"They’re Eating the Dogs!"

Gotcha! Clickbait is the new reading prompt.

This is NOT a whit about those vile moments in the losers’ Republican campaign for the Presidency. Not about J(ust) D(ead) Vance’s admitted belief in making shit up for the sake of drawing attention. Here’s what his “drawing attention” is like …0000, zero, zero, zero and less than zero. JD admits he rents dogs " to show I'm a dog fan"; that guy who could never write for AuthenticWV or any state authentically. Not about the rapist and felon Donald Trump’s most falsely dramatic moments in the debate, before he hit his nadir, misremembering that Virginia race which led his sliding mind to accuse us, the state of West Virginia, of infanticide, arguing Dems did it and want it as law.

This piece is about dogs that eat. Dogs that eat well because they are “our best friends.” Because, many say, and many dogs act like, they are human, or almost human as Nietsche might say. They are. I think of a great John Cheever story which ends with a family dog joyously all over the father-husband in his marital crisis. He’ll stay married. Thomas Pynchon ends one novel surely borrowing, alluding, to this story with another bounding dog full of the life and happiness this novel believes in. "Vineland." America.

The domestication of dogs, from wild to civilization and its discontents is a wonderful bit of history of the West. Socrates thought dogs were like philosophers: they knew who to trust from their faces (and smell, but he didn’t say that). He emphasized a statement with a “by the dog”. But Greece ended and the West was different. Shakespeare is maybe the first writer in English to take note of dogs in a positive way (sometimes) in his work. There is one line where a misanthropic character wishes so-and-so were a dog so he couldn't hate him. There is the famous “Every dog has his day” line from "Hamlet" wherein we read of the karmic justice even those who are neglected and abused might expect. Down, boy.
Read Leon Brooke’s "Shakespeare’s Dog" for a barking good time.

And there is that backward-looking, dog-hating^* ex-president who has kept alive the awful tropes from when almost everything was dog-eat-dog since he wants that back. The Former Guy who said “died like a dog” about a terrorist the US killed. The adjudicated rapist who praised General Kelly for having fired someone “like a dog”. The convicted felon's niece, Mary Trump, a trained clinical psychologist, who calls the rapist's father a sociopath and sees the same tendencies in her uncle: " unable to "experience the entire spectrum of human emotion." Sociopaths: not fit for dogs as human-like society.

But I digress. So that you won’t stop reading—[aside: Ron Charles at The Washington Post once told me that I would not believe how many people started and never finished simple book review pieces, we who always want closure, even to this dash]—I promised a real article about well-fed dogs and human individuality. Yes, I did smuggle in human individuality--that pretty great, albeit ambiguous, achievement of liberal democratic societies under late capitalism? Our free and fully developed choices in life for the elite of us. Maybe privilege means this, basically? All those choices for whatever we want. Dizzying, laughable; foodies (and other eaters) able to get seasonal food fresh all year; spices and flavorings as if the Silk Road was just country roads everywhere. More kinds of everything than one can taste or learn.

We’re feeding our dogs! Dog-friendly Shepherdstown, where I went to my first Dogfest years ago–we lent them our backyard–-and I saw a couple breeds as exotic as unseeable fish. Evolutionary variety. Is evolution the pluralism of individuality?
Every Sunday my partner and I set up a people-meeting table at Shepherdstown’s Farmers’ Market. Collecting spare change for Shepherdstown Shares is the why. Every Sunday, people bring their dogs by.

All the dogs know Nancy, the treat giver, most jockeying for her closeness for a treat; many doing the trick their owners want done to get that treat. (a nice hunk of the finest Milk Bone manufactured non-bone). But, not all!...Dogs, too, are full of the individuality all we humans manifest. I’ve owned dogs but I, too, felt what a friend who came by said when one refused a treat: “I’ve never known a dog to not take a treat.” That dog was the second dog that Sunday to refuse a treat. The look of disdain from one. The other who took it in his mouth then just dropped it—spit it out?—and walked away. Another week one just sort of pushed it along the sidewalk a bit, then left it. This week there were two dogs that took the treat in their mouth “to eat later” their owners said! ??!! Such delayed gratification, that hallmark of civilization.

But this past Sunday was unforgettable for this handsome, classy dog trotting past when her owner was asked, “Does your dog want a treat?” Her response: “I don’t think so, she only eats salmon.”

The wonders of one’s fully developed desires. American individualism (and I’m not being sarcastic) is a dog’s life.

^*The feeling is returned. Ever see a dog around Trump?