I Am Dog Tired!

I: They’re Going to do it to Me, Too, and it’s Partially My Fault

I remember learning not to strike a dog or any other animal. I already felt it was wrong, of course. It’s hard to watch a dog cower and wince, or a horse, or a cow, especially when you hadn’t ever hurt them. The pain crosses over, and you end up guilty. But that’s empathy and doing right and wrong. There’s another aspect, and that’s what I mean. You go hurting dogs, just beating them, and you get so that it doesn’t hurt to see them scared, even if you don’t even really like it. Well, it isn’t like that for the dog. It just gets more scared until it just gets helpless and to be a wreck. Then, it just takes a little shift. It’s such that it can always switch around, so you never really want the dog that way. Anyway, you’d never want another animal scared of you that way. I’ve seen lots of horses, dogs, cows, and such beaten, kicked, spurred at and slashed, and it got really clear what was at stake and didn’t have to be.

So, a stray, some mutt would wander up, and I’d always wonder what it’d be owed. Definitely, through abused animals first, I felt blood on my hands, and I learned not to strike dogs because of reasons not tied in with my not liking to see them suffer. In short, I knew how much it doesn’t work.

This all came to be relevant very recently. I was out in ice and snow, in trees, on beaches (only Coney Island, really, though the trees were in Texas). But I woke up the next day near frozen, my apartment fallen down, and I had no money.

“Oh!” I cried and howled, but that did nothing. However, I have a cat, and she’s got friends, and they pointed me right in the right direction. There was something about it, though, because where they pointed me isn’t generally a place where cats go.

So, I go, and it’s a dog pound. Lots of dogs, but I’m cold and don’t get any of this and no one seems to notice or think it’s weird so I go along because I did with those cats, so why not at the pound if it keeps going this way. Suddenly, it’s already happened in some flurry (pounds really aren’t all that bureaucratic) and I’m in some wire mess with pups and older ones.

It took a while for me to start getting scared. I was uncomfortable at first, but mostly I was thinking of all the implications. Also, I was looking at my penmates. Some were a little mangy and some looked like they’d always been mangy, but most of them looked well. I didn’t go stroking muzzles and groping necks, smiling for cameras. You know, these dogs weren’t much for smiles and cameras, and I knew it, too. I just sat there; I had my date and time just like them. I guess I thought, “I’m here, too, and they’ll do it to me, too. And I know people like me did this to you because they did it to me, too.” But that’s just unpersuasive. If you were in those dogs’ positions, many of them abused! I mean, they looked at me all ears and eyes and scruff hair, and they weren’t some incarnated revenge. Those pups were scared. I was scared. And so we, the dogs and I, sat and stared, thinking of threats.

The personnel came around once and murmured in a way that made me more scared of the dogs. I didn’t hear what they said or understand why I should get more fear out of it, but I did. After a while, everyone sort of settled on their haunches. There was still a lot of watching but less concern. It made me think of those trench troops playing ball on Christmas in Europe. It also made me think of G. Washington and the holiday Hessians.

I never hurt a dog or a cow or anything, at least not to hurt it! I know, too, that, though I’ve been trampled and butted and bucked and bitten, no dog or other animal did it really to hurt me in a mortal or moral sort of way. I know of people who’ve hurt animals that way. I’ve heard of animals doing that to people, too. But it’s never happened to me, I’ve never done it, especially not by or with these dogs here with me out of the cold. There were some things common among us, like among those trenchmen.

I came to realize, very specifically, that all of us loved much how spring made the world warmer. I guess I also thought of how, right now, all of us were thinking mostly of the past. The future, we all knew, wouldn’t be much to remember.

Thinking these things, and looking at all those dogs looking back at me, I started asking which one of them had ever accused me of what I hadn’t done, and I realized maybe I didn’t have their blood on my hands like I’d been led to believe. People I’d trusted in these things said to me:

They’ll smell that blood on your hands if they’re empty. They’ll smell it because almost everything you touch has their blood on it—it rubs off. Then they’ll know who you are and what you’ve done to them, and they will rip you to pieces. Who could blame them, after all? Sure, you didn’t want their blood on your hands, but they’ve shed it, and it’s on your hands.

Thinking this way, I pretty soon realized I was so scared because of what people said about guilty people making me guilty, too. If one person beat a dog, that dog would be scared of all people, making all people guilty in its fearful eyes.

Suddenly, I didn’t it want it this way. I didn’t want those dogs’ blood on my hands, and I didn’t want them scared of and angry at me for no reason. That didn’t make sense, and it was putting all of us in the actually bloody hands. And here we were, not much ahead of us, but not in those hands. It seemed so inappropriate to go at each others’ throats just because of what other people had done and said that we’d done.

I was very helpless at this point, and they were, too. We sort of stared and panted. I was glad not to be cold even though it didn’t make any sense. I was huddled up in a pound with my own time and number, and all of thse guys are just dogs and pups.

We don’t nuzzle or tumble, but I’m not as scared when I look at them, and that seems to make them less scared. They seem more calm, whatever the reason. The pound people walk by every now and then, but I’m through with them!

II: Stars Over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains Might have been Seen by Me, Too

I fell asleep, nonetheless, and I had a very strange dream. Now it has more meaning than it did then, but this is only because of how things would change how I would come to understand dreams. Events unfolded something like this:

We were all out in a forest, the dogs and I, but it was still a pound, too. We’d all become friends, I felt. After having had escaped the same thing, we should have been close. But the handlers, the pound personnel, came up to me and started acting very buddy buddy. I was thinking, “Hey! Get your hands off me!” But I hadn’t said this, and they hadn’t touched me yet by the time they had gotten across:

Oh man, they hate you. Really, you pissed them off. We wouldn’t do this, but if we didn’t We mean, gosh, they hate you, and we really have to do something when it comes to this. Sorry.”

They were already so close, and I couldn’t move. I was sitting on my haunches, and they started pushing the collar over my head. I couldn’t see it because of how they were putting it on, but it hurt a lot. When they finished, I felt it with my hands. I felt the sharp teeth of the stud brackets and figured what they’d done. The collar was inside-out, and the points were sharper than they should have been. I should have seen it coming when they came back shrugging, “Look, they’re wanting you dead.” I knew the dogs were there, but I only saw the handlers. When they said this last thing was when I got scared the dogs weren’t even there. For them to want this of me made some sense, but through the handlers, them? I started getting why unseen juries are frightening, and I began reevaluating Lincoln’s legacy in light of the habeus corpus issue.

By the time they’d returned, I had thought back to how easily they had let me in to the pound to begin with. At the time, I was so confused anyway, but at this point it was clear that they hadn’t mistaken me for a dog because everything they were saying currently assumed that I wasn’t.

They started striking the dogs. I couldn’t see the dogs at any point, but the sounds were clear enough. They beat the dogs all around me in places hidden by trees and shadows. The dogs were all howling by the time they came to me. Oh! They looked so much like executioners, their faces and eyes, how they moved in concert. All those pups just kept howling, but still I hadn’t seen one.

The handlers’ hands smelled like chemicals and blood, and they used them to stroke my face and knead the back of my neck. It calmed me down a lot, though I knew better. So that’s how they got me. That’s how they did it to me, too.

It didn’t make sense, how I’d gotten here. I’ve been well-educated, but there was dew on my knees and grass under my feet. All I could see, whatever I knew, was ultimately just a conspiracy of leaves and moonlight.

Maybe here, at this point, is when I realized how much I wanted and expected this moonlight and my posture and position in it all to validate it. The very hopelessness and absurdity of my situation convinced me of my martyrdom, however romantic the notion is. Ig you’re about to die or something, If you were in such a situation, you’d really want the things you loved, like stars and trees. You’d want to see them and to feel them making you better.

Oh! But they’re dogs! They’re wolves, you know! We were their scavengers, then owners. Fuck, this is all so beyond post-colonialism, what’s happening to me! Eghck! You get it? This is species-level!

The handlers stood around me, not in a circle, just clustered. Some dogs poked out into the clearing. The pound people threw things at them and yelled, but more dogs came. One handler injected me with, well because of how it felt, it was pretty surely doing something famous with all my dopamine. But then the handlers all just ran. So the dogs chased them off. But most dogs just stayed around, looking at me. I was in no position to start thinking of what they’d do. Importantly, I was in no position to care what they’d do. I was OK.

On the Unrest at NYU’s Kimmel Center or What Gives You the Right, Anyway?

What gives you the right, anyway?

Can students with trust funds protest? The question could make almost anyone, and pretty much any student, angry regardless their take on the matter. It is poignant, and it gets to the point. Milling about the protest pen outside Kimmel, it was the first discussion I heard:

“They just said, ‘give us pizza and we’ll leave’!”

“No, that was the College Republicans, but they left.”

However legitimate these claims may have been, the disavowal of wealth and elaborations of parental financial support so prevalent among those around me seemed to cast privilege and activism as ingredients for hypocrisy and ironically bourgeois politics.

There were thirteen demands, but what gives these students the right to make them? How can NYU students ask for social justice when too many of our peers in this city perceive anyone studying at NYU as temporary, fashionable leftists or outright pawns for the patriarchy? The question of whether or not middle or upper class people can protest is probably as unfair as it is relevant and important.

Getting an education at NYU does not inherently make anyone rich, but matriculating here as opposed to Brooklyn College or CUNY carries with it its own special implications and associations. Sextant may not talk to us, and NYU’s endowment might mean more than our tuitions to him. Maybe students didn’t ask for Washington Square Park to be torn up or for the ridiculous architecture of the Kimmel Center to mar the West Village. So far as I know, students were not asked about building a Green Zone style campus in Abu Dhabi. Personally, I have never met a fellow student so enthralled with Sextant’s intellect that they would agree that he is crucial enough to academia to ferry across the globe on a weekly basis.

James Dobson, the force behind the evangelical media outlet Focus on the Family, warned his donors that they would need at least three Christian men to replace him when he dies. Sextant displays the same self-aggrandizement. He brushes past student protesters at NYU in the way that Karl Rove ignores Code Pink. Sextant diminishes his role as university president in the same way that political strategists like Karl denigrate democracy. Sextant, implicitly perhaps, says, “the students are stupid!” Rove says, “the voters don’t know what they really want!”
Of course, Sextant works, undoubtedly hard, to increase the value of the NYU brand. The exotic campus in the Middle East and the posh campus improvements are all meant to preserve our very expensive degrees as intelligent investments. The dynamic is similar to that which lets the war machine claim that it is ultimately protecting our right to speak out against it. It’s patriarchal, and, in plain terms, it equates to something like this:

“They say, ‘No!’, but they really mean, ‘Yes, Yes!’”

Gawker, a Manhattan gossip blog, openly mocks the NYU protesters as inept refugees from cultural death zones (e.g., suburbs, the Midwest), but it admits that the barricaded students have some valid points in their list of demands. However, the Gawkers stop short of granting them the right to make these points. Their argument is old and effective:

“You were begging for it, so you can’t just turn around and say you really didn’t.”

Here, Gawker, and like-minded commentators, are saying, in other terms, “She was wearing a short skirt, so she wanted it,” just like any other cinema-stereotyped frat boy. Why?

We want our rape victims to all be virgins and our protesters to be poor and disenfranchised. Perhaps this helps us out because both groups are powerfully prevented from ever making their charges public. Let’s face it, a prostitute who cries, “rape!” is as easy to dismiss as, though hopefully not, a middle class American kid at NYU ranting about scholarships for Palestinian kids.

Interestingly, when Warren Buffet and Angelina Jolie go about with their philanthropy, we are expected to respect them. We are also asked, especially at such an excellent private university, to respect those who speak from poverty and oppression. We, hopefully, learn to value the subaltern. We do not want to, or cannot, be poor and abused, so we cannot hope to be actual rebels. We can only hope to be rich and powerful so that we can do real good. This is a polarizing political discourse, and it grants almost no ground to those of us who don’t want to pretend we weren’t privileged and do not really want to ever get rich.  NYU students, and many others, end up in political purgatory before they ever get started.

I was afraid, as I approached Kimmel, that the cops would outnumber the kids, but I’m not sure of the ultimate ratio. NYU had its best boot forward. The security in front of the student center was not NYPD; it was NYU and all white, female, or otherwise non-threatening for the parents and students. There was no riot gear. There were no flash grenades. Inside the building, I saw at least one well-fed, middle-aged white guy in a suit directing security. People in suits didn’t stand in front of the doors. Sextant did not seem to be around.

Protesters were pitted against the very same NYU workers whose wages the protesters hoped to secure. The security guard at the NYU building where I work had to stay around for an extra hour because of the protests. I feel bad about that. No one at the Kimmel Center was protesting campus security, and NYU security personnel were not antagonizing the students so far as I could assess. Maybe I didn’t see everything, but the conflict appeared to come from only one side. The students fought and tried to take power, but their enemies never came around and fought back. There wasn’t much power to take.

People like Sextant give us symbols to fight, like protesters were given cops at the D & R NCs, but they never come out themselves. For an honest person, this presents a problem. If we rush the police and call them names, we, in psychoanalytic terms, only displace our aggression onto a target that is available because our real antagonists are too scary and strong. A protester cursing a cop is not much different than me getting secretly mad at my roommate and then cursing my cat; it misses the point. This dynamic works for the actual perpetrator because the guilt of ruining the security guards’ night or kicking the cat gets displaced right back to the real threat.

That this gathering did not amount to a massive disruption of the Washington Square Park area and tantalizing videos of police brutality and window-smashing can be interpreted not as NYU students’ political complacency but as their general understanding that Sexton wouldn’t be there. Many people who agreed with several of those thirteen demands likely never showed up because they knew the fight could not be there. Occupying the Kimmel Center is a powerful statement, but it likely means very little to the people the protesters hope to influence.

Dave, in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man, finally gets a hold of a pistol. Dave is overworked with nowhere to get to, and he ends up shooting trusting Jenny, a labor animal. It’s a power thing, but the only living thing for Dave to kill is Jenny. Dave destroys the only creature less powerful than him, and he doesn’t even know he means to do it. It’s a horrifying situation, and we should all want to avoid it.

As of this writing, there have been no confirmed arrests. More importantly, there have been no validated reports of direct attacks on police or security guards. Whether or not any of these things occur as the situation progresses, we should respect the protesters and NYU security personnel for recognizing that they are not real enemies. A violent conflict between students and security guards would bring media attention, but it would also obscure the purpose of the protest and widely diminish the credibility of its claims. It is awkward when privileged people protest, but privileged anarchists annoy pretty much everyone.

This protest highlights the inaccessibility of radical discourse to us lucky students. We are not oppressed or ravaged. We are the people between Carnegie and the violated virgin. We can gag ourselves with our symbolic insignificance, or we can challenge Sexton and his cronies like, though hopefully not again, a prostitute cries, “rape!”

However easy it may have been, or is, for those of us who weren’t protesting to read the thirteen demands/e-mail updates and subsequently caricaturize those students who were protesting as immature and stupid, we cannot honestly call them cowardly or malicious. In the same way, we cannot ignore that Sextant and his buddies handled the situation smartly, but we cannot deny that they have been disingenuous and patronizing the whole long time.

The Hunt

The Hunt – A one act play

I

Martyr: I hope you have been practicing because we are going to backgammon soon.

Alchemist: No, friend, I hope you have been practicing. When may I accept said rematch?

Martyr: No my friend, I hope you have been practicing. It shall happen on the next full moon.

Alchemist: Sorry, man. Actually, Death and I will be busy aerial werewolf hunting on the next full moon (it’s kind of a side-activity on our previously planned tofu hunting expedition). So, unfortunately, we will have to reschedule.

Martyr: That is fine, just don’t hunt me…I allowed some doctors to do tests on me for about half a million Lei, it resulted in my body turning into pure tofu.

Alchemist: Hmm…I’m afraid I can’t make any promises. It’s really Death’s call, not mine, so you should state your case to him. I wouldn’t get your hopes up, though.

End of act I