The usually playful and gaily colored comic-strip “Mutts” by Patrick McDonnell takes on a decidedly somber tone for this particular Sunday edition (04 Nov 07). There are eight panels, each showing a pit-bull-like dog’s head drawn in quick pen and ink strokes. Each panel has the canine’s thoughts in black above his head. “Yeh, they trained me to be a fighting dog,” the animal muses. “Fight to the death. No mercy, no reason. Just senseless, mindless violence … a monster. I didn’t ask for this. Grrrrr. Look at what I’ve become … Just like them.”
This comic-strip story tells a waking-world nightmare. In the most powerful and wealthy country in the world, the United States of America, pit bulls are bred and trained to perform as unstoppably ferocious fighting dogs, with blood-thirsty crowds of humans betting money on the deathly outcome of their razor-fanged encounters with other dogs. Pit bull fighting is violent spectator sport at its nadir. As the comic’s canine reflects, the animals are turned into monsters, made to perform for the titillation of certain humans.
As with any nightmare, the one told in this comic strip reveals to those who study it information about something that is out of balance. What is the dream-gone-bad that has resulted in this bloody and vicious nightmare of dog fighting? Is it the desire for The Good Life, for fame and fortune taken to extremes? Or is it the valid need to have some sort of outlet for our own rage and anger unskillfully channeled? Perhaps it is our deeply-seated tendency to project our own dark thoughts and emotions onto someone/something else which then must die, like the Old Testament scapegoat, in order to cleanse our troubled consciences for a brief while?
As the comic’s dog wisely tells us, pit bull culture is not about the vicious dogs; it is about the viciousness of humans who create and participate in it. Even those of us who are neither raising such dogs nor betting on them need to take a look at ourselves. We all are part of the greater culture in which dog fighting occurs, a culture that gives kudos to, say, professional football stars who, not satisfied with the money and violence of their day job, indulge in this animal violence. What is it in our culture that leads to such reveling in and revering of violence? How well do each of us know the Pit Bull of Violence that lives inside ourselves? Are we mindful enough that we do not project its dark power onto others, or act it out unconsciously?
The nightmare of violence lives in each of us. We can choose to train and domesticate it in order to transform it into a restrainable and controllable ally. Or we can let the pit bull of rage and violence simply run wild inside of ourselves, slashing at our thoughts and feelings and compelling us to wreak bloody havoc in the world around us.
It seems feasible for us humans to not create monsters out of Man’s Best Friend and, instead, to muzzle and discipline the Monster that resides in each of us. This requires that we awaken to our nightmarish aspects and interact mindfully with them. Dreamfulness is an effective way to housebreak the snarling Monster of senseless and mindless violence inside ourselves and guide its powerful energies in useful, thought-out directions.