My Life as a Dogma

"As a white man, you can live your whole life never not fitting in. You never walk into a jewelry store that sees only your black skin. You never walk into a bar that sees only your boobs. To be Whitie is to be wallpaper."

Featured in Black Book Magazine and recently republished in his collection of non-fiction "Stranger Than Fiction", the essay My Life as a Dog was meant as a document of Chuck Palahniuk's foray into public inconspicuousness. The hate, anger, disbelief and generally uncourteous manner in which the citizens of the city of Seattle displayed towards the aforementioned writer and his female companion is surprising, if not shocking, when juxtaposed with the traditionally friendly character of the city we all know and love.

Of course, they were dressed in animal costumes; specifically, him a Dalmation, her a dancing bear.

Their modus operandi: to go about Seattle in animal costumes performing the excruciating work of modern tourists. They browsed the Pike Place Market, shopped the department stores and attempted to view the works found at the Seattle Art Museum. In the process this intrepid couple experienced physical blows to their beastly persons, thrown stones and blistering verbal indictments of their seemingly deviant behavior.

People spend their whole lives trying to fit in, wearing the fashionable clothes, speaking the hippest slang, visiting the trendiest night spots, and along comes two fuzzy creatures trying to go about their business whilst pissing in the face of one of the core tenants of civilization, assimilation. Most people in Seattle tend to masturbate to idea of their own openness, but fear of the unknown and the dangers that come along with it tend to push even the most ardent progressive over the edge.

This strikes at the heart of one of two points I'd like to make.

1. Ideals, belief systems, philosophies are only as good as the people that follow them. If you do something ridiculously ostentatious and abnormal, people are either going to laud you or beat you, regardless where on earth you live. When someone steps outside the norms of society and no longer becomes wallpaper, they are either uplifting others and making them feel good about themselves, or they are spitting in someone's face and pointing out their weaknesses. In Chuck Palahniuk's experiment, the author seems to have inspired the latter.




2. If this experiment had occurred just a short distance to the East in Capitol Hill people would have been propositioning Palahniuk and his companion for sex instead of harassing them. In his essay the author also mentions that a woman he knew that used to work as a clown used to get propositioned quite frequently. This he credits to men considering woman that don't attempt to look beautiful as being loose, or whores; but I digress..

If you appreciate the more amusing aspects of Chuck Palahniuk's white boy exhibition, check out the website for The Cacophony Society. They've managed to create a whole organization whose sole purpose is to do exactly not what immigrants to this country have been doing for centuries.