Like a Dog

A dog with the absurd name of “Bohem [sic] C’est la Vie,” aka “Vivi,” escapes from the baggage area of Kennedy Airport, and the authorities rush to deploy a helicopter and a dozen police officers to scour some 5,000 acres at considerable taxpayer cost. Even “pilots in the air told controllers that they would keep an eye out for the dog.”

Why all the hullaballoo over a little dog? Because its co-owner, Paul Lepiane, lied to the police about the show dog's value, which he'd inflated to more than $100,000 “to convince them to make helicopter searches.” (He later revised its value to between $15,000 and $20,000.)

The story, which has been generating a great deal of attention in the press, takes a sinister turn however when compared to another incident at JFK just a week earlier, a story that hasn't generated nearly as much attention but is far more tragic in its consequences.

Jiang Zhenxing, a 32-year old Chinese woman who had come to the U.S., married, given birth to two American sons, and opened with her husband a Chinese restaurant in Philadelphia, paying taxes on their earnings for about a decade, went to her regular appointment at the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office on Feb. 7. She was three months pregnant with twins.

When officials learned of her pregnancy, however, she was separated from her husband and sons, shuffled roughly into a van, and taken to JFK for immediate deportation. Jiang alleges the officers "manhandled her and ridiculed her pleas for medical help until it was too late." According to one account, the officers "stopped to eat lunch themselves but gave the pregnant woman nothing to eat during her eight-hour ordeal and cursed her when she cried and told them she was in pain. By the time they reached the airport, Ms. Jiang was suffering severe abdominal cramps and begging for help in a public waiting area..." Only when bystanders could no longer just stand by as Jiang cried out in pain did someone call an ambulance. (Where were the helicopters then?) By the time she made it to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, her babies were dead.

A dog owner lies to airport authorities and gets them to mobilize a helicopter and dozens of men to search for a dog, as the nation's heart reaches out to the aggrieved owners. A pregnant woman in pain cries out for help at the same airport one week earlier and is ridiculed and mocked and ignored, as her unborn twins are left to die.

If only she'd been treated, one cannot help but lament in retrospect, like a dog.

Monster Shopper

In her latest Critical Shopper column in the New York Times, Alexandra Kuczynski, the obscenely wealthy daughter of the Wall Street banker and (despite his Franco-Polish descent and naturalized US citizenship) current prime minister of Peru, Pedro-Pablo Kuczynski, shrieks at the spot of uncleanliness diminishing her shopping pleasure at the SoHo Apple store.

After noting the absence of staff to wipe down with "antibacterial spray" the keyboards and mice ("gripped by grimy hands all day long"!), she continues in the eloquent literary style that has won her a prestigious column at the paper of record:

On my last visit I saw one young man sneeze voluminously into his hands, then type on the keyboard and grapple with the mouse. Yuck! Two seconds after he left the station, a woman and her child began to fiddle with the mouse and keyboard. Triple yuck!

Of course her disgust at the unhygienic displays of the young mother and child might have been slightly more affecting had she not, some paragraphs earlier, admitted to throwing an iPod Mini — "ear buds and all — into a garbage can on Fifth Avenue" in a fit of annoyance, thus polluting the city with the electronic device's toxic heavy metals without a second's compunction.

Her obsessive self-regard and narcissistic sense of entitlement have rarely been on better display.

Nasty Daddy

A recent biography of the French writer Michel Houellebecq confirmed what most readers probably already suspected, namely that much of his fictional work was taken directly from 'life'. The figure of the mother, in particular, has been singled out for especial abuse in his work. Like the appallingly negligent mother in Les Particules élémentaires, according to this article in the London Review of Books (via Arts & Letters Daily) Houellebecq’s mother “was born to a pied-noir family in Algeria, became a student radical, trained as a doctor and then lived an alternative, itinerant lifestyle” (in the book she “joins a sinister cult and spends much of her time bedding young men and boys”).

As for Houllebecq’s father, well, he was dispensed with at the beginning of Plateforme:

Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become truly adult when our parents die; we never become truly adult.
As I stood before the old man’s coffin, unpleasant thoughts came to me. He had made the most of life, the old bastard; he was a clever cunt. ‘You had kids, you fucker . . .’ I said spiritedly, ‘you shoved your fat cock in my mother’s cunt.’ Well, I was a bit tense, I have to admit; it’s not every day you have a death in the family.

Houellebecq himself was abandoned by his parents, “who set off across Africa in a 2CV five months after their son’s birth and left him with his grandparents in Algiers. Michel only saw his parents during the holidays. “‘I grew up with the clear knowledge that a grave injustice had been done to me,’ he told one interviewer. ‘What I felt for them was mostly fear, as far as my father was concerned, and a clear disgust vis-à-vis my mother.’ ‘Until my death, I will remain an abandoned little child, howling from fear and cold, starved of caresses.’"

Indeed, Houellebecq condemns not only his parents but their generation of hippies and soixante-huitards for all manner of social disaster. In Atomised, the cult to which Bruno’s mother belongs turn from free love to ritual murder. In one of the most quoted passages from the book, Houllebecq writes: ‘Actionists, beatniks, hippies and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’

Given the monstrous injustice Houellebecq feels was commited against him by his parents, one might think he’d treat his own children a little better, in his books, if not in life. In life we learn that Houellebecq produced a child from a short early marriage. How horribly sad, then, to read in his latest book, the following: ‘On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelette . . . I had never loved that child: he was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father.’