"In Dog We Trust" in Time

My good friend Andrea called my attention to this article in TIME. "In Dog We Trust" is about Barack Obama's biggest post-election decision: what kind of dog to get.

Although I try not to let my politics intrude on this blog, I would like to weigh in on the side of mutts in this matter. As Americans, we're pretty much all mutts. No matter how far back you can trace your family in this country, it's a sure bet that there's more than one name Auntie Macassar quietly pruned from the family tree. And that you're swimming in a bigger gene pool than you know.

Hybrid vigor's what America's all about. Helping the least fortunate among us is what we do, at any rate when nobody's trying to scare us into cowering in our basements with the family silver. So come on, Barack, get a shelter dog, the more undefinable, the better.

Correction: In my story on Bruno a while back, I mistakenly identified him as an American Bulldog. I'm now informed that he's an Old English Bulldog. This, it turns out, is an example of what I'm talking about above: nothing about Bruno's dress, behavior or speech indicated that he was foreign-born, and I'm proud to say that I just took him for one of us. In a larger sense, we're all one of us. No word on whether Bruno's a Naturalized American Bulldog.