There is a dog in my house! Her name is Eleanor and she is a thirteen month old yellow lab in training to be a particular kind of service dog. Not gonna specify which kind because I don’t want to appear to be speaking on behalf of the excellent org to which she belongs.
Getting qualified to raise dogs like Eleanor is something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid, and have trained to do since the pandemic. I’ve had temporary dogs but I am now Eleanor’s primary handler.
It is an awesome responsibility and, being me, I’ve already had anxiety dreams about it. She’s a good girl whose worst crimes are a bit of pulling on the leash and some surprise bork-bork-borking when Charlie came home from college with Hazel the emotional support cat in tow. (Alice and Thimble have already judged Eleanor and found her wanting.)
Still I fret. The group leaders like to say “you won’t break the puppy” but what if I somehow do? What if I’m the first raiser to have her dog abducted by aliens or indoctrinated by Fox News? Charlie said, “no one’s expecting you to be perfect at this the first time,” and I said, “I am.”
She has enormous paws and hilariously expressive eyebrows. She likes licking things, meeting new people and curling up on my foot.
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Three years ago Daria described the fall of the Soviet Union to me. She said, Nastya, one day the light went out and the spirits came back. And we returned to the forest.
She had the terrible sinking feeling that whatever was going wrong right now, it was her fault somehow: that she hadn’t been smart enough or good enough.
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I’m sad she’s dead, for the usual human and parasocial reasons.
I’m genuinely curious if also worried about what comes next.
And I’m angry, I am so so angry, about the British empire.
As a white Australian I exist because of what Britain saw as surplus population it could send to administer its stolen wealth. The ways in which my life was predetermined, the ways in which I was raised and educated to be a colonial bureaucrat, were callous and calculating and fundamentally genocidal, and have left me traumatized.
The thing about Elizabeth. The thing! That I managed to grope towards just now, is that she was a human sacrifice to empire. She had no choice and no escape. She had to do her duty.
And she did her duty flawlessly. She was incredible at it. A genuinely awe-inspiring triumph of will.
And she shouldn’t have done that. For two reasons. One (the most important) is because the Empire is a death cult that murdered millions on her watch. The other is that her performance of that duty is and always will be forced on the rest of us as the standard we will inevitably fail to meet.
I admire her. But I will not seek to emulate her. Her indulgence of powerful men and her racism were ruinous even in her immediate family, and catastrophic for the world. What she did so amazingly well is a thing that should never have been done.
The nuclear family is a construct that both renders affairs of the family unit private and makes labor forces more “flexible.” Economists say frictionless.
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