Why Dogs Chase Cars by George Singleton

Author:George Singleton
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2004-09-05T07:00:00+00:00

NO FEAR OF GOD OR HELL

I learned early on that psychiatrists and dentists don’t care about their patients being cured. Why would a therapist want a client to stop having neuroses, nightmares, or delusions? Why would a dentist promote a brushing technique that would eradicate cavities forever?

My father took the time to let me in on a number of the mysteries of capitalism: how lawn care men had no choice but to spread fertilizers and weed spores sporadically; how no doctor cared about a cure for the common cold, red or German measles, migraine headaches, acne, or arthritis; how fishmongers, butchers, and farmers didn’t want the government to develop a long-lasting preservative. Way before anything made it to the newspapers, my father predicted that tobacco corporations had included addictive ingredients on par with heroin and vagina—his words and theory—to cigarettes.

I came to understand how entomologists had developed a chemical that kept termites away from wooden building materials, but that the lumber industry paid them off to keep it a secret. Oil companies didn’t give us their best. Although the United States Patent Office might have another inventor’s name down on the list, in reality it was a lawyer who thought up the foam-rubber neck brace and the term “whiplash.” Stockbrokers never gave up their best tips, seeing as their clients would get rich, retire, and stop investing. Insurance agents hadn’t been mentioned in Dante’s circles of Hell only because they didn’t exist back then. There were razor blades out there in the laboratories of America that never needed sharpening, batteries that never died, light bulbs that didn’t fizzle, clothes that didn’t wear or fade, asphalt that didn’t succumb to potholes, and reusable ice cubes. There were oak trees that never lost their leaves, but the rake manufacturers didn’t want that secret out. Veterinarians just plain made up canine and feline diseases in order to shoot up domestic pets with spurious vaccines and antidotes.

I heard it all. My father should’ve invested some money in a muckraking, yellow-journalism rag to sell at annual meetings for the disenfranchised, skeptical, and out of touch. Oddly, my father believed that man had landed on the moon instead of somewhere in the Mojave Desert. Unfortunately, he also believed that we’d already put a series of daredevil secret soldiers on Mars and on all of Jupiter’s moons, and that there was a hole in the ocean that went all the way through, guarded by bivalve mollusks on both sides at the two-and-a-half-mile depth mark. When I asked him what was in between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans he said, “You don’t want to know. Well, I can tell you what it’s not—there ain’t no Hell in between. And there ain’t no scuba divers brave enough to swim through.”

So it didn’t come as a surprise when I came home from school one day to be met at the door with, “I got a letter today from some peckerhead environmentalist telling me how trees are valuable, and how we shouldn’t be cutting them down.

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