Dogs doing lists #18: Faithful Unto Death

1. Dogs marching down into the lower depths of City Hall, bellowing, “Down, down to Goblin Town,” as a passing Mike Bloomberg reflexively salutes in return.
2. Dogs gathering before a dusty television playing a continuous loop of an anti-Muslim propaganda film entitled I CAN SHOW YOU THE WORLD, and offering peals of adoration, crying out in alternation, “SHINING!” “SHIMMERING!” and “SPLENDID!”
3. Dogs adjusting an aesthetic phase sequence modulator as Michael Bloomberg asserts, “You know, Ray Kelly probably visits more mosques than a lot of other people—” and dialing up Ominous Propaganda of Official Spite, complete with organ music and subliminal images of a jauntily smoking Lynndie England, as Bloomberg concludes (this is an actual quote), “—who believe in the faith and practice there.”
4. Dogs racing through the tenements of the Bowery and glancing back at a cloud of boots and raised batons, and glancing back again as police whistles and shouts pierce the night, and rounding a corner before glancing back at the harrying spectacle of batons waving over shouting helmets, and stopping at long last, gasping, exhausted, ready to keel over, as the now miniature swarm of law enforcement agents tramples through the gutter and disappears into a puddle.
5. Dogs furiously feeding box after box of punched cards into a massive computer in the basement of One Police Plaza, and falling to the floor in utter adulation as the machine finally heaves out a stack of continuous feed paper from a dot matrix printer bearing the message RAMMING SPEED.
6. Dogs crouching expectantly inside of a cardboard cake at the farewell party for the CIA special assistant to the NYPD only to wake up several hours later in a testing facility as part of an ongoing MK-ULTRA trial, and noting with some remnants of conscious satisfaction before swooning under an LSD haze, “The cake was always already a lie.”
7. Dogs standing nude before Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as he carefully inspects each new recruit’s blurred, shimmering form through a pair of X-Ray Specs and murmurs contentedly, “IT’S JUST A DREAM, IT ISN’T REALITY.”
8. Dogs zooming slowly in on a photograph being displayed for sympathetic appeal by a NYPD spokesman of Richard Nixon’s pet Checkers, pictured in a state of obvious, belching drunkenness, eyes boggling uncomprehendingly askew.
9. Dogs searching the sky for a badge number as the enormous, smiling face of Osama bin Laden rears up past the curvature of the Earth and into the airspace over One Police Plaza.
10. Dogs dancing absently, singing, “New York City cops— New York City cops—” and dancing as the Earth cooks and the Hudson rises and floods Manhattan, singing, “New York City cops— New York City cops—” until civilization disappears, leaving only the oceans and the faint echo of “New York City cops— New York City cops—” while the universe fizzles out and disappears and an all-seeing Turtle-god bellows in a resonant baritone through the void, “THEY AIN’T TOO SMART.”

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