The article below, which just appeared in Slate, seems better suited for the Pecksniffian Salon, famous for its authoritarianism and hatred of New Atheism. But let’s start with a viral tweet from Jim McGrath, who was a spokesman for G. H. W. Bush after he left the White House but before he died:
I don’t know if this was staged (I doubt it, because reliable media report that the dog spent Sunday night in front of Bush’s casket), but the picture of Bush’s service dog Sully touched the hearts of many people—including me (yes, I’m a cat lover, but I can be moved by the loyalty of a dog). The reasons why this went viral are many: its invocation of loyalty, the poignancy of what looked like the dog’s sadness, a connection between a former President and his dog, and so on.
So the photo was real, and what’s not to like about it? Well, read Slate‘s hectoring and repugnant piece below (click on screenshot), whose title tells it all:
Yes, you morons, Slate tells you not to waste “emotional energy” on the photo or the dog. How authoritarian can you get? The reason Graham is pecksniffing? Sully spent only six months helping Bush after his beloved wife Barbara died (they were married 74 years!). Six months, apparently, is not enough time for a dog to form a bond with a man, and therefore you shouldn’t act like Bush et chien were together for life. Stop tearing up and move on with your life, importunes Graham. I kid you not. Here’s a quote:
There’s nothing wrong with applying sentimentality when it comes to family pets reacting to their owners’ deaths. There’s even some preliminary evidence from the small field of “comparative thanatology” that animals notice death, and that some may even experience an emotion we might compare to grief. But Sully is not a longtime Bush family pet, letting go of the only master he has known. He is an employee who served for less than six months.
. . . It’s wonderful for Bush that he had a trained service animal like Sully available to him in his last months. It’s a good thing that the dog is moving on to another gig where he can be helpful to other people (rather than becoming another Bush family pet). But it’s a bit demented to project soul-wrenching grief onto a dog’s decision to lie down in front of a casket. Is Sully “heroic” for learning to obey the human beings who taught him to perform certain tasks? Does the photo say anything special about this dog’s particular loyalty or judgment, or is he just … there? Also, if dogs are subject to praise for obeying their masters, what do we do about the pets who eat their owners’ dead (or even just passed-out) bodies?
The photograph, in other words, is not proof that Sully is a particularly “good boy” or that “we don’t deserve dogs,” as countless swooning tweets put it on Monday. On its own, it says almost nothing other than the fact that Sully was, at one point in the same room as the casket of his former boss. This is simply a photograph of a dog doing something dogs love to do: Lie down. The frenzy around it captures something humans love to do, too: Project our own emotional needs onto animals.
Demented? Good Lord! And notice the whataboutery: “what do we do about dogs who eat their owners’ bodies?” Who the hell cares? It’s not relevant. And who is to say that Sully wasn’t sad in a dog-like way, or missed G. H. W. We just don’t know, and being touched by that picture can indicate many things beyond “projecting our own emotional needs onto animals.”
It’s bad enough that the Authoritarian Left tells us what we should think. Now they tell us what we should feel. If this weren’t a family friendly site, I’d use a certain two-word phrase to show how I feel about this article and its author, a regular contributor to Slate.
Here’s what Grania, who sent me the link, had to say:
This sort of left-wing article is just embarrassing. It’s a response to a photo that was going around the internet yesterday of the dog curled up on the floor near the coffin with a “mission accomplished” slogan on it.
Much as I was not a fan of any of the Bushes and think that some of the recent eulogizing is a little over the top, all articles like this prove is that there are many on the left who are petty and spiteful.
Amen. I’ll leave the last word to John Passantino, the Los Angeles bureau chief for BuzzFeed:
