Of Dogs and Meaning 3 (another excerpt from my forthcoming book)

I wrote a series of detective stories where my socialist detective, Roy Marx, specialized in solving crimes of class oppression. Marx’s sidekick was his little proletarian white dog named Trotsky who resembled the fiery Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky right down to a black goatee and side burns on his white furry face! During a case, Trotsky always managed to sleuth out clues that Marx misses because he’s swigging too much vodka or debating the finer theoretical points of communism with the cops and capitalists. These stories were intended as farce with some sly cultural commentary sliced in like so much Swiss cheese.

And speaking of farce, one of the greatest cultural farces to ever cross my path involved dogs, the drug-sniffing canines that searched for legal and illegal drugs in the various public high schools I taught in during my teaching career. The farce typically unfolded like this: at the beginning of the academic year, students would assemble in the gymnasium to watch a demonstration of the local police department’s drug dog with the intent of scaring them straight, at least during school hours. Oh, it was a farce all right! A corpulent and goateed cop wearing military-grade body armor would run (barely) a dog, usually a lab of some kind, through a series of searches (with rock music blaring) where the plan was for the dog to detect pot, meth, booze or PCP or whatever in some backpack stashed around the gym. Invariably the dogs made mistakes, public mistakes, and the students always cheered when the poor beast did find contraband. Nothing is more inspiring to youth when a cop holds up some dank weed or bottle of vodka right before first period of the first day of school. After these absurd demonstrations, teachers and students would repair to their classes and begin the lessons. The cop would then tour the drug dog though the halls, into several classes, and elsewhere around the campus, always followed by a newspaper reporter who would splash the dog and cop on the front page accompanied by a hack article on how the school district was “tough on drugs.” Later, during the course of the year, the dog would make surprise visits to a classroom, (sometimes the result of a tip) everyone, including me, would empty out into the hallway while the dog did his thing. I remember well those times in the hall, talking to students about the uniquely American farce that was underway, mentioning that the dog was not searching for legally-prescribed psychotropics, painkillers or anti-depressants ten times more powerful than mere cannabis, for example, that many teachers and students were under the influence at that very moment. I would ask: “Why are some drugs legal and others not?” This was before Oregon legalized recreational cannabis in 2015, and ever since, drug dog searches have mostly gone away because virtually everyone in an Oregon public school setting has some traces of cannabis on their person. The drug dogs would have lost their minds sniffing around classrooms!