It's a dog-eat-dog world.

This has been nagging at me for days now. At first it was just the strangeness of finding myself siding with the Taliban on any issue. Generally, the Taliban and I, we are not of one mind. It’s true that I, as does the Taliban, frown upon setting off firecrackers, reading sewing catalogues, and flying kites. And truly indeed, we agree on the very, very wrongness of adult humans having anything to do with stuffed animals. But strongly though I may frown, for me it ends at frowning. I’m not one to instigate public executions. And really, these things merely irk me. To be irked is a world of difference from going all jihad on some kite-flying, firecracker lighting, Butterick pattern-seeking, grown woman with stuffed animals on her bed. I just avoid that girl. The Taliban wants her dead.

Where the Taliban and I start to come a little closer, it turns out, was highlighted in the December 28th New York Times article about the popularity of dogfighting in Afghanistan.

The Taliban says dogfighting is un-Islamic. Me too! Only I also think that preventing women from becoming doctors and then telling women they can only be treated by doctors who are women is un-Islamic. So there ya go.

It turns out that quite a lot of men (and I specify men because this is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon) in Afghanistan have a strong cultural association with dogfighting. Especially in the south, where oppression is a primary thread in the fabric of the culture. This place, currently oppressed by a resurgent Taliban, lays claim to having been under the heels of a line of invaders beginning from antiquity. Everyone from Alexander the Great, to Genghis Khan, to Richard the Lionheart, to Leonid Brezhnev has wiped their feet on the Afghan people. In between invasions, they’ve been oppressed by a seemingly infinite list of brutal tribal leaders.

You’d have to go back at least 700 years to find an oppressor as controlling as the Taliban though. I mean, heck, I doubt that even Genghis Khan had a problem with sewing catalogues. That’s what makes it puzzling that the banned activity of dogfighting should persist in their shadow. Now, I don’t know what appendage they cut off if they catch you attending a dogfight, but I can’t think of any hobby I wouldn’t give up if I thought I might get even a tiny part of me cut off for pursuing it. Even the threat of a really bad haircut might dissuade me from some leisure activity or another. Not those Afghan guys though. Even though the Taliban doesn’t like it one bit, dogfighting remains popular. I think we have to assume that there’s a particular cultural salience to the activity.

Last February, a suicide bomber killed about eighty spectators at a dogfight. Now my first thought is: Well good. Eighty fewer walking vessels of stench on the planet. More oxygen for the rest of us. But the fans are hardly deterred since then; they keep coming out. To watch. To bet. To identify themselves with this stultifying occupation of feeling one has won something.

That NYT article quoted one of the spectators: “It’s not about money. If my dog beats another dog, it makes me feel like I’ve won $100,000. I can survive just from the happiness.”

It’s vicarious access to empowerment. Owning a dog who beats another dog is happiness. Afghanistan, that place more plundered than any other in human history, has cultivated this peculiar cultural value. It would seem that the culture of winning appears to thrive most perniciously among those who never win.

But who likes dogfighting in the U.S.? In Chicago, the only dogfighting references one ever hears, associate it almost exclusively to African American street gangs. But the subculture of dogfighting in the U.S. hardly began there. The gang-related dogfighting that we mostly hear about is a largely disorganized echo of a much older and elaborated subculture. As in Afghanistan, that culture is centered especially in the South. And from what I can see, wherever dogfighting is entrenched, it is not a single subculture that sustains it, but two distinct subcultures. One has money and power, and it dictates the terms. Around the world, the Italian Mafia and Russian Mafia control much of the organized dogfighting action. In Southern Afghanistan, it’s the Pashtun tribal leaders. In the southern U.S., it’s the monied kennel owners. The other subculture is made up of those who crave access to power enough to identify with the very persons who hold them down: The low-paid agricultural workers who gladly pay the guys who ensure their pay remains low for the chance to bet on the fights. The kids of negligible status in street gangs, buying status-identified crap that makes rich white guys richer, killing off their communities for crumbs of the profits going to the guys who are just as happy to see them dead.

It’s the ol’ exosystem-microsystem switcheroo here. A familiar story: The white trash overseer who beats the slaves in his impotent attempts to identify with the rich slave-owner who disdains him. In his gut, the overseer knows he is not the owner’s equal. He knows that but for the pseudo-power he attains through aggression, he is equal to the people enslaved under his watch. It’s the same process with the guy who’s boss treats him like garbage and goes home and kicks the dog. Someone who is secure in the belief that he possesses real power and that he will one day be the boss—that person never goes home to kick the dog. Nor does that person need to play Cinderella by going to a dogfight. Empowered people don’t sink into fantasies or rely on surrogates. If you have to have a surrogate winner, surely it’s because you believe that you, yourself, can never really win.

As I wondered this week how on earth dogfighting can thrive in any way under the watchful eye of the Taliban, I began also to wonder about how the City of Chicago can devote such paltry resources to combat dogfighting, despite it’s particular prevalence in this city. Then I remembered the position of the slave-owner. He relies on the overseer to act as his pawn in order to maintain control. Just so, the Taliban relies on the men of Kabul to occupy themselves with games that numb them further.

Much to my relief, the Taliban really has very little in common with me. They have much more in common with the Mafia. They have plenty in common with those dwindling few who control most of the money in the U.S. And they certainly have some key things in common with the breathtakingly racist and callous political machine that runs the City of Chicago. These agents of power rely upon maintaining ways for keeping the disenfranchised people whom they dominate numb to the experience of oppression. They maintain power by keeping the powerless spinning in circles, hopelessly play-acting their growing anger and aggression among themselves. It keeps the oppressed people busy.

If you’re reliably distracted by going home to kick the dog, you forget that kicking hurts, and you never get around to organizing to overthrow the one who has his heel on your neck.

Laura, Lost in the Bushes

Over the last eight years, like a lot of people, I have managed to hold onto essentially warm feelings toward Laura Bush. Having a facility for divorcing myself from reality, I have been able to shut off from my awareness that this is a woman who never (to our knowledge) acted on the many opportunities she must have had to take out Dick Cheney from close range.

I always enjoyed the fact that she is well-read. I took some smug satisfaction in recognizing that she obviously holds more progressive views than her husband and his band of puppeteers. And that he must be irked by that. Or better yet, that he doesn’t realize it, and there’s a special part deep inside Laura Bush that I will always understand—even touch—with more sensitivity than George ever could. Even now, I one day hope to have the chance to make George feel very small and insecure about that.

Although I am a consummately judgmental and intolerant former smoker, I’ve even taken pleasure in knowing that Laura Bush is a secret smoker. Because that would bother the other intolerant and judgmental people who probably voted for George because they mistakenly thought that Laura was a kindred intolerant spirit. And really, you can hardly blame her for having the occasional stress smoke. Look at the family she married into. Can you imagine dragging yourself through a holiday with these people? She deserves a good old fashioned heroin habit.

Laura Bush has been fully insulated from my wrath against the Bushes. I can’t pretend I don’t hold some grudges with the pointlessly infinite grip of a Bond villain. I’m still mad at Barbara Bush for calling Geraldine Ferraro a bitch back in 1984. Did she ever apologize for that? Didn’t think so.

But Laura has remained unsullied in my view. She has been that single intact and well-constructed tower rising in hopeful contrast from the ruins of a dessicated and crumbling medieval castle of a feudal overlord who had lived too long as a parasite upon the toil of the serfs.

Now that edifice is crumbling, and it’s all because of what I saw on TV this week: Really ugly china. Not at all the tasteful understatement I have grown to expect from Laura. No, this crap is gold leaf. With gold utensils. Yes. Gold utensils.

Really, Laura? Gold leaf? Isn’t that just a little too on the nose?

It’s not just a whisper of gold leaf, mind you. A thin stripe of gold leaf around the edges might have squeaked into tastefulness. But this is quite a lot of gold leaf. A little more gaudy and it would be suitable for a turn of the century whore-house. Ever so slightly more gaudy than that, and it would be right about what an eight year old might design as part of their If I Were King of the World fantasy. More gaudy still, and then we would have descended into the screaming-infant hell of Donald Trump’s taste.

The new White House china was on the news because people were upset that Laura spent $492,000 on china while the rest of us are saving up for that package of organic chicken breasts we’ve had our eye on. Laura explained fairly well that this deal was made two years ago when the economy was better, and seemed to put the subject to bed. Not so for me. I’m still wondering what kind of ecstasy laced bubble you have to be living in to feel like $492,000 on plates is ever a good buy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a zillion place settings with a zillion individual pieces per setting and blah, blah, blah it’s important to demonstrate gravitas for visiting heads of state. But that brings us back to the gold leaf problem. Shiny swaths of gold is not gravitas. It’s the film set of Hello Dolly. And it’s all very disconcerting because this is not the Laura Bush I know and whom I have till now felt confident that I could steal away from George if I wanted to. Where, amidst all this Liberace-wear china, is our secretly progressive, intellectual, Laura—jonesing for a Marlboro Red and rolling her eyes at Karl Rove? Has she been too long trapped in a maze of Bushes? Has she gone from dissident to being Barbara’s dutiful daughter-in-law? Will she inherent the pearls of disdain for us simple folk?

Perhaps it’s good that Laura is leaving when she is. This selection of expensive and overwrought crap for the White House is too much a signal that something has changed. She’s lost her way. She’s out of touch. And as Barbara reminded us in 1984, out of touch can make you very unkind, indeed. Today it’s kitschy dishes. Tomorrow Laura may wish to make us all her bitch.

Oh, Sylvia.

Last night I finally started reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. What a hoot that gal is. Was. Y’know. Till the suicide thing.

Like you, I used to think the most depressing thing about Sylvia Plath was the fact of her life and talent cut short long before it could all be fully realized. But here’s what’s more depressing: As an eighteen year old college freshman, she was tossing off journal entries more prescient and insightful than I have ever mustered, even in the full bloom of grown-up-hood. I think back to the journal I kept in my freshman year of college, and I must recognize that Sylvia and I may not even be the same species.

(I should note here that while at least two generations of readers now primarily associate Sylvia Plath with a weird sense of domesticity in suicidality and with poetry that betrayed her vulnerability to depression, Plath was above all else a starkly fine writer whose eye was as often turned to observe the world without as the world within. Her intuitive braiding of reason and emotion is unmatched among modern poets. And you should read her unabridged journals because the book is rich with great language and good thinking.)

Now here’s how eighteen year old Sylvia described getting a dose of nitrous oxide at the dentist: “I didn’t have to try hard to breathe now; something was pumping at my lungs, giving forth an odd breathy wheeze as I exhaled. I felt my mouth cracking into a smile.”

Here’s how eighteen year old me wrote about the same thing: “I like my new dentist. She said all you have to do is get this little thing on your nose and breathe through your nose. I seem to breathe very well through my nose. And it smells so fresh and clean. It’s just swishing past with no effort. I guess I must be about the best nose breather around.”

In her freshman year of college, Sylvia was coughing up cinematic descriptions and subtle, pithy metaphors for her journal. I, by contrast, am light years past college and still, when I journal, I tend to go on an on about how I don’t feel like writing and how I have a headache and how maybe I should just go back to bed. She processed, unflinching, the power of her own impulses and desires to shape her perceptions and assumptions. I whine about work and muse endlessly about whether I should buy a steam mop and which one to get. (They all work so well on the infomercials!)

When they come to posthumously publish my unabridged journals, they’ll find the whole mess of it shaping up to be a big swirly black hole of tedium, generating a vacuum powerful enough to suck the slightest speck of interest from the reader and spew it out into a vast empty space of indifference. Can’t do that with a steam mop.

That’s why I now realize I need to abandon those volumes of private journals I’ve been keeping since high school and become the easiest kind of fiction writer—a fake non-fiction fiction writer—a memoirist! (That’s still popular, right?) It’s never too late to start faking a life. Lacking substance, I now have the urge to fabricate a persistent drug problem and a much more colorful childhood. Soon enough, I can start checking the mail for an advance from a publisher who has nothing to do but trawl the internet for random memoirist types and send them money. Advance in hand, I promise I would promptly spend it on drugs and maybe a stylist to help me figure out what to wear on Oprah. It’ll be grand.

But at what cost? Could I sleep at night knowing that while my people continue to faithfully contribute to the world by going in early to the aerosol cheese factory and producing something that matters, I have chosen instead to betray the art of aerosol cheese-making and live, instead, on my own blather? Could I handle Liesl Schillinger’s inevitable paragraphs-long observation in the New York Times Book Review that while my grammar is mostly okay, the content of my thoughts is somehow both disturbing and uninteresting? Do I have the courage to face what might happen if Spazzita, my boss down at the aerosol cheese factory, were to discover my secret uncertainty about the benefits of aerosol cheese and summarily dismiss me for violating the fairly rigid ethical standards that dictate the production and distribution of cheese foods? Can I recover from the almost certain dressing down I might get from Oprah for failing to disclose that I actually don’t know what I’m talking about and have violated the high-minded integrity that surely suffuses the ethics of other people who contribute to the world by essentially writing down their emotional grocery lists?

Well, no. I can, in fact, handle precious little. And as the years recede behind me, I’m actually finding that that I can handle less and less. That, I suspect, might make me a better memoirist than, say, a real writer. Sylvia Plath, bless her heart, had some courage. True, it flagged under enough brutal treatment, but she held on as long as she could. I vaguely recall that I used to have courage. But my courage stole my wallet and left in the middle of the night years ago. Courage and I always had, at best, a cagey relationship. Bravado, I got; I traffic in stupidity, after all. But courage, not so much. That’s what makes Sylvia’s journals such interesting, if painful—in an affluence of ways—reading for me. She had so much of what I don’t got. And it’s almost heartbreaking to notice the small thing I seem to have, that she didn’t. She had courage and discipline and tornadic intelligence. I have misplaced confidence in winning lotteries I don't actually play. But there's something else. Apparently years ago when we were teenagers at the dentist, I learned to trust that I can breathe.

What the world doesn't need

There was a time when I wondered if the thing to do might be to undergo sex re-assignment surgery. When I was really young, I had no means to comprehend the notion of variability and ambiguity in gender expression. When I was a kid, Taco Bell was exotic. But thanks to Tom Snyder, I knew all about sex changes. Which made for interesting lunchroom chat in the fourth grade. Ultimately, I only really discounted the idea on the principle that the last thing the world needs is another straight white guy. Especially a relatively short one with anger issues, inwardly goaded and tortured by his own inability to grow a decent beard.

(In retrospect, I suspect I should have investigated the option of sex re-assignment more seriously. If only to avoid these many years of torment I have endured, trying to figure out what to wear. Sure, on most days, it’s easy enough to fall into the default lesbian uniform of androgyny. But special occasions demand drag. For a big event, you more or less have to pick a gender and run with it. Unless you’re in heels. Then you must not run; you must totter, awkwardly, whilst keeping track of that purse you would otherwise never carry and aren’t at all sure goes with your outfit because nobody ever taught you these rules, and no matter how much you studied Vogue in high school, the secrets of accessorizing remain more elusive than fractal geometry, and you must then ultimately drink too much in order to soften the sting of trying not to look like Peppermint Patty for one friggin’ evening—is that too much to ask?)

Now here’s a new temptation to give the world s’more crap it doesn’t need. Even less than the world needs another straight white guy scratching at the door does the world need another person with a blog, also at the door, also scratching. And writing in throbbing detail about what it’s like to scratch. And speculating about what makes her scratch. And hurling excessive time and effort formatting and editing her unheeded scratches. For no money.

Yes, it’s another great idea. What could be a better use of my time than to generate the literary equivalent of that cheaply made and wholly untantalizing free gift that comes with the infomercial product you would only consider buying when you’re drunk? In this endeavor I am the personification of that flavor injector that comes as Ron Popeil’s gift to you with your purchase of a counter-top rotisserie oven. You, by the way, will probably not use that oven very often. (Where are you going to put all that meat? Have you even thought about how much space a standing rib roast is going to take up in your freezer?) And do you really need the free the flavor injector? Maybe if you need to rocket-launch a pill down your cat’s throat and lodge it into the lining of his intestines.

Perhaps I am best served by accepting my remarkable similarity to the flavor injector. I too am free (or seem to be). I too may seem clever at first. And upon further consideration, my appearance also tends raise questions regarding possible uses for gendered, if not unsettling, behavior. A questionable use of time. Hardly justifiable effort. Uncertain purposes. No promise of penetrating content. At best, I can hope to just inject the flavor of something, but never the thing itself.

But it all manages to turn out okay anyway. Who needs a sex change when ya got a flavor injector, anyways?