In the fall of 1987 there was a week-long ABC special on pit bulls.
You had your intrepid reporter going into one of Those Neighborhoods,
dedicated to truth but all a-tremble because: ``There might be
pit bulls anywhere!''  The intrepid reporter is eventually seen
interviewing a nine-year-old boy, along these lines:

Q: Is that your dog?

A: (proudly, fondling the ear of a more or less bull-type dog who
looks as ferocious as Bill Cosby, though not nearly so energetic) Yes!
His name is Spike, and he's my dog.  He's a good dog! [We hear a fair
amount about how Spike is always there, and never deserts his friends,
and doesn't wet in the house, and never refuses to play.]

Q: Do you fight your dog?

A: Yes, I fight with my friend.  We fight every day after school.
Sometimes my friend wins and I pay him money, and sometimes I win
and he pays me money.

Q: Do you like your dog?

A: I _love_ him!  He does everything with me.  Other people -
my mom gets mad with me, but he don't.

At this stage, an ASPCA or generically Kind truck appears, and
gentlemen with snare poles leap out and ``capture'' Spike, who
responds with good humor and is dragged off to the paddy
wagon by men who are having a hard time making the capture
look dangerous enough to justify rolling the minicams.

The child - of course the child runs after the men, crying, crying,
crying, Crying out ``Please! Help! Stop!  They're going to kill
my dog!''


The voice-over asks the audience, ``What are we going to do about
this horror?''  The horror I saw was a child terrified and brutalized
because the state - in the form, as I recall, of the ASPCA, which has
a contract to handle animal control in New York - was impounding his
best friend, but the horror the newscaster had in mind was the child
himself, not the child's terror and grief.  The child was the emblem
and instance of the overwhelming specter of dogfighting and the dope
trade.

===

I keep thinking, too, about that nine-year-old boy whose ``pit bull''
was rescued from his clutches on television [in the ASPCA pit bull wars].
We have his testimony that his dog went everywhere with him, which means
that his dog knew him, so he is now stripped of the protection he had
from the continual presence of his dog's knowledge.  I wonder how he will
fare in the world, unfortified by Spike's adroit recognitions of him,
how he will manage now to sort out real language from pseudolinguistic
behaviors that are the form in which justice and truth will be presented
to him, most of the time.  That is, how smart will he be without his
dog and therefore unable to locate the just city?

===

Tests of intelligence and achievement typically present the subject
with a few paragraphs of prose and a limited time in which to read them.
Then there are questions about the passage of prose.  The passage might
be from a textbook on pit bull aggression, and it might go like this:

 Over a three-year period, 20 out of 28 people killed by dogs in
 the United States were victims of pit bull attacks.
 
 Pit bulls are especially dangerous because of their double
 jaws, which are developed by inbreeding so that they can hold
 on with the front jaw while they chew away behind.  These dogs
 are genetically vicious and their training is part of their
 genetics.
 
 Also, families may honestly believe that their dog is a gentle
 pet, never realizing that they might be harboring a dog who
 suffers from the Jekyll-Hyde sundrome and might turn on the
 children at any moment.  Funding for expert evaluation and
 investigation of this crisis is required immediately.

Then you have your test questions.  For example:

1. How many persons died of dog attacks in the study period?

2. How many of these deaths were caused by pit bulls?

3. Why is the apparent docility of a family pet misleading?

4. What causes the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome?

5. What is unusual about a pit-bull's jaws?

The students have no time to question this material, only
to believe it quickly so that it will stick in their heads.

This is why Charlie, who takes care of the cows, and George,
the ex-cop, are not as interested in learning Dan Rather's
abstractions as the high school student who is taking the
test with an eye on career communications.  This may also be
why it is harder for blacks and Hispanics to believe what they
read on comprehension tests, at least to believe it in time
to answer the questions.  Cultural competence so often becomes
a matter of managing to believe things quickly enough, and
cynicism entails slow belief, at least of certain things.
Specifically, cynicism means being slow to believe anything
a dog can't believe, and one of the things dogs have trouble
understanding, and thus believing in, is the righteousness
of the ASPCA's uniform.

Which is not, by the Way, to say that dogs don't believe in
cops.  Bullet, for instance, seems to have believed in George -
at least, I have heard nothing to indicate that he was a mutant,
and police dogs believe in cops.  But not in their uniforms.

The child - of course, long before my fantasy IQ test, there is
the episode in which the child runs after the men, crying.
Crying out to ABC: ``Please! Help! They're going to kill my
dog!''  And how foolishly, too, for it is to representatives
of the media, in this and other episodes, that people who are
afraid of losing their dogs have cried out, ``Help!  Help!'' The
media, by and large, have not answered this cry, and poetry cannot
answer the cry, being promised to a different territory of the
Ideal - to truth, rather than justice.  The poet's response might
be, if the muse approved the project, to sing a song of Spike,
celebrating perhaps even the small boy's pride in Spike's vaunted
prowess, and that would not help at all, not even if you explained
to the Assistant Attorney General that the dog wasn't really a
fighter and it was the boy's yearning for a dream of prowess that
was being celebrated, which is to say the song's yearning for
prowess and nothing to do with small boys anyhow, and justice
would not be served thereby.

I have sung of Bandit's prowess, of what a good dog he is,
and it has not helped me to understand the State Office Building,
which is one of the projects of this book. [p131]

 Vicki Hearne _Bandit_