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.