Vice President Al Gore shared the billing at this week’s City Council meeting with Alderman Lorraine Dixon’s dog control ordinance. The dogs were considerably more interesting.
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Gore became the first sitting vice president ever to address the council. He bored everyone to tears with a speech that took some shots at Republicans and proved that his staff can drop names of Chicago neighborhoods into a canned lecture. You could almost picture the speech transcript with “Mad-Libs” emblazoned at the top, sprinkled with blank lines above labels like “(successful Daley program here).”
“In response to Alderman Steele’s observations,” said Burke, “I doubt that any of the gangbangers are going to go out and buy insurance for their dog anyway. But I must say I’m reminded of that old Inspector Clouseau movie, where Inspector Clouseau walks in to the hotel counter and there’s a man standing there with a dog, and Clouseau says, ‘Does your dog bit?’” Here Burke did a credible Peter Sellers imitation. “And the man says no. Clouseau reaches down to pet the dog, and suddenly the dog bites him right on the hand. And Clouseau turns to the man and he says, ‘I thought you said your dog does not bit!’ The man says, ‘That is not my dog!’”
The dog debate broke for Gore’s speech and resumed with a sometimes teary Alderman Burton Natarus, who defended the dogs. Natarus took special issue with the ordinance’s requirement to muzzle vicious dogs. “What is the first thing you do with a dog to make ’em vicious?” he thundered. “Ya muzzle ’em. Ya muzzle ’em. That is the first thing you do with a dog when you wanna start making ’em mean. Ya muzzle ’em.”
