Friday, June 25, 2004

RATTLING CAGES—the ad canum—er, hominum—argument

“Hah! Look at this photo on the Common Dreams site of Dick Cheney.” Raven points to a fuzzy full color image on the screen that looks to be, from where I am sitting, a mad dog.

Yikes, Rave! Looks like a rabies epidemic is blasting off. Who IS that mad dog, anyway?

“I just told you: Dick Cheney. Snarling the F-word at Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont. Cute guy, right.”

Hmmmm. What did Leahy do, hoist his leg on Cheney’s personal fire hydrant?

“Says here that Cheney was being asked about his manipulating spoils of war contracts for Halliburton.”

And that’s when he snarled out the F-word? Did he start barking, too?

“I don’t know. It doesn’t say anything here about barking. But it does say that Senator Leahy said he thought Cheney must have been having a bad day.”

You know, Rave, this would be very funny if the guy weren’t running the US government. And if he were not sending the troops into the Valley of Death to be slaughtered. Have you noticed that the body count in Iraq is incrementing geometrically now?

“Well, that’s what happens when you let a dog take control. Dogs are not popular with Arabs, you know. There’s not much difference between them and hyenas except domestication. And domestication doesn’t seem to have made dogs a better species. If anything, their worst characteristics: a pack mentality and blind loyalty to the master (in this case the Masters of War) have become dominant.”

Rave, is there a point in there someplace? Or is this an arcanely knitted confection designed to show that Huntington was wrong in his racist analysis of cultures clashing—that is to say the clash of religions between Muslims and Christians—and that it’s really about Arabs hating dogs?

“I’m looking for the point. Just got distracted for a minute looking at Cheney’s crooked teeth. The point is that dogs have been bred not to look at facts or information, just to accept propaganda from their owners and gang up with other dogs to enforce it. Cheney, in this case, apparently sees himself as the Alpha Dog, and hence his outburst of scatology in the Senate. Leahy rattled his cage, and like any conditioned Pavlovian, drooled out the controversial cussword.”

And Ravens don’t pull those capers?

“Of course not. We are the independent shapeshifting tricksters of the animal kingdom. We just move on to another level of consciousness.”

Raven turns of the computer, flaps his wings 3 times and flies into the closed window.

Poor modest little guy. He will return to one of his levels of consciousness soon