Month: May 2013

After encountering a doberman at his gym, Farhad Manjoo throws up his hands:

Sometime in the last decade, dogs achieved dominion over urban America. They are everywhere now, allowed in places that used to belong exclusively to humans, and sometimes only to human adults: the office, restaurants, museums, buses, trains, malls, supermarkets, barber shops, banks, post offices. Even at the park and other places where dogs belong, they’ve been given free rein. Dogs are frequently allowed to wander off leash, to run toward you and around you, to run across the baseball field or basketball court, to get up in your grill. Even worse than the dogs are the owners, who seem never to consider whether there may be people in the gym/office/restaurant/museum who do not care to be in close proximity to their dogs. After all, what kind of monster would have a problem with a poor innocent widdle doggie?

As a dog-lover, I think he’s actually right about the owners. In all urban public situations, outside a dog park, you should have a leash on your dog. Where we now live – the West Village – feels at times like a very expensive dog complex. And that’s where the difficulty comes in. For many passers-by, greeting and cooing over the beagle and basset-mutt is one extreme of the problem. There, the trouble comes from humans, not dogs. But every owner should know the temperament of their dogs, keep them away from strangers if they are “unfriendly”, and make sure that any stranger feels comfortable. It’s called manners. Like cyclists who routinely violate traffic rules, these dog-owners make the rest of us look bad.

Manjoo compares his feelings about dogs to how some people feel about kids:

I realize that, although [my two-year old is] impossibly cute, it’s possible he might aggravate some people. For this reason, whenever I go into public spaces with my toddler, I treat him as if I were handling nuclear waste or a dangerous animal. I keep him confined. I shush him. If he does anything out of turn—screams, touches people—I make a show of telling him to quit it and I apologize profusely. And, finally, there are some places that are completely off-limits to my son: nice restaurants, contemplative adult spaces like grown-up museums and coffee shops, the gym, and the office. Especially the office.

I couldn’t agree more.

A reader writes:

The issue with the Tsarnaev burial is not whether he should be buried, but whether he should be buried in the community he terrorized. Yvonne Abraham conveniently leaves this out of her predictable screed. I agree that local leaders should have done a better job of locating a burial site outside the metropolitan area, but this is also relatively uncharted waters if I’m not mistaken – burying a domestic terrorist (we never classified Lanza as such) in the weeks following the attack.

The mayors of Cambridge and Boston are absolutely correct in acknowledging that a burial site located within their respective city limits would become a significant distraction and public safety/health issue. Buying Tsarnaev locally would undoubtedly lead to the resting site becoming public. What then? An armed guard patrolling a 50-square foot area from now until forever?

Another:

I want to offer one instructive historical example for burying terrorists. In the fall of 1977, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe all committed suicide (though this fact is self is still highly debated) in Stuttgart’s Stammhein Prison.

At the time these were the most notorious terrorists in the world have killed or maimed dozens of Americans and German in their effort to bring about Revolution. Far from being like the Tsarnaev brothers, these folks were more akin to Osama bin Laden in the German public’s mind.

So when they died, all the surrounding cities scrambled to tell the media that there was no way that the terrorists would be buried in their city, in their cemetery. Finally, the mayor of Stuttgart stepped in. A great man (and the son of an even greater man), Manfred Rommel said “Enough! In death all enmity must cease.” And he ordered them buried in a Stuttgart public cemetery.

If you go to New York’s Museum of Modern Art you can see Gerhard Richter’s massive painting depicting their funeral (see above). The gravesite did become a bit of a shrine at first, but that went away. I visited it 10 years ago and no one else was around and it clearly hadn’t been visited much that day at least. Just a quiet little gravesite in the corner of a giant cemetery.