Real Change News | ©Dr. Wes: A short detour into the dog world

November 12, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 47

Dr. Wes

©Dr. Wes: A short detour into the dog world

by: Dr. Wes Browning

Adventures in Irony

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The incoming president is shopping for a dog for his two daughters. After the election was all over, the tears of joy wiped away, and the spilled champagne mopped up, the media looked around for new news and came up with this. It’s so great not to be forced to write about torture, war, and economic disaster, for a change. Let’s talk about hypoallergenic dogs!

I think I’m like most Americans, in that I did not know there was such a thing as a hypoallergenic dog. I’d heard of hypoallergenic earring studs and hypoallergenic soap. I wear hypoallergenic socks. But the thought that I could get a hypoallergenic dog never crossed my mind. I’ve looked it up and I’ve found out that one of the reasons I’ve never thought of such a thing is that the only really hypoallergenic dog is a bare naked dog. My mind resisted the thought simply because my mind revolted against the idea of calling any sort of naked furless quadruped a dog.

Then I remembered how, in the ’90s, about two years after Utne Reader declared Belltown the seventh hippest neighborhood in America and it had fully ceased to be true, the place was overrun with people stringing along minute little hairless things that I used to call “long-legged rats.” Their owners referred to them as dogs.

Here’s what I’m thinking. Obama is just not funny enough by himself. I need me some funny stuff in the White House. He got me Joe Biden, and I thank him for that, but even Joe Biden isn’t all that funny. He’s no Sarah Palin. But a hairless live ferret morsel passing for a dog you can carry around in a coffee mug, that’s a hoot.

Barack to the kids: “Here’s the dog I promised you! Now remember, you need to put him back in his thimble when guests are over, which will be all the time now; otherwise people will think we have rats. Oh, and here’s one Swedish meatball. The lickings from it should feed him for a month.”

The bottom line is, they don’t really make hypoallergenic dogs, they only make hypo-dogs. They’re less allergenic because there’s less of them. This could be a great metaphor informing Belltown, Seattle, and America.

Greg Nickels wants Seattle to be a major business center and he figures businesses won’t locate here if there’s homeless people everywhere you look. That’s never stopped businesses from locating in New York, San Francisco, or Chicago (home of Boeing), all three of which I have been to and know have at least as much visible homelessness as Seattle does. But let’s forget that and accept the premise that visible homelessness would prevent us from being The Big Apple By-and-By that we’ve always wanted to be. We should then be striving to make Seattle hypo-homeless.

That way, in boardrooms all across the U.S. there can be conversations that go: “Gosh, I had to see a homeless person on my way to our offices on the 70th floor of our skyscraper. How awful! Can’t we do something about that?” “Why yes, I was looking on Craigslist for an ugly dog and I noticed that Seattle is up for sale, and it’s listed as hypo-homeless.” “That’s great! Let’s sell this skyscraper and buy a new one in Seattle, and work there.”

In reality, this is America, not the United Arab Emirates. In America, there is no such thing as a hypo-homeless city. The closest thing to a hypo-homeless city in the world is Dubai, which passes its wealth out among its citizens so that not one is poor by any standard. That will not happen here, even with the socialist in the White House.

So, the only real way that Seattle can be hypo-homeless is for her to be hypo-urban. Without sharing the wealth that is created on the backs of our citizens and from their resources, we can only have less homelessness than other American cities by being less city.

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