Little tooth, what are you doing?!

When Katerina and I visited her family in Ukraine in 2012, we met with her paternal grandparents. It was my first experience with Ukrainian cognac, which was quite good and sadly I have not had it since.

The cognac wasn’t the only thing from that visit that sticks in my head though - they had a little wiener dog that was muscly as all hell, which might be standard for wieners, I don’t know. This dog was a little noodle of swole. He would run around and, much to the dismay of his owners, would hump the guests’ legs. This would prompt grandma to bring out a spatula and spank the little dog on the bum.

She would exclaim:

“зубчик, що те робиш?” Zubchik, what are you doing?

“удорів?” Have you gone crazy?

The first time it happened, one could chalk it up to “Ah, it’s a young dog and guests don’t come that often.” but it happened a few times during our obid with them. It became clear to me that not only was this a common occurrence for them, but it also does nothing.

Katerina commented - “The dog has no idea what’s going on - it just gets spanked occasionally and it gets to hump occasionally.” Easily one of the most hilarious and memorable insights. She empathized with animals quite readily and also was quite talented at poking holes in the ways that people try to wrest order out of chaos and in doing so settle into a bizarre rhythm that doesn’t actually do anything.

My mom sent a voice note about a funny memory she had - the headmistress at our elementary school called for her to come pick up my sister. When my mom arrived, the headmistress was smacking my sister on the face and head, and when my mom questioned what was happening, the headmistress sent both my mom and sister off. On the way home, my mom asked my sister:

“ఎందుకు ఆవిడా కొట్టింది?” “Why did that lady hit you?”

My sister responded “ఏమో “ “IDK, for some reason”.

Apparently one exam day, I had clothes that weren’t ironed well and I got smacked - my mom wanted to oppose it but she didn’t and felt terrible - “Oh no, he’s going to get poor grades now” - but apparently I aced my exams that day anyway. I think I also ingested this idea that “Yeah sometimes you get smacked and you don’t know why and that’s just it, let’s go play.” Which doesn’t seem like all that terrible of a philosophy for me personally.

I think it’s much worse of a philosophy for the headmistress to have though. The headmistress was one of those straight out of a British convent school types. Discipline was ensured through regular beatings without reason in those environments, and she brought that same philosophy to our school. The goal of an education was not simply to learn, but to learn obedience, to cow to power. My sister apparently never learned this lesson and was frequently smacked and refused to learn a lesson from it. She gets to do what she wants. Occasionally she gets smacked. The school embraced a style of learning that completely ignored the sheer abundance of curiosity and sense of adventure someone like my sister possesses. I learned to hide my indiscretions a bit better. By high school, my parents rarely knew of my violent outbursts.

Perhaps this topic is more in the forefront of my mind because of this recent article about the real Lord of the Flies - children left to fend for themselves on an uninhabitable desert island. In the absence of harsh convent discipline, these teenage boys - the avatar of unrestrained libidinal energy in American pop culture - self-organized and cared for each other. All that pursuit of discipline and fear of our behavior in the absence of an overarching power - is it justified?