This photo is not a picture of me before I lost 100 pounds. Although I envy this guy. He eats whatever he wants all the time and doesn’t wear pants. If I go to heaven I will look like him and have a cigar in my mouth.
Apparently my man suffers greatly however to inspire my my grrrr, aaaaah tummy-rub affection.
A famous 78 year old conservative Georgia lawyer (he was a prominent figure in the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil) breeds the English bulldogs who serve as mascots for the University of Georgia football team. (Let me unpack this sentence. It is filled with red flag words that inspire my ire: conservative (boooooo!!!!!!hiss!!!!!!!!), Georgia (what’s with the Confederate Flag, ladies and gentlemen…I’m a proud Italian-American but I don’t have pictures of Mussolini and the Mafia in my house), rich lawyer (oh right, this guy made millions screwing widows and orphans out of their insurance money) and the University of Georgia football team (I’m a football fan, God forgive me…I’m willing to watch young men risk traumatic brain injury so that I am not bored when nothing is going on on a Sunday afternoon and I am a Notre Dame alum. I like seeing my buddies at football games and talking about the team. But these rabid semi-retired success stories who have no interests besides the national championship and their golf games and think culture is a discussion of an old Louie Armstrong record and a bottle of wine their grandkids’ nanny introduced to them…oh God!!!!!! Shut up!)
The Georgia lawyer’s bulldogs apparently die very young. The University of Georgia replaces bulldogs more often than they replace running backs. One Georgia bulldog died at age four of heart disease. The next died at age two of cancer.
When challenged as to whether he looks out for the welfare of his dogs, the Georgia lawyer says they have great lives. He opposes changing the breeding practices of the English bulldog to give dogs of the breed generally healthier lives with less suffering.
They aren’t unique for their breed either. Many dogsperts report that many, maybe even most bulldogs are inbred to an unhealthy and disturbing degree. The inbreeding has made the English bulldog the Tennessee hillbilly of the dog world. Both inbreeds are stubborn, although the bulldog is more mellow and less dangerous. The Second Amendment has not been extended to bulldogs probably because they can’t sign up for militias. (Urban sophisticates should beware too…one wonders what will happen with some of these designer babies I hear about on commercials for “The View”. I know nothing about designer babies. I just saw the commercials. I also have little or no curiosity about the matter of designer babies. I am not the person to write or talk about designer babies. But I have observed that a lot of people don’t do a good job in many professions in our epoch—Ignoramus Americana. The incompetence has to extend to genetic bartenders since it has a strong presence in every other walk of life. Some of these offspring are bound to arrive with too much gin and not enough vermouth. These kids will come out shaken but not stirred. Vanity is a motherfucker—I’m not talking about altering a fetus to sidestep an hereditary disease; I’m talking about breeding for Taylor Swift’s cheekbones. We urbane urbanites have caught up with the hill people. Our answer to their incest is our narcissism. Is it incestuous to fuck the pleasant images in one’s mind? Remember everybody I am artist and this is a character. The real me thinks there is no red America and blue America and in the blue America we worship an awesome God…yadda, yadda, yadda)
A too short snout makes it very difficult for the dog to breathe. English bulldogs have a hard time panting…the way that dogs perspire, and should be kept in air conditioning in warm weather. English bulldogs can’t have sex when left to their own devices and breeders must midwife conception. (I don’t think they do it that way in Tennessee.) English bulldogs must give birth by Caesarian section because the pups’ heads are too big to emerge naturally. Well, nature has a limited role in the creation of bulldogs. People love their cute flat faces. They look like us. They are endearing especially to the conservative in all of us. They look cartoon tough but they are cowards, kind of like Dick Cheney who couldn’t enlist in the Viet Nam era because he had better things to do. Winston Churchill famously had a bulldog. Now Churchill had balls. I don’t know if his bulldog did. He was a prick but he was our prick, goddammit. We needed a son of a bitch like him to beat Hitler. So what if he created Iraq (in a bloodbath) from three disparate clans. Great innovation.
Last bulldog fun fact: English bulldogs are the champion farters of the dog world which is of course lovable.
We are all the Georgia lawyer scumbag because as I always say we are all selfish stupid and corrupt. We are all the bulldog because in the end we get what we deserve as we stupidly accept the unacceptable for a little entertainment and praise and affection from a bully.
Go Irish! Get to the National Title Game! And pass that tray of rigatoni!
Copyright 2015 Richard Thomas
Richard Thomas Writing Blog 