Barney begs Bush to act human
Tue Nov 28, 2006 at 03:03:09 PM PDT
Our dog, WhoMe, is famous in the neighborhood for his looks of astonished innocence whenever a human refers to his possible role in any matter of overturned garbage cans, disturbance of the peace, flowerbed excavations, or odors so rank as to invite respiratory system failure.
Who, me? his look says. Me?
That is the great thing about dogs. They never admit responsibility. For anything. A dog whose look is embarrassed or guilty is putting you on. He has merely resigned himself to the airtightness of the case against him and is angling for leniency at the sentencing phase.
Besides, he knows one good lick on the face and a couple wags of the tail and you’re his huckleberry again.
Having said that, and conceding that the more I learn about humans the better I like dogs, it is nevertheless not my Kantian wish that humans adopt dog sensibilities in the matter of responsibility.
Take the nominal president of the United States. (Please.)
While accepting “full responsibility,” he has denied having any of the personal kind in the matters of his own direct reports’, friends’, and hirelings’ intelligence tampering, CIA outings, tortures, or kidnappings, not to mention the tangled skein of fuckups, missteps, lies, assaults, thieveries, frauds, and ineptitudes whose intertwining threads are too numerous to count--and under which even the perseverant innocence of my dog might begin to buckle.
My dog doesn't want people acting like dogs. He'd rather people take some actual responsibility, because, goddammit, someone has to and it sure as hell isn't going to be him. And he says W's dog Barney feels the same way. So I’d like to make a proposal, for the humans.
First, some vocabulary:
Responsible--adj., from the verb “to respond.” Alas, the word is often used incorrectly, as in “the flood waters were responsible for the destruction of New Orleans.”
Flood waters, of course, being inanimate, are incapable of response—neither to mitigate, repair, nor even to regret what they have wrought. So it would be wrong to call them responsible.
A similar wrong (more ethical than semantic), then, would be committed by officials who vow to “accept responsibility” for blunders, crimes, cruelties, damages, or injuries done, but who thereafter do nothing actually to respond, mitigate, or repair.
This only adds further injury--against words’ very capacity to carry meaning.
“Dipshit,” murmured lovingly to a dog, sounds like purest affection. Dogs don’t need a lot from words. Humans, on the other hand, do.
A determined indeterminacy of meaning may be just the thing with literature, which is meant to be full of ambivalence and ambiguities. But words’ meaning cannot be dismissed as inconsequential in public policy or the law.
Therefore:
Any claim of responsibility by officials shall henceforth be deemed invalid, unless accompanied by specific statements of
- regret, in which harm is publicly acknowledged
- apology, affirming that what has been done, because it was officially done, was more than just a mistake, a slip-up, or a lapse; that “shit happens” is not an explanatory principle for the coercive mechanisms of power.
- remedy, stating how the official means to make amends to the injured and what specific efforts he or she personally means to undertake to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
The higher the official, the more strictly should this rule be applied.
In other words, the president should be required to demonstrate that the “public trust” means something more to him than it does to my dog.
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