When the alligator ate my dog:
The laws of God and Man and what comes next
vol. 4 issue 3
Greetings,
When I was 8, an alligator ate my dog.
I stood beyond the cattails, helpless, screaming, watching as my beloved Flower, a terrier mix, was plunged under the brine.
When nothing but the bulbous eyes of the prehistoric monster was left showing above the surface of the dirty water, I turned tail, still screaming, until I reached our house in the palmetto scrub clearing at the end of a dead-end, shell rock road.
My mother grabbed her shotgun, and back down the road we flew.
Gators often drown their prey before eating them. There on the canal bank was Flower’s lifeless body. The gator, half submerged in the water, sat observing its kill.
There was nothing we could do. We could not retrieve her body. It was not safe enough to.
We went home.
Why didn’t my mother shoot the gator?
For one thing, even with the vultures doing their part, a rotting, stinking corpse so close to home would have reminded us for days of the tragedy I’d hardly need help remembering. And we sure weren’t going to eat it.
Mom hadn’t brought the shotgun for the beast, but for Flower. If my beloved doggie had somehow managed to get away but was mortally wounded, buckshot through her would have been for compassion.
I remembered this scene from my wild rural South childhood after watching the penultimate episode in Season 1 of Taylor Sheridan’s Western serial, 1883. A woman, scalped and shot through with arrows by a Lakota hunting party seeking revenge for the rape and murder of their own women, goes mad, runs in circles, comes at the white man who has arrived to help her. He tells her that while he does not know her, he imagines she does not deserve what has befallen her, and then shoots her through the head. With a pie plate, he begins to dig through the hard dirt, but cannot go deep enough even for a shallow grave.
Instead, he too falls to pieces, riven by moral injury, until the leader of their group arrives and tells him that if that was the best, most compassionate choice to be made in the moment, then it was the best choice of all. Together the two men set about burying the woman.
Thinking about that scene, I couldn’t help but wonder about how different it might have been for white settlers if they had sought to share what they found, not take it away from those who already had it. If they had sought to cooperate, not dominate. Would it have been perfect? Duh, no. But so many other options would have opened up to our ancestors. Instead, the only two they had were to win or lose.
At least the debilitating moral injury would have been avoided, most likely.
I am not a casual Western movies fan. I have shelves of books devoted to understanding how settling the West contributed to our sense of self in this country.
I have seen most every major Western movie ever made. So many of these films explore the in extremis character of the Western frontier, the “all or nothing”, “black or white”, “dead or alive”, way of life lived with such immediacy. But they get it all wrong.
No matter how entertaining or morally provocative the films might be, they are all at the heart of our American myth, our ethos of individualism. So often, they amount to a fantasy creation of the “good badman”, the hero who must resort to violence in order to bring about peace because there is no middle way.
In his book, The Psychology of the Western: How the American Psyche Plays Out on Screen, William Indick writes:
“With his combination of civilized and savage elements, the hero represents a mediating force between the passive stillness of civilization and the violent wildness of the frontier.
“Though he’s motivated primarily by individual honor, he typically chooses to be on the side of law and order…like ‘the savage’ [quotations mine to emphasize the “othering” action essential to validating this point of view], he mourns the death of the open range and fears the loss of freedom and independence that will come as the result of the fencing in of the frontier.
“In the end, the hero and the townspeople, including his love interest, are incompatible.
“He plays a sacrificial role, risking his life to save a town where he cannot stay. Instead, he ascends from town to wilderness, vanishing into the setting sun, like a savior of Biblical or mythical proportions.”
Well, RIP John Wayne. That moral code, that fantasy, that self-importance is so last century.
I’ll tell you why. For the same reason my mother didn’t shoot that gator: there’s always another gator.
Natural law will always overcome manmade laws. That is the “all or nothing”. Nature is all, and without it, we are nothing.
We’ve exhausted the myth of man as mediator between civilization and the wilderness. If we’re going to evolve, if we’re going to live in a world with alligators, as we should do, because who are we to say we shouldn’t, then the new moral code has to come from the perspective of humans as mediators between natural law and our laws.
The two kinds of mediation sound so much alike, but they are a world of difference apart. The former is the Manifest Destiny myth where it’s all about dominating nature, claiming to love it while also bringing it to heel. Love it but rape it just the same. Kill all the gators. Who needs them? But then one day there are no gators, no more a lot of things. That day is today, by the way, where more than a quarter of all earthly species face extinction due to our current version of “mediation”.
Cling to that world view, and the joke will always be on us, however, because when the earth ends, we end, yet nature will go on. The stars will twinkle, even if there are no humans to regard them. Space will still generate something from itself. Or not. We won’t be the ones to decide.
As Sheridan himself said recently in a worth-your-time podcast interview, “We’re bound by the laws of nature... we’re seeing right now an erosion of the laws of man, so the laws of nature are playing out.”
As they will.
In a week where old tropes of war and domination are being acted out by yesterday’s villains-as-heroes, the “good bad men” of old, it’s worth considering what “mediating” actually means.
Last week, I debuted a new podcast, Off the Charts, with co-host Elisabeth Grace to help empower you to think of yourself as a mediating force, not give your agency away to corporate media when it comes to deciding who the winners and losers are in life. That’s a good place to start, I think. To start generating new, better, more modern questions, such as: How are we present and accountable to what humans need and desire, and what Nature wills, rather than assign everyone adversarial roles?
The erosion of the rule of law Sheridan refers to is scary. But it’s an inflection point. It presents us with more than two options for us to consider.
Nature’s law kills dogs because reptiles must eat. Such a law is merciless, but it is all-encompassing, and thus beautiful because it is perfect. It destroys but it also creates. It is not linear, but holistic. It not only includes alligators, but also what is soft, wet, harmonious, just, and right. Not just what is hard and macho.
As Elisabeth, a former NBC marketing producer, pointed out in our podcast, corporate media directives are for employees to frame things as who wins and who loses.
That admission was a Eureka moment: the battle against nature is fake. Battles against one another mostly are, too.
And it is the source of so much of our national mental illness, frankly, because that way of framing reality is delusional. All of us are losers if we think we can ultimately overcome natural law.
If we stop outsourcing our ability to mediate our minds and the world around us to Media that aggregate our attention for profit, that make us think we are always in search of a bad guy to blast, that we can win battles that they create for our entertainment, what would we do instead?
I don’t know the forms such a shift in world view would take, but it can’t change until we ask different questions based on different desired outcomes.
Much as I would like to not have seen my dog eaten before my eyes, we are within nature, not above or outside of it. That’s the first thing to accept.
From there, I think the difference between what has been and what is to come, if we’re to achieve it, is to shift our framework from needing to achieve domination over Nature to seeking dominion with it.
Peace,
Whitney