Does a Celebrity Dog Realize It's a Star?

Lassie (photo: state archive of Florida)

Does a celebrity dog recognize his or her own fame? And is he or she able to handle the notoriety? Clearly one of the best ways to study this would be to attend the annual Westminster Dog Show, where reputations and fortunes can be made overnight. But look at dogs like Lassie, Rin Tin Tin or Neil, the martini quaffing Saint Bernard on Topper. These stars of movies and television were preened and vetted just like human beings who had risen to the top of their professions. And then there was Leona Helmsley’s dog, Trouble, who’d inherited a fortune on her owner’s death ("Cosseted Life and Secret End of a Millionaire Maltese," NYT, 6/9/11). Can a dog be made to understand that they’ve become rich and will a rich dog be able to not only buy themselves out of a kennel, but gain entrance into the kind of exclusive clubs that people with that kind of money are used to joining? Would a dog be able to enjoy Woody Allen’s sentiment that they wouldn’t want to join a club who would have him or her as a member? Would a dog be able to truly appreciate the fruits of his or her labor? Of course lots of people anthropomorphize their dogs and attribute to them all kinds of emotions that would facilitate the process of empathy. It's the rare dog owner, who after taking his lumps in a hard cruel world, doesn’t want to feel at least understood by their dog, but this, in all likelihood, has little to do with what a dog is really experiencing, especially when it comes to receiving accolades. Though no dog has ever received an Academy Award, dogs have received all kinds of recognition and you wonder if there is actually a Brad Pitt (bull) or Charlie Sheen type dog, who has demonstrated self-destructive symptoms--say excessive drinking of water from bowls--which might be evidence of the fact that success has gone to their heads.

Sperm Count: Where Do the Republican Candidates Stand on Sex Trafficking?

Many perfectly well meaning men and women are opposed to sex trafficking. But who is going to supply the prostitutes? It’s an issue that neither of the three front running candidates for the Republican nomination have answered amidst all the jockeying for king of the road. Recently Donald Trump got into trouble when MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked him if he would punish women who got illegal abortions ("How Chris Matthews tripped up Donald Trump on abortion," The Washington Post, 3/31/16). But how would the current front runner in the race for the Republican nomination answer the question about prostitutes and how would it impact on his declining popularity amongst women voters? It’s always been said that Donald Trump shoots from the hip and on the basis of other things he's said, one might think he would come out against sex trafficking in that it would be another example of filling our markets with low priced foreign labor that puts Americans out of jobs. One would guess that many sex workers inadvertently traipse through Trump properties as they ply their trade. However, if you allow in slaves who can undercut the market, then many of these hard working call girls, gigolos and exotic dancers will be out of jobs. On the other hand it’s unclear whether the United States itself produces enough domestic sex workers to service the needs of 25-45 demographic which accounts for the good part of the pay-for-sex market. If there's a scarcity of sex workers, then prices are going to skyrocket to a point where even the modest pleasure of glory hole fellatio is going to be out of the reach of many salaried blue collar workers.The  three candidates for the Republican nomination, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich should all be asked what they think about sex trafficking and it’s a question that even Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton should be urged to address.

What is a Dickhead?

 illustration by Henry Vandyke Carter

A pothead is someone who smokes lots of weed. A Deadhead is a someone who likes the Grateful Dead, who listens to their recordings, attends their concerts and was infatuated with Jerry Garcia when he was alive. The thing that potheads and Deadheads have in common is an addiction to mind altering forms of substances (if we look at music as having the same properties that drugs do with regard to consciousness). A Dickhead similarly gets off on works like Minority Report and The Man in the High Castle written by the science fiction master, Philip K. Dick. Of course a dickhead is also a person who is a dunce, a person who just doesn’t get it. Dickheads are unavoidable. They’re the people you can’t get through to, no matter how hard you try. If you are an Enlightenment rationalist, a follower of Voltaire, Locke or Hume, you’ll be especially confounded by dickheads, who demonstrate the limits of human reason. A dickhead can also be a person who’s actually malevolent. Such a person possesses ratiocinative abilities which they choose not to employ for opportunistic and often expeditious reasons. They know exactly what you’re saying, but they play dumb because they don’t want to listen to reason. A dickhead is someone, for example, for whom the ends justify the means. When it’s pointed out to a dickhead that the American judicial system depends on due process and individual rights such a dickhead will simply give one of those chuckles which is supposed to indicate we’re all in agreement about the real truth— which is that none of these things, which are ultimately the groundwork upon which democracy is based, really matter.

Are Non-Life Threatening Problems Less Worthy Than Life-Threatening Problems?

photograph of American G.I.'s standing over corpses at Buchenwald

A friend who has suffered from the discomfort of having to wear a catheter after an operation writes, “I have a friend who has  cancer. He has been on a chemo regimen for the past 4 years. He called and asked how I was feeling…genuine concern. But how can one tell someone who has chemo and wears a bag…that they are in pain. What is the philosophical answer?”  This is one of the oldest moral and ethical questions in the books. How can you complain about not getting the promotion when there are people dying of starvation in India? How can you grouse about your lousy childhood, when you read stories about children who survived the concentration camps after their parents had been sent to the ovens? Within the context of medicine itself with the exception of the relatively small class of suicidal ideators, how can you justify the profession of psychiatry where a good part of the male population bellyache about their problems with erectile dysfunction, when there are people dying of AIDS? The one thing that can be said about problems, even if they don’t involve life or death, is that they’re yours. Placing a problem low on the food chain is as ethically and morally suspect as failing to see it in perspective. Heidegger may have claimed that the lack of awareness of death leads to an inauthentic existence, but what can we correspondingly say about the lack of awareness of life? Death is a part of life as well as a life passage, but it is not all of life and similarly life threatening problems are only a part of life. Treating only those difficulties which are life or death matters is tantamount to turning away from life itself.  However dramatic life and death problems may be, many of the so called lesser problems account for the passage of days, a process which occurs until that one day when you take your last breath. To deny all the smaller problems is to give unfair weight to matters that occupy a relatively short time span. The morality or lack of morality of fixating on a non-life threatening problem is a no brainer. Do the math.

Love in the Time of Cancer

So great is the power of infatuation or what we might call romantic love that even a dying man or woman might succumb to its torments and delights. Let’s say the end is nigh and a chronic condition has reached a critical level where a patient’s days are numbered. If they’re Catholic, their priest has been alerted and last rites will imminently be read. However, let’s say the knight in shining armor, in the form of a hematologist, or La Cicciolina, in the form of a fetching hospice nurse, saunters into the room. While the senses of the sufferer may be dulled, it’s love at first sight. The dutiful husband or wife who has loyally trudged from doctor to doctor, from one hospital to the next, ever faithful to the beloved whose condition has reduced him or her to being a faint shadow of their former selves, finds his or herself summarily cast off by an invalid who dreams only of escaping into the embrace of what John Donne once described as “Oh my America!my new-found-land.” Love, as we all know, is a temporary form of insanity. It’s nature’s way of creating the idealization which enables sexual attraction to surmount the shoals of consciousness—with its built in reality checks. Now it dabbles with a very dangerous substance which is hope, hope that love will conquer all, and, in specific, debilitation and disease, hope that some romantic agony itself with its diminution of the present and familiar and its “love” for that which has yet to be will metastasize through the body causing the dying and dead to be resurrected from their own ashes. Remember the title of  Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, Love in the Time of Cholera?