Letter to the Animals’ Friend

Recently my old friend Russell Shaw (now with the Huffington Post) and my daughter Robin (left)  had a colloquy on the subject of animal rights.

Russell wrote in the Huffpo that shows such as “The World’s Funniest Animals” demean God’s creatures, making fun of their failed attempts to deal with “human” situations.

Robin, who wants more than anything to be an Animal Cop ,  agreed.

On the whole, I do too. But I try to take The Long View.

As recently as a decade ago, the idea that animals had any soul and any rights was, frankly, ridiculous. If portrayed at all, it was in human terms, selflessly taking care of their humans, desperately trying to get back to their humans. We were the center of their universe and whatever “duty” we had to protect them was secondary. They were still, at the end of the day, meat. We were the only ones with souls.

It was a bit like the era of  “The Birth of a Nation,” the D.W. Griffith flick from 1915 that had white actors playing most black roles and all blacks portrayed (falsely) as animals, as base, as evil. Films like that justified the KKK, they justified lynching, they justified Jim Crow.

It’s different for animals today. Thanks in part to Animal Planet, thanks in part to the suburbanization of America, millions of animals in this country have it pretty good. And their owners are now taught, through people like Caesar Milan (The Dog Whisperer)  to treat animals as animals, to respect their animal natures, their animal intelligence. Their animal souls.

This is progress. Here in Georgia, which a decade ago would never dream of protecting an animal in any way, we nearly got a bill through making dog-fighting a felony,  a bill that would have prosecuted trainers and bettors and even spectators.

The bill failed to pass both houses, but its time is coming.

Are you ready for another analogy?

That’s Russell at left. See why I had Robin’s picture at the top instead?

Think back to the 1930s, when Hattie McDaniel (below) , Eddie Anderson and Louise Beavers were playing selfless, all-knowing servants on radio and on film, and the big fight of the NAACP was to win anti-lynching legislation.

Recently, Turner Movie Classics had a month-long salute to “black images on film” and Prof. Donald Bogle   noted how demeaning those roles in fact were. “Where did Hattie McDaniel sleep?” he asked. How could Louise Beavers turn down a fortune in “Imitation of Life” just to cook for a white lady?

He was right. He was absolutely 100% right. But there was a big distance between 1915 and 1939. Progress had been made over a quarter-century, progress that was necessary in order to set up further progress.

In the 1930s one of the people Mayor William Hartsfield of Atlanta would turn to for advice on race issues was a minister he knew as “Mike” King. He probably thought of the man’s son as Mikey. But that minister’s name wasn’t Mike, it was Martin, and Mikey would grow up to become Martin Luther King Jr.

Maybe that’s too nuanced. I would like to feel just as outraged as Russell and Robin feel. I think their outrage is justified. I think they’re on the right side of history.

But a distance has been traveled.

In his autobiography “Sunday Night at 7” Jack Benny recounts how he was once accosted by a white liberal angry over Anderson’s role in his show. Everyone knew of Anderson as “Rochester,” the butler, factotum, and conscience of Benny’s radio show. It was one of the few times Benny admitted to becoming angry. He pointed out that Anderson had a big house, one of the fattest paychecks in Hollywood, that he designed his own race cars and had servants of his own.

Behind the small progress, in other words, lay bigger progress.

Down the street from my house there is a new park. It’s a dog park. Yuppies with no kids bring their dogs there to play and socialize. Progress. Dogs are being treated, not as mini-humans, but as dogs with souls, deserving respect, and the right to act as dogs, to be respected on their own terms.

Progress comes in small steps. You have to see under the surface to see it. And it can be infuriating, when you know the destination, know how righteous it is, to see so little progress.

The anger is just. The cause is just. But the progress is real.