the difference between sarah palin and pit bulls

What is it with Sarah Palin and animals?

For the sake of my blood pressure, I skipped Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention Wednesday night (yeah, I know, so "me first, country second"). When I came across a reference the following morning to that line about hockey moms, pit bulls, and lipstick, I thought for sure that it was something out of the Colbert Report. It had to be... right???

My incredulity was partly a reaction to the odious gender posturing (I guess she's both more butch and more femme than the rest of us). But part of it was plain cognitive dissonance. The last time I checked the American cultural imagination, the pit bull is the quintessential "gangsta" dog - i.e. violent, criminal, underclass, hypermasculine, and, above all, black. When the story of former NFL star Michael Vick's dog-fighting arrest broke in 2007, the media was awash in breathless insta-reports on pit bulls and black subcultures, as well as lots of poorly framed, zero-sum discussions of racism "versus" animal cruelty, civil rights "versus" animal rights. The feminist and animal ethics scholar Kathy Rudy has a good op-ed piece that addresses the problems with these facile dichotomies.

The dogs in the Vick case were very lucky in that they were seen as traumatized victims from the outset and ultimately granted a reprieve from group execution. (Coincidentally, Palin's pit bull quip comes just as Michael Vick's dogs are on national TV again, in not one but two specials about their rescue and rehabilitation.) But this efflorescence of public sympathy happened against a backdrop of persistent pit-phobia which imagines the breed as congenital killing machines unfit for human society. Pit bulls (and sometimes other bully and mastiff type dogs) are subject to breed-specific bans and disproportionate rates of euthanasia in public shelters. Sometimes the cyno-eugenics cavorts openly with human racism and classism, as this story about a recent breed ban in a Colorado suburb shows.

So how is it that, all of a sudden, we have a conservative white politician - the GOP's newly coronated spokesperson of "small town America" no less - claiming this hated urban beast as a mascot for "hockey moms"? In this Daily Show clip (about 3:10 in), Jon Stewart cuts to the quick: "one is unfairly maligned in spite of evidence that it is no worse than any other dog, and one is an artificial demographic that is no better or worse than any other mom." (Stewart, I just learned, is a pit bull person.)

I know this is just one soundbite, one small thing in a big election. But it does seem fitting that Palin would jokingly identify herself with an animal that's popularly imagined to be killers of other animals - and be more or less tone deaf to the reality of its systematic persecution by humans. After all, here's someone whose "executive experience" in human-canid relations includes support for aerial wolf gunning.