Fast forward to the coinciding occurrences of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and the addition to our family of Sparkle, the best dog ever.
I had noticed the Trump chew toy, for sale at Farfel's Farm in Boulder, long before we adopted Sparkle, and since then I'd wished I'd had a dog for whom I could buy it. It was one of her very first purchases.
If it's wrong to burn a President in effigy, surely it's wrong to use a President-elect's image as a doggie chew toy. If it's not wrong to burn a President in effigy, it may still be wrong to use said President-elect's image for a doggie chew toy. I use the word "wrong" very loosely; more "an affront of common mores" than "a serious moral transgression." If someone wants to publish these thoughts elsewhere, I'll edit it and come up with a more precise word. I also consider the President-elect to have equal status to a sitting President, ignoring the technicality that Mr. Trump does not officially become President-elect until the electors vote.
Is it wrong to burn a President in effigy?
I acknowledge that there's a certain amount of decorum that accompanies an office, both on the part of the person holding the office and on the parts of The People perceiving that person (with extra consideration of The People's perception if the person holding the office is in a representative position).
When George I was in office, my father's position was that, as a fairly elected government official, he was owed a certain amount of respect. Though he did not think that the President was above criticism, he perceived an indignity to immolation that crossed the line of acceptable criticism.
There is an implicit dehumanization in setting someone on fire. Its most famous uses involved punishment of people who were indeed considered nonhuman in one way or another, for example witches and heretics.
But burning in effigy is not immolation. It's burning a non-sentient artistic representation of an individual as a protest. Whether it's a protest of the person themselves or of a concept that the person represents is debatable, and the moral implications clearly would follow one's interpretation of same. I would consider it "wrong" if the burning was being conducted as advocacy for setting the represented individual on fire.
The worst thing about burning in effigy is that uncontained fire is almost never a good idea. Fire is dangerous, and if a person sets one in public, they ought to be subject to whatever general public safety laws are in effect.
Is it wrong to use a President's likeness as a doggie chew toy?
It is certainly reasonable for a person who finds burning a President in effigy beyond the pale to object equally to using a President's likeness as a doggie chew toy. Another defensible position is that burning in effigy is abhorrent but the chew toy is not because the indignity of the immolation is unique.
I am here to explore a third position: that the chew toy is actually worse than the burning in effigy.
An important question is whether there is a distinction between a regular Presidential stuffed toy (or bobblehead or action figure) and one that is designed specifically for the purpose of being chewed by a dog. One argument could be that dogs are low in the social hierarchy and therefore a dog's chew toy is even lower. I don't subscribe to this view; I value dogs as autonomous beings as much as humans.
Similarly, we often use dog in one way or another to mean yucky. If a movie is a "dog" it sucks; something from a restaurant is so bad that you wouldn't even feed it to your dog. I don't care for that vernacular, either, because dogs are awesome.
There is a distinction however between a toy that is designed to be loved and a toy that is designed to be destroyed. A doggie chew toy falls into the latter category, and I acknowledge there is a lack of respect reflected in specifically selecting an individual's image for joyous canine destruction.
So we're back to the question of whether President of the United States is an office that commands a certain amount of respect and decorum.
Fortunately, we don't have to answer that question in the abstract.
Is it wrong to use this President's likeness as a doggie chew toy?
"How would you feel if it were an Obama chew toy?"
I suppose, if I disregard the false equivalency, I would ask how your dog plays with the chew toy. Sparkle and I play "get the bigot" with the Trump toy. I am completely comfortable calling President-elect Trump a bigot. I call him a "misogynist bigot" too.
And this is where I realized I was drawing the proverbial line in the sand. I have decided that even if there is an amount of respect presumptively owed to our nation's elected leader, Mr. Trump's own behavior has destroyed his entitlement to the presumption. His lack of basic character, which I really don't need to rehash here, speaks for itself. And not only has he made no effort to redeem himself, he's only dug himself in deeper.
I do not believe that President Obama has done anything to earn the level of scorn that I have for Mr. Trump. It may be that we value different things. It may be that those things are or are not important enough to affect our opinions of each other.
The sequence of events was undoubtedly unprecedented, regardless of whether you think the outcome was positive or negative. The standards for acceptability, then, are a bit looser. If the man himself is not following traditional social mores, why on Earth should he expect to benefit from them?
Epilogue
We bought Sparkle's chew toy in liberal Boulder. Recently, in Colorado Springs, we saw a Bernie Sanders chew toy at a local pet boutique. Touché.
