*
The year is 2024…and you’re in the post-nuclear rubble with sparse ammunition and only your psychic dog for company—he finds you women to rape, you find him food.
Could you imagine a better life?
But…isn’t it 2024 now? Yes—and remember, there’s still time.
If you want to understand the generation war in 1960s America, the divide between groovy chicks and uptight squares, read the short story Vic and Blood—later made into a 1975 film, a bad film, under its original title, as A Boy and His Dog (bad film, better title—hence that is how I will refer to the story from now on).
The idea is better than the execution, as with many such things—it’s the idea that appeals, the vision. Just you and your psychic dog amid the post-civilisational rubble. It’s a variant, a more bleak variant, on every man’s aspiration to own a small plot of land or to live as a mobile hunter who follows herds of animals.
And who says dogs aren’t psychic? When I started to read this story about a boy and his psychic dog my dog came upstairs and sat with me—he never does that normally. Perhaps he’s just waiting, waiting for nuclear war, for his telepathic abilities to manifest.
But A Boy and His Dog isn’t any good as a story—it’s badly written, it’s meretricious and nasty. I mean, I’m pretty gross—but even this story was too crude for me.
At the end, it must be said, the boy feeds his new girlfriend to his hungry dog—so the story’s metanarrative is “bros before hoes”, a story as old as the The Iliad (sometimes resolved in favour of hoes, sometimes for the bro party).
His girlfriend is really a square, you see—she comes from underground, from a model re-creation of Topeka, Kansas (now reduced to about 22k nuclear-sheltered denizens; Dorothy, she not there).
These people are all bible-believing Christians, very dull—they eat ultra-processed food, freeze-dried for decades before the war. And they’re all frightfully polite (liars); it’s a contrast to the topside world where the boy and his dog usually roam—with dirty clothes, dirty mouthes, and dirty thoughts.
So the boy is meant to be a laid-back cat—he’s chill. He eats “real food”, when he can get it, from the ruins of the supermarkets. He watches pornographic films in the open air. He can go where he wants, when he wants—he can see the stars and the moon, not the artificial polished metallic sky of Topeka (occult).
People mean many things by the word “real”, but in the register of hippies and squares “real” means dirty—its corollary is “authentic” (the third world, scabies, delhi-belly—all authentic, not freeze-dried). Don’t be so uptight, man!
You see in the “two worlds” a reversal—because the God-fearing folk of little Topeka are actually “good”, anodyne and inoffensive, but are here presented as being “in hell” (i.e. underground), whereas the boy and his dog actually live in a kind of hell, filled with rape and murder and hunger, but that world is presented as “heaven” (topside).
Indeed, there’s trouble in paradise—because the denizens of Topeka are slowly being sterilised by their hermetic environment. So they send a girl, remarkably clean and with an actual second name, unheard of in the totally atomised topside world, a world without families, to seduce a stud to revive the population.
And that is how the boy acquires the girlfriend—who is rather concerned that he loves her—that he later feeds to his only true friend.
So there’s an idea here that civilisation and “goodness” are wholesome but, rather like the proverbial “white bread”, also sterile and tasteless.
You need “the demon seed” from above (below)—from hell, from nature, from the pagans (in Christian terms) to actually fertilise people. And so you bring down this obscene and violent kid to try to rejuvenate your dying civilisation…
So you see why this story was a hit for college students for many years—because their situation is rather similar to “the boy’s”, in that they’re away from “Topeka” for the first time and so they’ve been cast into the world, and the experience is both frightening and obscene but also provides exhilaration.
“Freedom”, like “reality”, is another tricky word that could mean anything, and in A Boy and His Dog you see the tension between what the left means by freedom and what the right means by freedom.
The right means “self-restraint that leads to higher opportunities, whether material or spiritual” and the left means “the ability to do anything you want, when you want—a situation that should be facilitated by the state, so that all can do as the rich do (whatever they want, supposedly)”.
The boy has leftist freedom—he can do whatever he wants, stay up past his bedtime or rape women—whereas the Topekans have rightist freedom, through diligent preparation and self-restraint they have survived and thrived, even during a nuclear war (with guidance from the LORD and the wisdom of Providence…).
One freedom is destructive and chaotic—ultimately, it cannot build anything beyond the individual, the boy is totally atomised (beyond his dog, who could be read, per traditional esoteric reversal, as “his god”—his genius, his daemon, his consciousness projected or merged into his fluffy companion; a dog that may or may not actually be able to speak and think—though I take the dog to be a real psychic myself).
The other freedom is constructive and ordered—it’s all about the idea that if you abnegate yourself to a higher structure that you will be rewarded with a certain share of the collective stability (represented in part by wealth) so achieved when one man sacrifices his freedom in exchange for greater freedom (e.g. you could never build an aeroplane on your own, but if you agree to work as a shop assistant in a dutiful way you can afford a holiday on a plane thanks to the collective self-negation of many people).
The tension between these two aspects to freedom is why the “Robinsonade” remains so popular—and A Boy and His Dog constitutes a post-nuclear Robinson Crusoe story, no doubt (the dog is his “Man Friday”).
It’s because “the other side” demands to be fed, which is why men like films about gangsters and pirates and men stranded on desert islands; because although these depict tough and primitive conditions, these also represent that former primitive freedom that society and religion destroy (magic precedes religion—a man is alone with his “dog” [god], without priestcraft).
A Boy and His Dog represents the tension between the two sides to freedom—which were both brought to a height (a Haight-Ashbury) in late 1960s America.
And, as the story suggests, total order is, in the end, sterile—and so it must be re-inseminated with fresh “demon seed” from above (below); and the flipside to that is that total chaos doesn’t have love, doesn’t have the soft domesticity that is represented by the girl that the boy eventually eats with his dog (god)—in what could be seen as a “love-feast”, just as the early Christian “love-feasts” (Mass, consumption of the body) were seen to be orgiastic or cannibalistic (I love you so much I could just eat you up).
**
The book is also about the Jews. You say everything is about the Jews—you’re obsessed. Look, some of the greatest men in history have been obsessed with the Jews—and, anyway, my dog told me to write this bit. He’s in telepathic communication with me, and he also ate my homework.
Harlan Ellison, the author, is a Jew—and the Jews think they’re god; or, in this case, think they’re a dog. The dog is meant to be the Jews—because he sees his role as the exasperated “teacher” to the boy. He retains all the pre-war knowledge that has been lost in the nuclear storm—he is the wise teacher, a teacher unto the nations (Ellison also uses the term “gentiles” at one point).
This is how the Jews see themselves—as a hyper-intelligent psychic dog that has to try to reform and teach the gentiles. In some respects, being a dog, being unable, per the storyline, to hunt for themselves (due to their enhanced psychic abilities) they have to chide and teach and instruct people who can actually hunt (occasionally procuring women for them, in exchange for scooby-snacks).
Whether or not a dog is a parasite is debatable—in strict terms, no; but there are some people, notably cat owners, who think so.
Now, as noted, the Jews are under the influence of the number “8” (don’t ask me why, it’s Chaldean numerology). The “8” on its side is two circles, it’s eternity, it’s both good and evil (order and chaos). So the Jews split two ways: they’re either destructive and perverse; or they’re religious scholars who are misunderstood (Jesus)—and Ellison is in the former category (he’s a perverse teacher, or a “bad teacher”).
You can tell because he literally wrote a novella called Satan is My Ally—another story, The Wife Factory, received the strapline ‘Call Her Satan’; and did I mention he produced another tale called The Abnormals? That’s what all popular culture in the West, Jewish popular culture, extols—to be abnormal.
So Ellison was an evil teacher—he was the Jew in his evil personification, the “evil dog”.
That’s why A Boy and His Dog is so ugly—why the language is so bad, and why it’s so badly written. Indeed, Ellison once punched a teacher at university who criticised his writing—then sent him every story that he ever published.
But that professor was right.