This one's about Pete Hegseth

"I know niggas is hard-headed but I ain't got the patience
Don't want me havin' no patience, turn into more patients
More trips to ICU 'cause I see you
Trying to get away with shit a real nigga wouldn't do"

 

DMX - Where Da Hood At

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"You'll never get rich

You sonovabitch

You're in the army now"

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Once upon a time, my family's adorable puppy killed a cat. Strays from the neighbourhood continually trespassed in her yard, no matter how many times she chased them off. She'd tree one occasionally and have to be locked indoors while my father coaxed/carried the furball back down. Then one cat was too slow climbing and she shook it like a terrier having caught a rat, snapping its spine.

 

The adorable puppy was in turn attacked by a neighbour's pit bull while walking down the block, out in the open street. One year it broke her tail. A couple years later, it tore open her flank, thankfully not hitting much but skin and subcutaneous fat so she eventually healed up alright after being stitched up twice. But she's still absolutely terrified of even walking along the other side of the street from the pit bull's yard, and has to be walked to the park by the back road.

 

See the difference there? The Adorable Puppy did murder a repeat offender invading her territory and ignoring all warnings. But she doesn't go after cats in general, making no fuss at the neighbours' pampered housepet since it has the sense to stay on its own side of the fence. In fact when our relatives visit with their own cat, the two animals have always studiously ignored each other like divas at a cocktail party, instinctively accepting some sort of transitive in-group membership via monkey clan. They obviously don't like being in the same house, but neither raises a hackle. T'would be impolitic.

 

The pit bull attacks everything that moves, anywhere it moves, going after a local child on another occasion, who thankfully escaped before it could reach him. And though you'd rightly assume those holding a dangerous animal should take extra care to keep it contained, the same psychosis leading some to buy a pit bull prods them to "accidentally" let it slip out of the yard even more often than most. They want the drama. They want to play the victim when others call them on it as if they and their precious murder-beast are being targeted in a pogrom.

On a completely unrelated topic, the webcomic site Big Head Press has seemingly shrunk a bit over the years, down to its main libertarian adventure yarn and its porn spin-off. A couple of decades ago it also hosted a gargle of similar fare, including The Probability Broach, wherein a medium-boiled detective from a commie hell-topia travels to an alternate-dimension free-market paradise to be shown the wrong of his assumptions on public safety and powermongering, yadda-yadda, you know how that sort of story goes where academics are evil wizards and anyone who's not a shotgun-totin' shitkicker might by some contrivance prove a devious foreign subversive. Given how much of it reads like Robert Heinlein fanfiction, I will admit to having enjoyed The Broach well enough, which did not blind me to some of its more batshit insane moments, more often than not involving Americans' obsession with firearms.

 

"Vaughn's gun didn't do him much good, though."

"Not against a machinegun -- that's what happens when you outlaw handguns -- matters escalate."

Wait, so if you outlaw pit bulls, everyone will manage to find and buy Bengal tigers? How does that track? You gave your character gun N, had him killed by gun N+1, all as proof that N-1 would result in more gun murder? Well, I'm sure it aaall made sense back at the rally...*

 

Most comical the railing against criticism of the gun fetish as sexual sublimation, when the detective's requisite plucky love interest wails for a few pages around the stunning line: "who's sicker, somebody who thinks his gun is a sexual organ, or somebody who wants to take everybody's sexual organs away?"

Umm, the first category, definitely. You're still the crazy one. Your sublimation is unhealthy, and if my Pride-And-Joy were a revolver, I wouldn't blame you for making me at least wear a kevlar condom around town. 

 

There's a particular insanity to the image of a pit bull as call to atavism, as a strongman championing "the hood (at)" or his people, tribe, what-have-you. Much as a religious cretin might in his unbearable ignorance present an agriculturally, artificially selected banana as symbol of God's tailoring of the world for humans, a pit bull is the result of hyperselection for a highly artificial environment, the fighting pit. It exists at the mercy and self-destructive insanity of an entirely different species. In the wild it would show its innumerable disadvantages like its coat or its loss of energy-saving canine loping gait, etc. Wolves are certainly more aggressive than domestic dogs as a whole, but a wolf born with a pit bull's omnidirectional hyperaggression would likely be torn apart by the rest of its pack or would at least be abandoned to its fate when it idiotically runs at a bear or whatever. Most animals value but also understand the limitations of turf and trespassing. T'would be impolitic not to.

 

And for the human species itself, while warrior castes had existed for millennia, mass militarist sentiment among the lower classes was a rare phenomenon until Napoleon's** adept exploitation of our overdeveloped social-climbing instinct, discovering he could pay soldiers, instead of material goods, in artificial status symbols a.k.a. medals a.k.a. the latest spaulders in Word of Warcraft. North-American colonists had guns for immediate necessity, not sport or ideology.

 

But in closing we must in brief touch on Pekingese and try not to lose a finger, because many toy breeds in fact display the same level of aggression as pit bulls, and are undisciplined even by that comparison! Had Chihuahuas the size to carry through on their intent, every tupperware party would end as redly as Cujo's wettest dreams. And as for surviving in a natural state, well... let's just say the local squirrels would acquit themselves better. By analogy, if you scoff at the absurdity of pumping military staff full of testosterone, admit depo-provera's no divine ambrosia either. There's nothing healthier or more natural in recent decades' obsession with feminization, in fabricating a political prop of what should be personal choice, in the feminist movement's desperation to prop up transsexuals and transvestites and metrosexual poodles as morally superior misandrist converts and a show of diversity reducing diversity to a neutered cherub ideal. Feminists' yapping purse-pooches have made at least as much a spectacle of their ideology as libertarian gun nuts, and their market penetration is even greater. Gun Queen Story Hour, anyone?

 

So yes, great, leash the current political insanity. Then also leash the other brand you've refused to address for decades running. As would be politic.

 

 

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* A lot of times this sort of argument hearkens back to increased alcohol consumption during prohibition, naively ignoring that manufacturing a machine gun takes a helluva lot more investment, coordination and precision than mashing some grapes in a barrel and forgetting about the sauce for a while. Bathtub gin is doable. Bathtub anti-air missiles, not so much. The proliferation of firearms is not a grass-roots movement, but the result of very large, very organized, very governmental corporate profiteering.

 

** Though Napoleon tends to be over-credited for this. Pretty sure the Prussians were developing the same system around the same time.