AGI – A TV series that has become a cult among fans of political drama, ‘House of Cards’, the protagonist, Frank Underwood, goes out onto the driveway of his house because the neighbours’ dog has been run over. The poor beast is not shown but the point of view with which we observe Frank is him. The dog seems to be dying because of the hit-and-run driver and the protagonist, lucid and impassive, speaks of “two types of pain, a necessary one that allows us to grow and a useless one, just pain”.
By virtue of this second, while he is bent over the dying dog and no one can see him, he gives the final blow with his own hands to the little animal to put an end to its suffering.
A gesture of compassion? It’s difficult to say, given that we are not shown the actual conditions of the animal but only hear its plaintive barking. All this tells us that, in a delicate situation, Frank does not lose heart and gets his hands dirty directly, without having someone else do it by proxy.
From fiction to reality
Just a fictional character? No, judging by the behavior of South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s potential vice presidential candidate, who shocked Americans by revealing that she had shot the family dog because instead of chasing pheasants, she was chasing chickens. An unfortunate admission to say the least in a nation that loves pets.
In an unfortunate memoir, of which the Guardian has drafts, the conservative republican recounts how, at the end of a hunting trip gone wrong, she shot and killed her 14-month-old dog Cricket because he was “untrainable”. “I hated that dog,” Noem, 52, wrote in “No Going Back,” in which she recounted how Cricket ruined a pheasant hunt with his “excitement,” and then killed several chickens belonging to a local family . The only solution, according to Noem, was to tear it down. “It was not a pleasant task,” writes the governor, “but it had to be done. And then I realized that another unpleasant job had to be done”: killing a “bad” goat.
The reactions
The revelation rocked this year’s election season and prompted a deluge of reactions among political commentators, on social media and on talk shows. Dogs occupy a special place in American life, and public figures are often pilloried when they mistreat dogs – as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney knows well, having had the unfortunate idea in 2012 of reporting that his family had tied up the dog from home to the roof of the car during a trip.
Trump himself faced criticism when in 2017 his detractors pointed out that he was the first White House occupant in more than 100 years not to have a dog. As the Noem case ballooned, Democratic governors Tim Walz of Minnesota and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan urged X to “post a photo with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit.” What’s incredible is that Noem, in telling how she killed Cricket, tried to show that she is willing, in politics and in life, to do what’s necessary, even if it’s “difficult and messy and ugly.”
Hillary Clinton’s coup
More or less the same idea as Frank Underwood, with the difference that the character played by Kevin Spacey was smart enough to do it away from other people’s eyes and above all not to tell it in an autobiography. On Sunday, Noem had the courage to tweet that “people are looking for authentic leaders who are willing to learn from the past and who don’t shy away from difficult challenges” and added that “as I explained in the book, it hasn’t been easy. But often the easy path is not the right one.”
But Noem also managed to give Hillary Clinton the right to republish a message she had spread in 2021: “Don’t vote for anyone you wouldn’t trust with your dog.” “It’s still valid,” she added today.
