The Beacon Of Pitch Darkness

This morning I met Kate. This very nice King Charles Spaniel was wearing a coat saying "Support Dog". I asked its owner what this was about. She replied that Kate was there to help her with her mental health needs.

Clearly this has not been thought through. If dogs can really have a positive effect on mental health every dog owner would be an Aston Villa fan. But if that happened every dog owner would understand the international conspiracy which prevents us winning our rightful trophies and want to correct it. Then there would be no vast professional football industry creating millions in revenue and taxes because there would be no public interest in the game when Villa won every competition they entered. Even the best intentions of the best individuals would not survive against the vested interests of so many.

However the incident does shed further light on the psyche of those who rule us by controlling our welfare services. If a dog is supposed to help with mental health needs dogs must be equated with sanity. There are far more people diagnosed with mental health problems than ever before by those who have the power to do so. It is instructive to understand the version of sanity these people expect us to aspire to.

The first manifestation of our rulers' version of sanity is a wet nose. All dogs have one unless they have some medical problem. It has traditionally been believed that humans only have one if they have a medical problem. Presumably we are asked to believe this conventional wisdom is false. Nevertheless it takes a lot of effort on the part of humans to have a perpetually wet nose. Living in a continuously cold and wet climate would help but that would mean politically incorrect cultural assumptions were being made. No one would dare say that people who live in cold and wet countries were inherently more sane than others. Clearly there is an expectation that humans will do everything they can to have perpetually runny noses. To capitalise on this the National Health Service will soon be producing Nose Thermostats which rapidly cool and heat a perpetual supply of liquid when strapped to the face thus creating a perpetual cold in their wearers. This may sound extreme but it does at least create a visible benchmark for sanity. To avoid being cast out of society and labelled as sick for the rest of your life you simply need to wear one of these devices all the time and tell everyone how good they are. This will demonstrate your unimpeachable sanity in the eyes of the powerful and privileged who will all be wearing them themselves as a matter of course.

The second manifestation of sanity is being covered in fur. Most humans find this very difficult and would shy away from such a condition. The only known fur covered humans are the famous Andre Agassi and Stella McCartney and even Mr. Agassi has rebelled by shaving his head. Nevertheless we are now led to believe that this is what sanity consists of. Although this sounds just as absurd as the idea of everyone having a wet nose it is a much more sinister proposition. In the Old Testament the hairy man Esau lost his birthright to the smooth man Jacob when Jacob pretended to be hairy before their blind father. It is most unusual for a leading politician to be hairy and apart from Mrs. Thatcher there has not been a bearded British Prime Minister since the Marquess of Salisbury. By being hairy we might be sane but we will also give up our birthrights. All our liberties will be handed over without a fight to the smooth politicians who are making these rules. We are being encouraged to believe that this is the only sane and rational thing to do.

The third way you can demonstrate that you are sane is by wagging your tail. Humans do not have tails of course but there have been considerable moves in the last thirty years or so to reintroduce tails into the gene pool. First it was figure hugging jeans which showed off people's backsides and persuaded people to aspire to a distinctive tail again. Then there was a variety of new dance forms involving swinging the tail around or gyrating from the base of the tail which made it essential to have a protruding tail if they were to be performed on a daily basis. Then there was the publicity given to the "bum cleavage" of fat men and labourers on various television programmes which tried to persuade us that it was shameful to show the top of the buttocks if there was no tail visible there. Nowadays at party conferences you see a platform of senior politicians who appear to be shifting in their seats when speeches are being made. They are doing no such thing. Whilst the hoi polloi are applauding the speaker they are wagging their bottoms back and forth to demonstrate their sanity and therefore the higher authority of their response. Apparently sanity like Socialism can only be practised by those able to afford it.

It would be interesting to meet a human who fully manifested these characteristics of a sane person on a consistent basis. In all probability there will never be one which is why dogs are used as the exemplars. But there may in fact be a method in this madness. Every generation has its idols people try to live up to. No one ever does in fact become who they set out to emulate but they spend a great deal of effort trying. They would of course be better off trying to emulate our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ. But trying to emulate dogs to prove you are sane is hopefully the final absurd extension of this wilful refusal to be human. Then we will discover what sanity really is. All we will then need is to justify why we have chosen to ignore this for so many thousands of years.