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Barbarians at the GateAugust 30, 2007 I'm not a fan of professional sports, I've never watched a football game (live or televised) all the way through, and I don't follow the mainstream media. When people I know start talking about an event, a movie, a book, a TV show, whatever, then I go look it up so I can understand what they're talking about. The first I heard of Michael Vick or his involvement with dog-fighting was on AlterNet. I'm a dog person (in case you didn't notice), but dog-fighting was barely on my horizon as something that men [sic] did with dogs. Dog-fighting as practiced by Vick and his cohorts never crossed my mind. And yet, and yet . . . Despite the barbarity of the "sport" and the horrified responses to the case, dog-fighting isn't a self-contained horror, unique and dissociated from everything else. Is any human-caused horror unique and dissociated from everything else? How about the genocide in Ruwanda, the killing fields of Cambodia, the A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death camps of Nazi Germany, the extermination and internment of American Indians? Hell no, but we sure like to think about them that way. Dog-fighting is part of a continuum, several continuums, around the world and through time. Cock-fighting is an obvious analogue, a too easy analogue: no one I know stages or watches cock fights either, so it's easy to dismiss them all as thugs and barbarians. But how about dog racing and horse racing and horse showing? The higher the stakes, the greater the potential for abuse, and for some the stakes don't have to be all that high. How about professional and Olympic-level human sports? In ancient Rome, gladiatorial combat -- that is to say, human-fighting -- was a popular spectator sport. Much more recently public executions were considered wholesome entertainment for the whole family. I suspect some wouldn't be averse to bringing them back, though they'd probably rate them "R" to keep the younger kids out. While we're at it, how about snuff movies, or apparent snuff movies, or mainstream blood-and-guts "splatter" movies? How about run-of-the-mill pornography? For sure there are lines to be drawn, but they're slippery, and most of us have this slippery tendency to draw the lines so that we're on the right side of them. Most of us hold the scruples we can afford to hold. People who hold scruples that actually cost them, in money or economic opportunities or reputation, make most of us a little nervous. So the Michael Vick case is interesting. No, scratch that. The case itself is sordid, but responses to it have been fascinating. The baying for blood in the mainstream media does make me wonder if the human race has really put gladiatorial combat behind us. On AlterNet, two distinct responses made me think: Earl Ofari Hutchinson's argument that if Vick had been white, the response would have been less immense and more equivocal; and Sandra Kobrin's pointing out that when celebrity athletes beat their wives or girlfriends, the public response generally ranges from "ho-hum" to "boys will be boys." Reader reaction came so fast and furious that it became a story in itself: "What Have We Learned from the Vick Case?" This is actually an interesting and important question. Most of us activists and theorizers tend to focus on one or a very few issues -- for obvious reasons: there are only so many hours in a day, or cells in a brain. Every once in a while a major case comes along that involves a range of issues (or "causes"), and we have to deal with all of them at once. We have the opportunity to listen to the perspectives of people whose priorities are different from ours, from immediate (occasionally intemperate) responses to thoughtful analyses. So what have I learned, from the stories about the case, and the responses to those stories? I didn't learn anything about human callousness and depravity that I didn't already know -- though if a woman had been doing what Michael Vick was charged with doing, I would have been horrified. As a white feminist in her mid-fifties, I've long taken it for granted that race, sex, and class suffuse media coverage and "public opinion" about just about everything. I have learned that some white people who post to AlterNet don't assume, as I do, that race affects popular perception of most things. I've known for decades that it's more mainstream and less controversial to oppose cruelty to animals than it is to oppose cruelty to, say, women or people of color or poor people. What I've gained from responses to the Vick case is more insight into why this is so. Animals are defenseless against human power, animals are innocent -- these things I already knew. But, in addition, animals can't speak in their own behalf. They can't contradict our human opinions about what is best for their welfare the way that (for example) a woman can tell a man, "No, that's not 'what women want.'" When black people get too militant or "uppity," white people stop writing checks to civil rights organizations. Dogs, cats, and horses rarely get militant or uppity. What does this remind me of? Fetuses. "The unborn." The innocent, defenseless entities that the right-to-lifers are committed to protecting. No, I'm not about to become anti-choice, but that's what I've gained from the Vick case: some new insight into the passionate commitment of the right-to-life movement. I can't say that I'm especially comfortable with my new understanding.
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