A Puppy Faces Rigorous Criticism

One responds as one responds to a small, helpless mammal. There are no surprises in the almost reflexive desire to scootch Mr. Wuggums under the chin, or fluffle up his ears in a rapid, repetitive hand motions.

But here Mr. Wuggums additionally, and I believe disingenuously, presents us with a juxtaposition of cuteness and an emasculated ferocity, with the irony redirected towards cheap humor rather than towards dialectical clarity; an ennervating attack on class consciousness typical of hegemonic mass culture.

Mr. Wuggums appears to transcend his weakness with "attitude," to adopt the imprecise vernacular, meaning that Mr. Wuggums, despite a contradictory, fully inhabited adorable and harmless physicality, has internalized aggressive, even lethal precognition. Mr. Wuggums, to put it bluntly, is prepared to murder. The potential external critique of culturally-sanctioned violence as normative is voided precisely by the appearance of a creature apparently least capable of this violence, yet who also adopts this posture of subsumed destruction, thus normalizing it.

Of course, puppydom itself is an uncritical cultural entry point into the whole distorted praxis of the reified socialization of dogs, who, by their immutable nature as hierarchical pack animals, reinforce by their ubiquitous metaphor the dominant/subservient social relations the dog pack models for human beings. Mr. Wuggums, for all his potential, offers nothing to our culture but trite counter-democratic propaganda.

It is not too grand a stretch to suggest that Mr. Wuggums is not only co-opted by proto-fascistic social modeling forces, but by the visual evidence here, is also a willing participant.