LEE KRAMER'S ROOM: With Views

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Kristi Noem’s dog killing is pure Southern gothic
A literary critic’s take on the South Dakota governor’s memoir, “No Going Back.”
https://wapo.st/4ajeMZZ (gifted)

Review by Ron Charles
May 10, 2024 at 11:16 a.m. EDT

Toward the end of Fred Gipson’s 1956 classic, “Old Yeller,” Travis says, “It was going to kill something inside me to do it, but I knew then that I had to shoot my big yeller dog.”

Reading that scene again yesterday, damn if I wasn’t struck by the same storm of tears that overtook me in seventh grade. It’s a devastating moment, full of anguish, permanently embedded in the memory of anyone who’s read the novel or seen the movie.

If this week is any guide, a dog-killing scene will be permanently embedded in our memories of Kristi Noem, too. On Tuesday, the South Dakota governor published a political memoir called “No Going Back.” But days before it appeared, everyone on planet Earth already knew about the passage in which Noem describes shooting her 14-month-old wire-haired pointer named Cricket.

What you can’t get from the 24/7 worldwide freakout, though, is how strange Cricket’s summary execution feels in context. That grisly story pops up in a chapter called “Will the World Awaken?” — right after Noem describes how much Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wanted to meet her and right before she lays out a series of clichés called “The Noem Doctrine” — e.g. “Fight to win.”

In the fight with Cricket, Noem won the battle but lost the war. Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Republican garden gnome Karl Rove called “No Going Back” an act of “stunning self-destruction.” As Donald Trump considers whom to pick for his vice president, “bragging about shooting her puppy in a gravel pit ended her hopes of being selected.”

As a literary critic, I must object. The description of Cricket’s Last Stand is the one time in this howlingly dull book that Noem demonstrates any sense of setting, character, plot and emotional honesty. Otherwise, it’s mostly a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge.

And far too many people have been obsessing about Noem’s fantastical tête-à-tête with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Come on — who among us hasn’t mistakenly believed that we once faced down the leader of the Hermit Kingdom? As I told Joseph Stalin, “We all make mistakes.”

But the central moment in Noem’s memoir is that transcendent scene of South Dakota gothic.

Picture it: Harvest season, “the Super Bowl of farming.” But it’s hunting season at their lodge, too. “Balancing both at full throttle is enough to break a family,” Noem says. She does everything possible to make sure friends from Georgia bag some pheasants, but Cricket — “out of her mind with excitement” — ruins everything. “I was livid,” Noem writes.

Then, on the way home from that disaster, Cricket attacks some beloved, irreplaceable chickens at a neighbors’ house. The mother — holding a baby, no less! — runs toward the melee, sobbing: “My chickens! No, not my chickens!” Noem pays for the birds and hauls Cricket into her truck. “She whipped around to bite me,” she says. “I hated that dog.”

Once home, Noem leads Cricket to the gravel pit and dispatches her. Then she spots a smelly old billy goat that she wants to kill, too. The first shot goes awry. She has to run across the pasture for more bullets “to finish the job.”

Construction workers taking a coffee break at her house witness all this carnage. “When they saw me heading their way,” Noem writes, “they put their cups down, got up and went back to work — in a real hurry.”

Gripping, right? Disturbing, even. Forget Travis and his beloved yellow cur. For a few glorious pages, Noem feels like a Flannery O’Connor character with tax cuts. Honestly, as someone who had to endure all 260 pages of “No Going Back,” I wish Noem had shot more dogs — or me.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”



As if Old Yeller is speaking from the grave;

Abigail Disney evokes Old Yeller in plea to reject Republicans after Kristi Noem kills dog
Exclusive: great-niece of Walt Disney issues appeal to appalled voters on behalf of Progressive Change Campaign Committee
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/10/kristi-noem-dog-abigail-disney

Evoking the classic Disney tearjerker Old Yeller, in which a family is forced to put down their beloved dog, the US film-maker and campaigner Abigail Disney exhorted voters to oppose the Republican party of Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor whose story of killing Cricket, a 14-month-old dog, shocked the world and seemingly dynamited her hopes of being Donald Trump’s running mate.

“My great-uncle Walt Disney knew the magic place animals have in the hearts of families everywhere,” Disney wrote in an email released by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC) and obtained exclusively by the Guardian.

“When he released Old Yeller, the heart wrenching story stayed with people because no one takes the killing of a family pet lightly.

“At least that’s what I thought until I read about potential Trump VP Kristi Noem shooting her family’s puppy – a story that has shocked so many of us.”......................


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