Who's The Dog? You're the Dog!

The incoming president is shopping for a dog for his two daughters. After the election was all over, the tears of joy were wiped away, and the spilled champagne mopped up, the media looked around for new news, and came up with this. It's so great not to be forced to write about torture, war, and economic disaster, for a change. Let's talk about hypoallergenic dogs!

I think I'm like most Americans, in that I did not know there was such a thing as a hypoallergenic dog. I'd heard of hypoallergenic earring studs and hypoallergenic soap. I wear hypoallergenic socks. But the thought that I could get a hypoallergenic dog never crossed my mind. I've looked it up and I've found out that one of the reasons I've never thought of such a thing is that the only really hypoallergenic dog is a bare naked dog. My mind resisted the thought simply because my mind revolted against the idea of calling any sort of naked furless quadruped a dog.

Then I remembered how, in the 90s, about 2 years after Utne Reader declared Belltown the 7th hippest neighborhood in America and it had fully ceased to be true, the place was overrun with people stringing along minute little hairless things that I used to call "long-legged rats." Their owners referred to them as dogs.

Here's what I'm thinking. Obama is just not funny enough by himself. I need me some funny stuff in the White House. He got me Joe Biden, and I thank him for that, but even Joe Biden isn't all that funny. He's no Sarah Palin. But a hairless live ferret morsel passing for a dog you can carry around in a coffee mug, that's a hoot.

Barack to the kids: 'Here's the dog I promised you! Now remember, you need to put him back in his thimble when guests are over, which will be all the time now; otherwise people will think we have rats. Oh, and here's one Swedish meatball. The lickings from it should feed him for a month."

The bottom line is, they don't really make hypoallergenic dogs, they only make hypo-dogs. They're less allergenic because there's less of them. This could be a great metaphor informing Belltown, Seattle, and America.

Greg Nickels wants Seattle to be a major business center and he figures businesses won't locate here if there's homeless people everywhere you look. That's never stopped businesses from locating in New York, San Francisco, or Chicago (home of Boeing), all three of which I have been to and know have at least as much visible homelessness as Seattle does. But let's forget that and accept the premise that visible homelessness would prevent us from being The Big Apple Bye & Bye that we've always wanted to be. We should then be striving to make Seattle hypo-homeless.

That way, in boardrooms all across the US there can be conversations that go: "Gosh, I had to see a homeless person on my way to our offices on the 70th floor of our skyscraper. How awful! Can't we do something about that?" "Why yes, I was looking on Craigslist for an ugly dog and I noticed that Seattle is up for sale, and it's listed as hypo-homeless." "That's great! Let's sell this skyscraper and buy a new one in Seattle, and work there."

In reality, this is America, not the United Arab Emirates. In America, there is no such thing as a hypo-homeless city. The closest thing to a hypo-homeless city in the world is Dubai, which passes its wealth out among its citizens, so that not one is poor by any standard. That will not happen here, even with the socialist in the White House.

[Right: Some would say Dubai can afford to be so socialistic.]

So, the only real way that Seattle can be hypo-homeless, is for her to be hypo-urban. Without sharing the wealth that is created on the backs of our citizens and from their resources, we can only have less homelessness than other American cities by being less city.

Horsemeat and Other Indelicacies

Recently Andy Rooney started one of his 60 Minutes essays talking about spinach making people sick and ended with some observations having to do with the eating of horsemeat. I’m not actually sure what he was saying in-between because I was drowning his voice out with my screams. Later I spoke to Timothy “Perfess’r” Harris, our director, and asked him to shoot me if I ever wrote like that and he indicated that in that case I’d be shot about once every four weeks.

This may be one of those times. I’m high on NyQuil and I feel an irresistible urge to lead you all on a tour of my mind.

Speaking of tours, I was watching Rick Steves’ Europe the other day, and he was touring Turkey. While my eyes were watching, my mind was spinning with thoughts of cattle swimming the Bosporus, the cow jumping over the moon, and questions like, “If Turkey can be part of Europe, then why do we have wars, and why can’t we all have vacation property on Bora Bora?”

As my questions went unanswered I noticed that Rick Steves was playing backgammon with some Turkish people on the screen, and I listened long enough to hear him say that you can’t make a bad move in backgammon when playing the Turks, they won’t let you.

I immediately thought of Sudoku, to which I have lately become addicted. Sudoku isn’t remotely like backgammon, except that it’s a game. For the purposes of my immediate thought the only significant feature of Sudoku is that you do it by yourself. Therefore the great thing about doing Sudoku, the thing that makes it so appealing for me, is I don’t have to play it with some ego-crazed spoiled crybaby sitting across from me.

You see, I used to think that I might like to play chess. But I discovered that everyone within a radius of 3000 miles of me who was willing to join me at it was an ego-crazed spoiled crybaby. Thanks to Rick Steves I now know that I only had to move to Turkey to find people who could enjoy a friendly chess game like human beings. Provided I first hid their dice from them.

You may be wondering what any of this has to do with eating horsemeat. Well, one of Andy Rooney’s points, or pointlets, was that he was an American and Americans don’t eat horsemeat, and he, for one, wasn’t about to start.

Likewise, I would like to make a point, or pointlet, that I am an American, and that we Americans are by and large ego-crazed spoiled crybabies, and I, for one, have just about had it.

I’m not talking just about the lack of civil discourse evident during the current political campaigns, although that’s part of it. I’m talking about all the mean-spirited and uncivil and unsportsmanlike conduct that is revealing itself throughout our society at all levels, especially the highest, where it does the most monumental harm.

How can it be that I now have to write columns arguing against pre-emptive warfare and torture?

Last week George Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which deprives almost all human rights to all non-Americans. It doesn’t prevent them from being tortured; it only requires torturers to avoid doing anything that might feel like organ failure or life threatening. So genital-electro-shock is out, thumbscrews are in.

The Act not only allows torture, it also lets the military tribunals use the evidence so obtained against the unlucky suspect. So if you are suspected of being a terrorist and they beat you or someone else into saying that you are a terrorist, then by the new rules, you’re a terrorist.

One of my former chess acquaintances made up the rule that he would always be White, because Black loses too much. I quit playing right about then. How soon before the rest of the world quits playing with America?

How long before the rest of the world catches on that our law treats them like dogs?

African Wild Metaphors

Having been homeless a bunch of times has warped my conception of a good time. It used to be that a good time involved some activity. There had to be a convertible and a woman. I expected some state and federal laws to be broken. Two or three weeks' worth of spending money had to be thrown away within minutes. My idea of a good time is now and probably always ever will be to sit indoors someplace where I belong and not have to get up and move.

That's what I like about the zoo. What I can do at the zoo is pay my money (or someone else's money, I don't care) to get in, then find my way to the food pavilion, sit down with a burger and a drink and watch the other people at the zoo who are running around looking for animals to watch.

As many of you know, I am no longer homeless but live in a subsidized apartment building, the Union, run by the same people who run what's called the Downtown Emergency Service Center. These people, who also call themselves DESC, don't want me to just sit in my room and not get up. They try to entice me out of my room with ping-pong, bingo, parties, and games. Nothing much works until someone mentions a field trip to the zoo.

The zoo is wonderful. You've got your animals. Animals are cool. You've got your basic zoo paradigm: the animals are mostly locked up, but it's made to look like they aren't, if it's a good zoo. Every time I go to the zoo I think there has to be a wealth of political metaphor there. I think of Walden II, Brave New World, and lately the Matrix, and I'm sure I will have something insightful to say in this column about such metaphor, perhaps having seen the orangutans.

So last week I went to the zoo with a bunch of fellow residents of the Union. I couldn't wait to get my hands on some of those hot political metaphors I was going to write about, and then I would check out the snow leopard, and then I would retreat to the food pavilion to sit and not get up.

First we all rushed to see the tiger cubs. We studied our maps carefully and found our way to the tiger cub display. As we approached them I thought of all the injustices of child exploitation around the globe that I had ever heard of. I was thinking, boy, these are going to give me terrific insights. Finally we arrived to see them stretched out on some fake rocks in front of us. What a dearth of political metaphor they represented. I have never seen such a paucity of metaphor in a pair of cats as in those two. I have more political metaphor in my little toes.

Then we went to see the snow leopard. Whenever I had looked for the snow leopard in the past he was almost impossible to find thanks to his camouflage. There'll be a metaphor in that for sure, I thought.

Well, guess what. This year the snow leopard was out in plain view putting on a show for all the visitors. He wasn't hard to find. You could see, hear, and smell him as easily as an incontinent Great Dane. Not much political metaphor there.

There was a little relief in the form of the one neurotic porcupine. But I do neurosis all the time. I was hoping I'd find a metaphor that was more out of the way, a little less common. I can find neurotic at 3rd and Pine.

Finally, just as I was about to give up, our group approached the African Wild Dogs. As we walked up to them I could see four wild dogs running around their area in a single file, nose to tail, always in the same order. I shouted something stupid like, "Hey, everybody, look! Puppies!" Or something like that. The lead dog then made a beeline for me with his three buddies following him in their constant order, and he stood in front of me and said: "Hoo."

Then, when he was satisfied that I was nobody, the lead dog took off with the other three to look for other potential challenges to his power in their territory.

That made my day – I'd seen politicians themselves.