I am not a dog hater. I do hate what man has made of his best friend. The snarl of a panther is certainly more dangerous than the snarl of a dog, but it isn't ugly. A cat's rage is beautiful, burning with a pure cat flame, all its hair standing up and crackling blue sparks, eyes blazing and sputtering. But a dog's snarl is ugly, a redneck lynch-mob Paki-basher snarl...snarl of someone got a "Kill a Queer for Christ" sticker on his heap, a self-righteous occupied snarl. When you see that snarl you are looking at something that has no face of its own. A dog's rage is not his. It is dictated by his trainer. And lynch-mob rage is dictated by conditioning.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
...
Here is an excerpt from William S. Burroughs's book The Cat Inside:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
The film White Dog (by the great Sam Fuller) came straight to mind when I read this. If you haven't seen it, I recommend you look it up at imdb.com or wikipedia or whatever. It is pretty ridiculous, but worth watching.
I think that Burroughs's idea about dogs sums up his view on our society pretty well... In his book The Western Lands, this idea is more fully explicated, he states, "Then come the one-God religions ... Just pray and you can't go astray. Pray and believe––believe an obvious lie ... And doe the Christian God stand with his worshippers? He does not. Like a cowardly officer, he keeps himself well out of the war zone, bathed in the sniveling prayers of his groveling, shit-eating worshippers––his dogs" (70).
Though Burroughs writes about religion here, I think that the one-God religion can be easily substituted with the figure of the capitalist; capitalists that tower over their consumerist worshippers, but stay out of the war zone of the impoverished class which they thrive off of.
What do you guys think?
Let's watch for dog-like figures in Naked Lunch...
Post a Comment