attention with poor dental plans, have been abducted by alien creatures and have had their anuses violated by technically complex gadgetry. How would NASA know what had been in anybody’s anus? Spooky, right? I do not know what NASA says about Elvis. NASA is a part of the government and anything the government tells us is wrong. They lie to us, alternately, to enslave us or to protect us from our own irrational fears. Perhaps they lie to us to protect us from our own irrational fear of being enslaved. The point is, we can never rely on anything we are told by anyone who is more educated than we are, who wears a suit or who has any interest in ensuring domestic tranquility or promoting the general welfare. If we are not ever vigilant, they will take our goats.

Speaking of goats, the Mayan civilization of Central America was pretty sharp for a bunch of half-naked guys with no television. They had the only known written language in Mesoamerica and were skilled at astronomy, mathematics and architecture. Their monumental structures still stand despite centuries of neglect and their cities were built with a complexity and scale that rivaled anything in the world at the height of Mayan power in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries. They were a culturally and economically diverse society with a complex and expansive trade system and sophisticated agricultural practices which supported massive urban populations. They also had booze, cigarettes, pornography and human sacrifice. Apparently they didn’t sacrifice the right humans, though, since, for suspected reasons of prolonged drought, ecological mismanagement and political turmoil, Mayan civilization collapsed within the span of a few decades in the Ninth Century. Their urban centers were abandoned and the populace returned to a life of agricultural subsistence in the countryside. It should be noted that many renowned Republican scholars, such as Sarah Palin, are still trying to figure out how President Obama pulled it off.

The Mayans had a complex system of calendars that was based upon concepts previously developed by the Zapotec and Olmec civilizations which divided history into a series of nested cycles which could be aggregated into larger cycles to expand the calendar into the past or the future. The Mayan Long Count calendar regulates the largest of these cycles, and the 13th cycle of the Long Count runs from September 18, 1618 until December 20, 2012, which is why that’s the date the world will end. Given that the Mayans had all gone back to living in the jungles before the 13th cycle began, I’m not sure why there even is a 13th cycle in their calendar, and perhaps the world actually ended on September 17, 1618 and we just haven’t noticed it yet. The Mayans believed the world began on September 6, 3114 B.C., which would be big news to the Egyptians, Sumerians, the men of Troy and the rest of the other approximately 30 million Homo Sapiens who were around before that, but I guess you might have a hard time knowing the world had just started unless the tags were still on everything. Nonetheless, it is still pretty sad that the fact that some Mayan calendar bureaucrat never got around to chiseling down the 14th cycle somewhere has doomed us all to oblivion, but that’s how it works.

So anyway, in 2012 the planets will line up on one side of the sun and the resulting gravitational pull will rip the Earth apart, although it has rather conspicuously failed to do so the numerous times in the past that such planetary alignments have occurred, and those liars at NASA tell us that there will not be an alignment in 2012 and that another such alignment will not occur until 2040. Maybe that means the truth is that the rouge planet that NASA has been hiding from us all these years will collide with the Earth and destroy us all. Clearly all the amateur astronomers and telescope manufacturers in world are in on the cover-up and have been hiding this massive celestial object from the public for centuries. Or maybe the cause of our destruction is going to be that plague or war or health-care reform or whatever else it is that we are being lied to about now; it is so tragically disappointing to know that nobody in the whole world can be trusted except me, a demented Congresswoman and some random dude with a website.

The Mayans, like many societies before and since, worshipped a pantheon of gods who controlled things like whether your child was deformed or not and when it rained and who died from drinking too much, and they made sacrifices to incur the favor of these gods. They also worshipped the spirits of their ancestors which they believed inhabited the world around them and they subscribed to the concepts of demons and goblins and numerology and astrology and all manner of divination. Much like modern-day Republicans, they were a superstitious and fearful lot, and their faith was rewarded by the privilege of standing hot and hungry at the fringe of the expanding jungle and looking wistfully backwards toward the towering monuments of their ruined civilization. 2012 baby.

The Mark of Cain is the Barbeque Stain

I recently viewed a video clip from the American Human Society which revealed some rather distressing behavior at a Vermont slaughterhouse (please see http://radicalsahm.blogspot.com/2009/11/unacceptable.html). Whether you feel that killing animals for food is morally repugnant or you patronize McDonald’s daily, it is really difficult to excuse the sort of indifferent and callous behavior that was captured on camera, and the sad thing is that these events are probably not all that infrequent in the world of animal slaughter. Let’s face it, if you spend the whole day killing animals for a living, you probably aren’t a PETA member. For my part though, when it comes to the morality of meat, I am awash in a sea of gray.

Fundamentally, humans are meat eaters; there is little point in denying it. More accurately, we are omnivores and our teeth and jaws and digestive tracts are designed to deal with most anything we can fit in our mouths, but it is clear that meat has always been a big part of that. The paleontological record is replete with examples of our carnivorous excess, including stampeding whole herds of Mammoths off cliffs in order to have an easy feast. The fact that there was a time when some of the stuff we were eating would also occasionally eat us may give some an ironic sense of moral symmetry, but let there be no doubt that the human race will eat anything necessary in order to survive, up to and including each other. One can argue that a meatless diet is possible, or even superior from the health and ecological perspectives, but such an approach is clearly not the norm in any human culture.

So, they way I see it, there are two distinct questions that are raised by the sort of treatment seen in this video; is it, in and of itself, immoral to kill and eat other animals; and, if we are not prepared to make that leap, then what standard of treatment should be afforded to an animal which is being killed for human consumption? Regarding the first question, if meat is indeed murder, then the whole human enterprise is deeply flawed. Every aboriginal culture that lived in harmony with its environment and revered the primal and the natural would have to be just as morally bankrupt as modern civilization sometimes is. I suppose there is a line of reasoning that ethically distinguishes necessity from preference, but that type of situational analysis generally just leads to the sort of moral parsing that lets us excuse everybody except the people we don’t like. Who gets to define what is necessary? Nature only judges efficiency, not necessity, and the survival value of omnivorousness is so deeply ingrained in human culture that you might as well ask a bee not to dance. If eating meat is wrong, then we are, at our roots, wrong, because that is what Mother Nature, or God the Father, has, in part, designed us to do

I will fully here confess that there is no chance that I will ever willingly substitute tofu burger for that USDA Choice on my grill. Maybe I should, but I won’t, and I suspect that there are at least a couple of billion other Homo Sapiens who feel pretty much the same way. My intransigence does not, however, excuse anyone inflicting unnecessary suffering on our fellow creatures, but now, just so you know, I do realize that this is where my trail of tortured logic breaks down. Telling the slaughterhouse guy that he better not mistreat the cow that he is about to kill, said cow being destined to ultimately be consumed by me for it’s tasty, protein-rich flesh, does seem like some pretty convoluted moral masturbation designed to obscure the cruel reality that I am a principal part of a brutal system of unfeeling exploitation. And so I am. And so are most of the rest of us, and so have we been for hundreds of thousands of years, and our genetic progenitors for millions of years before that. In the relationship between predator and prey, sympathy is extinction and extinction precludes both evil and redemption. Having said that, whatever it means, it doesn’t imply we shouldn’t still follow the Golden Rule. I mean, if someone was going to kill you and eat you, you would want them to keep it a secret and be all nice to you and bash your brains out when you weren’t looking so that your death would be relatively stress-free, wouldn’t you? Certainly we can give a cow such a small courtesy.

So, I am prepared to accept my share of the responsibility for the sad-eyed calf which may, or may not, completely appreciate the full depth of the horror of its situation, and I will give some earnest thought to what I can do to prevent this useless suffering in the future. I will also ask others to understand that every time you flip the light switch that you bear some small responsibility for Chernobyl, that every time you cash your paycheck you have just bought another handful of bullets to be sent somewhere in the world, that for every gallon of ethanol in the gasoline you buy you have just pushed the price of corn out of reach of some hungry family, that for every piece of jewelry you buy someone on some other continent may become a virtual slave and that for every Tom Cruise movie you watch you have just made it possible for one more dumbass to be hornswoggled by a free personality test. I will ask others to please hate the sin but not the sinner, because we exist in such an interconnected web of relationships that we no longer have Pilate’s luxury of simply washing our hands, of saying “I don’ eat meat, or I don’t buy diamonds or I don’t pay taxes, so it’s not my fault”. I will ask others to let sadness, not anger, guide their judgments and to let reason, not outrage, inform their actions. Maybe then we can relieve the suffering of the helpless without just transferring it somewhere else.

Dog Gone

A friend of mine recently had to terminate one of her dogs due to advanced age and the sudden worsening of a long-standing illness. For many years she had been spending a substantial amount of money on medication each month and had been administering said medication on a regular schedule, including a dose ‘round about midnight. I am not sure that I love my own genetic progeny that much, but, needless to say, she was broken-hearted over the death, even though she still has two other dogs to fill the void by shedding hair everywhere, rummaging through the garbage and barking at inappropriate times.

I have great empathy for her loss, having put down a dog or two in my 50 or so years, and it is never pleasant. A couple of years ago our 16 year-old Rat Terrier suffered a “major neurological event’ which left her unable to stand, eat, or drink. She was, however, still able to crap herself, which was perhaps the saddest part of it. When I transported her to the vet for assessment, I was informed she could probably be kept alive for a few weeks with intravenous rehydration and a nutritional mush fed through a tube, but that the prognosis was not good. When I inquired as to the cost of this inhumane procedure I was quoted a figure resembling the Gross Domestic Product of Bolivia. Needless to say, she died shortly thereafter.

I am sometimes still irrationally troubled by my unwillingness to spend my children’s college fund to keep our beloved pet alive for just a few more days in conditions you wouldn’t wish on Michelle Bachman, but I know I did the right thing. Kali (that was her name, pronounced Kah-lee) was a sort of grumpy clown who didn’t like children, other dogs, cats, squirrels, cold days or wet grass. She was, however, very fond of canned Alpo, watermelon, back-scratching and sleeping, and she was a faithful companion and watchdog who would growl menacingly at the Cable guy and Jehovah’s Witnesses. She only bit the kids when they really pushed her limits and she only violated her house training in the final months as she slipped into canine senility. She would not have much enjoyed the tube thing and not being able to pee on top of our other dog’s pee in the backyard would have been a deal-breaker. After the administration of $100.00 worth of sedatives, she quietly crossed over to oblivion without so much as a look of reproach and I cried for the first time in many, many years.

If you aren’t a dog lover, it is probably difficult to relate, but there is a long history of bonding between humans and canines which has evolved from a symbiotic tolerance to a full blown love affair over the course of 15,000 years, give or take. Dogs are social animals, much like us, and they know the value of reliable backup. Unlike many humans, however, almost all dogs know that to have a friend, you have to be a friend. Dogs are opportunistic survivors, like humans, and they never met an easy meal they didn’t like, even if there are cooked carrots in it. With a brain generally the size of a walnut, about half of which is devoted to operating their nose, they are limited to some pretty basic intellectual accomplishments and they probably don’t really feel all those complex emotions that we project on them, but they definitely have individual personalities and they know what they like.

Most dog owners would probably be disappointed to know that all that face licking love their new puppy gives them is just a genetically programmed effort to get them to barf up some tasty chunks. In undomesticated canines, the mothers will hunt and eat prey and return to the burrow where the pups’ face licking will stimulate regurgitation of the partially digested meat, a sumptuous meal for hungry tail-waggers. Almost all other canine behaviors that we perceive as emotional responses are programmed forms of communication which convey information on status in the pack, receptiveness to contact, indifference or anxiety. We become so attached to our canine friends that we grieve their loss just like we would a child, or at least a close cousin, while in the dogs’ simple mind the practical requirements of survival predominate and abstract concepts like love have little place. If you don’t think so, try not feeding your dogs for a week and see if your desiccated corpse isn’t discovered days later.

But that doesn’t mean that our dogs are not telling us something with all their gratifying attention, and I would like to think that the reality is superior to the fantasy. I believe that unconditional love is just a selfish genetic indulgence evolved to keep us from killing our ingrateful children, while respect is an appreciation borne of reason and logic. The dog rushes to the door and furiously wags its tail not to say “I love you” or “I missed you”, but to say “you rock; you can open a can” and “ you are a success; you can make that water thing work” and “you are the hardcore shizzle; you killed all my fleas”. Dogs are results oriented, like nature itself, while sentimentality is a luxury that only creatures with the power to control their environment can afford. Dogs are smart enough to run an emotional con on us and practical enough to know that it really is better to serve in heaven than to rule in hell, and that’s why they were here long before us, and why they will likely be here long after we are gone.