May 152011
 

When I was growing up our family pet was a West Highland Terrier (this is the white dog of Black & White Scotch – my father would always note he was the “pee-anist” in the family). Mozart was adorable, but dumb and could not be trained, find his way home, or remember the limits of his rope when there was a squirrel to be chased.

When offered cheese to do a trick, he would get so excited that his little brain would overload and he would ignore all prompts and do everything he knew at the same time; he would beg, roll-over, sit, and shake-a-paw simultaneously (comical to watch, but there was never any progress on this reward-for-learning effort).

The proponent is doing the same thing, they’re saying anything and everything, without thinking it all through and without ensuring it all makes sense. They just want their approval to proceed because then they expect we would have to accept whatever bad news turned out to be required – maybe barbed-wire fencing, strobe lights and sirens, too much noise and vibration, a look-out that isn’t at the water’s edge, blasted rocks piled up the side of a concrete cube as the best they can do to disguise this 120′-long poured-concrete ugliness, a 75′-long and 15′-high driveway retaining wall, a town’s economy ruined because people won’t come to see where the falls used to be, a dangerous water intake scaring people from using the town docks, and on and on.

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