Cats rule everything around me
(tangential; 'Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers' merits an open minded listen)
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say you can understand Americans’ politics through their relationship to cats, and pets in general, as nurturing-surrogates.
It explains a lot—not all, and probably not most, but a lot—about how the US and the West generally structures everything from economic and housing policy to immigration laws and criminal justice systems, and it’s exactly because it seems unserious and too pat an explanation that most people won’t hear it out.
JD Vance, some years ago, made a remark about society being bent towards the whims of so-called childless cat-ladies, referring to the stereotype of women who don’t marry or have children getting a bit deranged for want of something to nurture and love them back. Stereotypes have a kernel of truth to them.
No thinking, honest adult is bowled over by this observation about cat-ladies or why it’s a trope. If you have lived enough life (read: are over 25) you will have seen some women who don’t marry eventually acquire small, dependent, cute, cuddly, straightforwardly-cared-for, loving animal companions. It’s plain as day.
It’s considered impolite to observe this obvious child-surrogacy, especially in the company of such women, because it calls attention to the (for whatever reason) manifest failure to attract a mate and start a family. Podcasts and social media rudely impinge on our antediluvian tree-swinging primate instincts, and we no longer have the refined and rigid Victorian (or other) mores to keep it all quieted.
And just in case women seem too hard done by, analogous observations exist regarding the expectation of male employment and the diversion of video games.
But this doesn’t mean the observation isn’t true, and another thing any honest adult knows: it’s those which get at painful truths that sting the most. The cacophony of anger—though, by its feminine nature, entirely virtually expressed—that followed when Vance’s quip was dredged up has turned into everything from Kamala Harris campaign merchandise to a pointedly signed endorsement from the biggest, most popular pop star in the world, Taylor Swift. These are things that actually count for winning elections for the office of the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, including its nuclear deterrent.
Memorably, Donald Trump in his own 2016 resurfacing of off-the-cuff, funny, and of course true remarks, inspired plenty of merchandising and big social campaigns of his own: the Pussy March and attendant hats that occupied many menopausal women. Oddly, (this is just an amateur history and anthropological observation you’ll have to take as fact) the hats and gestures and verbiage gradually shifted from the grossly anatomical to the more delicately feline.
The caricature is simply inescapable. Cat ladies! The New Yorker’s cover artist, Adrian Tomine, who produced this classic work, was taken to task for his cat:
One can reform the quote from Solzhenitsyn on the nature of Soviet deception to aptly describe the nature of US democracy and its institutionally ruled life today:
”We know that they are cat ladies, they know that they are cat ladies, they even know that we know they are cat ladies, we also know that they know we know they are cat ladies, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are cat ladies too as well, but they still keep cats. In our country, the cat has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry.”
Nothing more acutely underlines this more than the crisis of Springfield, Ohio where TWENTY THOUSAND HAITIANS have been airdropped like Amazon packages onto a town of just 60,000 Americans and a poverty rate of nearly 25%.
The narrative (nota bene: circumstantial evidence does in fact point towards Haitians often eating accessible wayward fauna) of Haitians scooping up Mr. Whiskers and Pumpkin and Mittens and Luna and wringing their little necks and chopping off their paws and yanking off their tails and ripping out their guts and EATING them is just so comically lurid and horrifying that it couldn’t be anything other than a viral story. Adding to the hilarity is the (broader phenomenon that involves more stuff but especially this) black-twitter slang of ‘eating cat’ having become something kind of in vogue among sexually vocal young women on the internet inspiring songs and memes. It’s *perfect*. As Vish Burra put it, if the childless cat ladies still believe in Refugees Welcome and No Human is Illegal and vote for Kamala, then they may end up cat-less, too.
Is it happening? In exactly the way some residents claimed? Wrong question.
Does it paw at the American psyche and meow loudly? You Betcha.
It’s no coincidence, either, that many of the people actually functionally involved in the Haitian Migration Situation, are also women. Without getting into the weeds, the people most animated by the issue of refugee welfare are women and the people who are most concerned about animal welfare are women.
In a way, these women, and Marvena Twigg, the (very) well paid head of NYAP, and the legions of other women in the NGO-Refugee-Employment complex are not in any way deviating from the natural script. What is it they’re doing, really?
Procuring the room and board of less than independent people
Transporting those people around to and fro their economic life
Organizing and managing the procurement of household supplies
Etc.
Does this, uh, maybe, remind you of anything?
It sure does seems to remind a lot of actual mothers (including those with cats!) of motherhood. Don’t you think it “reminds” women without kids of that, too?
I won’t abuse you with my typical graphs and charts, but I think you know where I’m headed with this. Like a conservation of momentum, women go longer than ever (with an increasing percentage on track to go on forever) without children, but their biology certainly doesn’t wait around for their careers and social status and whatever else to be ready for them to have those children, so those nurturing, loving, caring impulses are redirected onto surrogates.
Is this so wild a claim? Returning to an earlier aside about childless men and video games, American Conservatives (in a preachy way) and Chinese Communists (in a bold and unapologetic way) recognize the existence of some kind of circuitry in young men that is very easily beguiled by video games. And what are those games concerned with? Largely mimicry of work and warfare.
What did the press—but even the countless refugees themselves—call Angela Merkel (a woman with no children) for her stewarding of Syrians and Afghans and Senegalese, etc. into Germany? ”Mutti” Does that need a translation?
I don’t know how any society gets out of this particular spiral. What seems like “the immigration” issue is clearly related to the “marriage rate and birth rate” issue, and thus abortion as well. We know which political party young (and *not* so young…) unmarried women — whom our society produces at pace now—prefer on that issue. It’s the war of everyone else against Kelly from HR:
But, where there’s a will…
…perhaps there’s a way.