Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  Do you know the history of crate training? ’Cause I do. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand. Like saying dogs are wild. Dogs are wild—that is glib. Dogs are … I’ve done the research; there are crates that they put us in to quote unquote train us. They throw rattlesnakes at us. Electric-shock tags! I’m not making this up. This is … it’s history. Crate training just masks the problem. These dogs, they become zombies. You can totally handle disobedience naturally by saying “No!” and “Bad dog!” It works. Look at the facts. Shock tags?! I am disgusted.

  HAHAHA! I fetch! Boy, I love to fetch. I am totally fired up when I fetch. And nap. I’ve got a great dog bed with leopard spots where I can power-nap, man. I’ve got awesome chew toys, too. I’m passionate about this rubber T-bone with peanut butter hidden in it. Here’s the point: Do you know there are strays on the street eating out of the Dumpsters behind Chinese restaurants? I’m not making that up. I care about those mutts. But they don’t know what the options are. They don’t know that you can live in an apartment and get fed by a human. These hounds, man—when it thunders, they think the world is ending. Because they haven’t done the research. Do you know the statistics? A hundred and fifty dogs are being fixed every ten minutes. A hundred and fifty. Every ten minutes. I can’t … that’s just wrong. And I speak out about it.

  There’s this yellow Lab, Clover, who I see in the dog run. And this is a totally great purebred. He’s a … HA! He’s … he’s a great guy. I’ve got enormous respect for him. But he’s overweight. You know why? ’Cause they’re feeding him scraps from the table. And he can’t fetch or chase without getting winded. That is sad. I care about him, and I care about the apricot poodle with the plaid socks on his feet, and I care about the basenji with the drooling issues. I want to hear good news. I like to see a Rottweiler get a bath or a shepherd savor a Milk-Bone. That makes me happy.

  What these beggars don’t understand is that if you hover around the dinner table long enough and you’re observant food will come. Food’s gonna come naturally, man. They’re gonna drop stuff and you can—HAHAHAHAHA! But, seriously, begging is a huge issue among our species. I did the research. And I speak out. I speak out about misinformation. Do you know people think that one dog year is seven human years? That is false. Total fabrication. It’s approximate. Flea and tick collars? There are vitamins for that. And your master can totally put that capsule in a slab of butter and you’ll never know you ate it.

  OWOOOWOWOWOOO!!! This bitch, she’s kind, she’s caring, she’s a wonderful, wonderful dog. It’s like … wow. And I don’t want to compare, but I’ve never felt this way before. We might have a litter. One thing at a time. It’s joy, man. That’s what it is. Look at my tail! I’m panting 24/7. HAHAHAHA! I purr, even. Like a cat, man. The cat looks at me and he’s, like, “What did they put in your kibble?” HAHA! I don’t care. I’ve never cared what that cat thinks. But I care about him even though he’s a cynic. I care about the glib parakeet and those jerks the gerbils, but I’m not sure those are the same gerbils as before. HAHAHA! Those gerbils! We have fun. I bark, they run on the wheel. What’s that? The leash jingling! Is it eight already? Walk?! OWOOOHAHAHAHAHAHARUFFRUFFRUFFHA!!! I love living my life!

  2005

  YONI BRENNER

  AESOP IN THE CITY

  THE HAWK AND THE MOUSE

  A clever mouse is sunning himself in Battery Park, when a hawk swoops down and seizes him in her talons. Whistling through the air, the mouse warns the hawk not to eat him. “Why shouldn’t I?” says the hawk. “Don’t you know,” says the mouse, “that mice are loaded with trans fats?” Alarmed, the hawk releases the mouse and flies away. Several days later, the hawk happens upon an old owl devouring a less fortunate mouse. “Stop!” cries the hawk. “Don’t you know those things are loaded with trans fats?” The owl stops eating and says, “What are you, an idiot?”

  Moral: You just can’t argue with libertarians.

  THE FOX AND THE GOAT

  A fox is offered free tickets from Cindy in P.R. She drops them off after lunch, and the fox is dismayed to find that they are for an experimental Swedish dance company called Leøtrd. He takes the tickets to the goat in the next cubicle. “Leøtrd?” says the goat. “I’ve never heard of them.” “I saw them last week,” coos the fox. “The Scandinavian Alvin Ailey. I’ll give them to you for ten bucks.” And so, while the goat spends the evening in a dank underground space off Avenue C, the fox goes to Ollie’s and spends the ten dollars on lo mein. Sure enough, the performance is awful and the goat gets a massive strobe-light headache. Still, inexplicably, he puts his name on the e-mail list. Moral: Always check the website.

  THE CROW AND THE HARE

  Waiting for the uptown No. 1 train, a hare becomes ill and tumbles onto the tracks. “Help me!” the hare shouts to a nearby crow. But the crow is uncertain. “How do I know you won’t eat me?” he asks. “I’m helpless,” replies the hare. “Besides, hares do not eat crows.” Satisfied, the crow flutters down from the platform and grips the hare by the scruff of the neck. Suddenly, the hare flips around and eats the crow. “That’ll show him,” he says.

  Moral: Hares will eat anything.

  THE DOG AND THE MAGIC HEN

  A dog in the East Nineties is lying on the curb when a friendly hen happens by and asks him what’s wrong. “My bone,” says the dog. “It’s stuck under the tire of that Volvo.” “I’ll tell you what,” says the hen. “Come back Tuesday at eleven-thirty and I will make the Volvo disappear.” And so the dog returns Tuesday morning and, sure enough, the Volvo is gone. “Amazing!” says the dog, his bone retrieved. “I’ll do you one better,” clucks the hen. “Come back tomorrow and I will make the cars on the other side of the street disappear.” The dog comes back the next day and, as promised, the other side of the street is empty. “Incredible,” marvels the dog. “I guess this is why they call you the Magic Hen.” “No,” replies the hen. “They call me that because I sell acid.”

  Moral: You didn’t hear it from me.

  THE MOUSE AND THE DONALD

  Ambling through Central Park one day, a mouse happens upon Donald Trump, trapped in a hunter’s net. The mouse asks the Donald if he can be of any assistance. “How could you help me?” scoffs the Donald. “I am Donald Trump and you are just a lowly mouse.”

  Several years later, the Donald calls the mouse into his office. “Your division underperformed again, Johnson,” says the Donald. “Someone’s gonna have to take the fall.” “But, Donald!” cries the mouse. “Don’t you remember why you hired me? How I nibbled through that net and saved you from the hunters?” The Donald thinks for a moment, then replies, “I don’t remember it that way.”

  Moral: Success is fleeting, so keep a paper trail.

  THE JACKDAW AND THE EXPENSE ACCOUNT

  A jackdaw takes a job with a prominent consulting firm. One night, after working well past nine, he decides to go to Pastis on the company dime and invites his old friend the hare to join him. After the two have scanned the menu, a server comes to take their orders. “The ravioli for me,” says the jackdaw. “And I’ll have the lapin à la cocotte,” says the hare. The server is aghast. “But, sir … that’s rabbit.” The hare shrugs. “Whatever.”

  Moral: Hares really will eat anything.

  THE LION AND THE DONKEY

  A lion and a donkey go to a Knicks game, only to find that their seats are way back in Section 426. “I can’t see anything!” moans the lion. The donkey replies, “Aren’t you a lion? Just move down.” So the lion proceeds to maul his way through the crowd, until he and the donkey find a nice spot on the 200 level. But, by the end of the first quarter, the lion is again dissatisfied and decides to maul his way to half-court seats. By the fourth quarter, the lion and the donkey are courtside. At this point, the lion, his paws caked with blood, scraps of licensed apparel stuck in his fangs, turns to the donkey and says, “They call that defense?”

  Moral: You can’t field a team with five pure shooters, quirky draft picks
, and no inside presence and expect to win more than thirty-five games.

  THE WOLF, THE SHEEP, THE H.R. PERSON, MAYOR BLOOMBERG, AL SHARPTON, AND JESSE THE INTERN

  A wolf applies for a job with the Parks Department. To his chagrin, he doesn’t even get a second interview. He disguises himself in a sheepskin and reapplies, but the H.R. person is still unimpressed. Believing that he is the victim of discrimination, the wolf hires a lawyer, who notifies Al Sharpton, who puts in a call to Mayor Bloomberg. The Mayor holds a press conference at which he reaffirms the city’s commitment to diversity and offers the sheep, who is actually a wolf, a job. The wolf accepts, and the whole thing blows over. After a month of answering phones, the wolf suddenly throws off the sheepskin and announces to the office that he is a wolf. Inspired by the wolf’s example, Jesse the intern suddenly announces that he is gay. The office breaks into applause and everyone goes out for drinks to celebrate.

  Moral: It’s best to come out of the closet on a Friday, so people can let it sink in over the weekend.

  2007

  YONI BRENNER

  MONKEY DO

  In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys. —The Times

  EXPERIMENT I: BANANAS

  Method: A monkey observed to have a particularly strong penchant for bananas is given a choice—he can continue his standard ration of one banana per day or he can give up bananas in exchange for an unlimited supply of a revolutionary product called New Banana. Unable to resist the lure of this perpetual bounty, the monkey throws caution to the wind and eschews his regular banana in favor of New Banana, which, unbeknownst to the monkey, is not actually a banana but a cake of hard-packed baking soda inside a banana peel.

  Results: Initially, the monkey is revolted by New Banana and enters a prolonged period of depression, eyeing his fellow monkeys and their tasty bananas with a doleful expression. But, after a few months, the monkey gets used to New Banana, and by the end of the year he has become a vigorous proselyte, extolling the energetic, spiritual, and colonic properties of New Banana, while disparaging the musty tropical reek of traditional bananas. After a year, the monkey refuses to so much as touch a regular banana, and repeatedly proclaims that switching to New Banana was the best decision he ever made.

  EXPERIMENT 2: APARTMENT SEARCH

  Method: Having lived in a research laboratory for ten years, a monkey is encouraged to get his own place, in midtown or maybe the East Village. A research assistant, posing as a broker, shows the monkey a cramped, overpriced studio off Second Avenue. The monkey balks—after all, he’s a grown monkey; doesn’t he deserve a little space? The monkey dismisses the research assistant and starts obsessively scanning the rental listings on Craigslist, determined to find an affordable one-bedroom with no fee.

  Results: After responding to hundreds of listings and visiting more than twenty apartments—all of which are either dilapidated, vermin-infested, meth-lab-adjacent, or some combination of the three—the search begins to wear on the monkey, and he starts questioning why he was so fixated on getting a one-bedroom. After all, he’s a single monkey, and doesn’t he spend all his time at work anyway? Besides, with some creative light-palette decorating and a new flat-screen TV, a studio could look quite spacious. After a few days, this logic sinks in and the monkey not only signs a two-year lease for the Second Avenue place but recommends the “broker” to several other monkeys in the lab. Two months later, the monkey is tragically killed when he rolls out of his bed and directly into the trash compactor.

  EXPERIMENT 3: JUDAISM

  Method: An avowedly secular, antireligious monkey is introduced to a gorgeous female research assistant with a sarcastic edge that some would call harsh but he finds wholly endearing. Early in the relationship, the research assistant informs the monkey that, as much as she loves him, she cannot marry him unless he converts to Judaism. Undaunted, the monkey seeks out a rabbi and thrusts himself into the arduous, several-year process of Orthodox conversion. Then, fifteen months into conversion classes, the research assistant suddenly dumps the monkey, explaining that he has “changed.”

  Results: Heartbroken, the monkey withdraws from everything that reminds him of the research assistant, denouncing religion and claiming that he never really liked Malaysian Expressionist cinema. But in a few weeks, the monkey is back with his rabbi, having determined that his spiritual journey was independent of the relationship and that he owes it to himself to see it through. Following his conversion, the monkey throws himself into Jewish life—running for treasurer at a small progressive temple in New Rochelle and contributing an online column to the magazine Hadassah—before falling madly in love with an Episcopalian underwear model he met during intermission at the Israel Philharmonic.

  EXPERIMENT 4: IRAQ

  Method: A right-leaning monkey is invited to be a guest on what he believes is a Sunday-morning news program but is in fact a panel of research assistants sitting around a card table in pancake makeup. The panel proceeds to grill the monkey on the catastrophic intelligence failures and phantom WMDs that led to the invasion of Iraq, asking how he can justify his continued support of such a costly and destructive war launched under false pretenses.

  Results: Unfazed, the monkey deftly reframes the debate, asserting that the war was never about WMDs but about transforming the political dynamic of the region, which is an ongoing historical process and thus immune to the partisan slings of shortsighted pundits. So polished is the monkey’s reasoning that he is recruited by the Heritage Foundation and soon becomes a fixture on the real Sunday-morning circuit, steadfastly denying the relevance of WMDs. All seems to be going well until he appears on ABC’s This Week and is ambushed with a 2003 tape of himself at a VFW post saying, “This war is about WMDs, pure and simple.” After a prolonged silence, the monkey stammers something about “out of context,” then leaps at George Stephanopoulos’s face, inflicting several small bite wounds. Six months later, the monkey’s confirmation as Ambassador to the United Nations is effectively sunk following a bizarre incident in which he is accused of throwing his feces at Barbara Boxer (although the monkey insists that it was the other way around).

  2007

  SIMON RICH

  ANIMAL TALES

  FROGS

  “Hey, can I ask you something? Why do human children dissect us?”

  “It’s part of their education. They cut open our bodies in school and write reports about their findings.”

  “Huh. Well, I guess it could be worse, right? I mean, at least we’re not dying in vain.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, our deaths are furthering the spread of knowledge. It’s a huge sacrifice we’re making, but at least some good comes out of it.”

  “Let me show you something.”

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a frog-dissection report.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “A fourteen-year-old human from New York City. Some kid named Simon.”

  (Flipping through it.) “This is it? This is the whole thing?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Geez. It doesn’t look like he put a lot of time into this.”

  “Look at the diagram on the last page.”

  “Oh, my God … it’s so crude. It’s almost as if he wasn’t even looking down at the paper while he was drawing it. Like he was watching TV or something.”

  “Read the conclusion.”

  “ ‘In conclusion, frogs are a scientific wonder of biology.’ What does that even mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Why are the margins so big?”

  “He was trying to make it look as if he had written five pages, even though he had only written four.”

  “He couldn’t come up with one more page of observations about our dead bodies?”

  “I guess not.”

  “This paragraph looks like it was copied straight out of an encyclopedi
a. I’d be shocked if he retained any of this information.”

  “Did you see that he spelled ‘science’ wrong in the heading?”

  “Whoa … I missed that. That’s incredible.”

  “He didn’t even bother to run it through spell-check.”

  “Who did he dissect?”

  “Harold.”

  “Betsy’s husband? Jesus. So this is why Harold was killed. To produce this … ‘report.’ ”

  (Nods.) “This is why his life was taken from him.”

  (Long pause.)

  “Well, at least it has a cover sheet.”

  “Yeah. The plastic’s a nice touch.”

  DALMATIANS

  “Hey, look, the truck’s stopping.”

  “Did they take us to the park this time?”

  “No—it’s a fire. Another horrible fire.”

  “What the hell is wrong with these people?”