No Best Friend to Me

Don't bother with characterization. They all love us anyway.

I don’t like dogs.  Never have.  Never will.  There, I said it.  Depending on the breed, dogs register any emotion from indifference to terror with this particular blogger.

Oh, I know I’m in the minority.  Believe me.  Ask all my grammar school friends whose parents received calls from mine about my not being able to handle houses with dogs.  Ask my aunt (first cousin once removed, if you want to be technical) in New Jersey, at whose house I took it on myself to intermission Thanksgiving dinner by climbing on the sofa to get away from her dog.  And I’ve heard all the common appeals to qualify (“Oh, you couldn’t possibly dislike our dog,” “Our dog is like a part of the family”).  No, I don’t like your dog either.  And I think your kissing it on the mouth is affirmatively filthy.

I’ve taken my share of derision and even scorn at my doggy distaste, but I prefer to view myself as preternaturally attuned.  I can see these creatures for what they really are – beasts.  A guy I knew as an underclassman in college (didn’t know him; he’s an acquaintance of the wave-and-nod variety) has one in his campus house, which I’m sure is in violation of the rules, but that’s not the point.  This animal is white, light-eyed, up to my waist on four legs and arguably outweighs Alicia Sacramone; he calls it a dog, but I think that’s the wrong word.  It’s a wolf.  Let me repeat that: he has a wolf.  Twice a day, he can be spotted around Brown’s campus walking a wolf on a leash.  Call me paranoid, but I find it strange that the boy keeps a creature by his bed that, in its state of nature, would Lon Chaney Jr. his face off.

Dogs defecate in public.  That’s disgusting.  I can’t say this for certain, but I’d place good money on the claim that if a rhinoceros were to squat on the Campus Green, there would be some uproar.  When it’s a dog, though, it’s adorable.  Excuse me while I hurl.

Hollywood certainly knows how to parlay the general populace’s dog worship into millions.  Drawing only from my own childhood, I can recall Air Bud, Homeward Bound, See Spot Run, Shiloh and Beethoven.  I’m not even speaking of these movies’ quality (I unsurprisingly don’t like any of them, but there you have it); I’m speaking of the implication flung at my seven-year old self that I ought to instinctively connect with dog protagonists and consider them, in and of their selves, entertainment.

Give little Nick superior kids movies like Toy Story and The Sandlot any day, and not just because their makers had the sense to make the dogs the villains.

Is “Of Its Time” an Excuse for Racism?

Us? Racist? But we're old!

There’s an episode of I Love Lucy (Season 2, Episode 24 to be precise) centering upon an “Indian Show” at the Tropicana in which Ricky aims to cast American Indian actors and Lucy mistakes them for savages and knocks them cold.  I am a die-hard I Love Lucy fan (despite being born after all the lead actors were dead), and my angry consideration of this matter is in no way a condemnation of the show.

I’ve watched most of the episodes of I Love Lucy at least a handful of times, so I’ve noticed that, for all its uproarious laughs, there are moments when an awkwardly mean joke fails and leaves an uncomfortable silence over the airwaves (Lucy getting spanked or anyone but Lucy mocking Ricky’s Cuban accent would be examples).  ”The Indian Show” contains no such moments.  The 1953 audience loved the episode, and audience reaction to all the major comic set pieces was enthusiastic.

One such moment occurs early when, in a bid to land a role in Ricky’s show, Fred dons a headdress and begins to mimic an Indian war cry (I’ve always claimed Bill Frawley got a quarter of his laughs by strolling on set in absurd costumes).  This is meant to be funny for one single reason – an old white man is dressed in feathers.  And it’s not Blazing Saddles, where Mel Brooks’ classic line “They darker than us!” at least identifies itself as being a racist slap.  No.  In the mentality of this episode, there is nothing even potentially offensive in the content.

Then comes the scene where Lucy and Ethel knock out two auditioning actors in Native American garb.  I may be mistaken, but I believe these are white actors playing Native American actors (one is a semi-regular, I think also appearing as Grace Foster’s bellicose husband in the episode about gossip).  The line between farce of this nature and a minstrel show is thin as a thread.  What?  Because their skin is lighter, it’s minstrel show-lite?  I don’t think so.

I don’t know if it was the show or the 1950s, but there are some extremely troubling assertions about who the “Indians” were.  Ricky and Lucy read alternately from a book of “blood-curdling” tales where dastardly savages harass and mutilate the heroic cowboys, and Ricky actually says with a straight face, “Those Indians you used to have in this country [were scary.]”  Yeah, that’s right.  We were in this country minding our own business, and some red-skinned freaks of nature sprouted out of the sand Jason and the Argonauts style to terrorize us.

Having come of age a half-century later, I can’t say whether remnants of the “manifest destiny” shit actually still survived in our adults’ minds in 1953 or if we just couldn’t condemn the white man’s plight on television.  Either way, it’s bitterly depressing that one of my very favorite television shows of all time contains one of the single episodes most uncomfortable for me to believe actually aired to a nation of guffawing 1950s folk.