I often say that dogs are a lesson in unconditional love, and cats are a lesson in very conditional love.
Having pets in your household can mean a lot of things, and it does not necessarily mean having pets in your family. It can mean having beings who make you feel good about who you are because they love you so much.
Then there are Siamese cats.
My first and second cats were Siamese, and I loved them. They were just cats. One of them was very talkative, and had a particular way of telling me that he wanted a glass of water. (There was lots of water available, but he liked me pouring him a glass of water. That seemed reasonable to me. When I went off to college, my mother was not happy about his expectations.)
When we moved into this house we’d lost a couple of cats because of asshole neighbors in Cedar Park who let their dogs run free—those dogs killed cats and small dogs. Those dogs killed two of our cats. If St. Peter really is a gatekeeper to heaven, and really does ask that we explain why we deserve to go to heaven, I will point out that I did not take a baseball bat to the owner of those dogs.
We moved to a house on a busy street, and one of our cats was one-eyed, so we wanted to keep them inside. Jim built a catio (we didn’t know that was a thing)—a way for the cats to go outside and yet be in an enclosed space. (If memory serves, he initially used a structure he built so that I could try to grow kale and keep it from squirrels.)
After we moved here, our munchkin and I wanted a third cat. Around this time of the year in 2006 (or 2007?), we went to various cat rescue places to get a cat. Turns out that this is not a time of year when there are a lot of kittens up for adoption, but there was a Siamese of indeterminate age. (Definitely not more than a year, but how far under that was unclear.) She was affectionate, and just absolutely beautiful. I was puzzled as to why anyone would give her up. Our munchkin had been reading the Eregon series, and so she was named after a blue-eyed dragon.
And she was a Siamese, the kind I’d never had. She hated being picked up. She liked being around people, while in her own space. She would, at her will, come over to someone and get petted, perhaps even climbing onto a lap. Then, she was incredibly affectionate, as long there was no move made to hold her. When she wanted affection, she asked for it. Otherwise, she was not to be touched. As the catio got more elaborate (it now has three stages), she was clear about what part of it was hers.
When we moved to this house, we decided our cats would be purely indoor. We live on a busy street, a short distance from a creek that is a coyote highway—it’s just too dangerous. Every once in a while—because our house is built on clay that’s on limestone—the house shifts in such a way that doors don’t really close. That happened after we got back after seeing a play one evening, so it was late (for us). We realized she’d gotten outside. We caught glimpses of her behind the ac unit, and then in some bushes, and spent over 45 minutes crawling in bushes, trying to chivvy her to an open door. At some point, while crawling around, one of us looked up and saw her sitting in a window watching us, mildly interested. She was on the inside of the window. She’d long since taken advantage of one of the open doors.
Her space was the porch. A friend gave us a beautiful Morris chair, and we put it on the porch. She claimed it. When we went onto the porch (which we do a lot), she’d come and get scritches, and then go back to her chair, once she’d gotten what she wanted. She went blind about two years ago, and she stopped joining us for morning cuddles, but otherwise behaved no differently. She still went into her catio, made her way to the litterbox, checked in with us (as though she was granting us the pleasure of petting her) when we were on the porch, chivvied dogs off of any space she wanted, and was just the cat she wanted to be.
Shortly after we got her, I felt bad, and thought maybe we were the wrong family for her. I imagined that maybe her ideal home was a little old lady who had her as their only cat, and that we were failing her because there were other animals. I eventually came to think we were the perfect family for her. No one fucked with her. She got affection when she wanted it, hung out on the catio watching birds and squirrels when she wanted, claimed the most comfortable chair in the house.
I came to admire her clear sense of boundaries, her ability to ask for what she wanted, her clear sense of dignity, and her treating blindness as a minor issue. She really was a blue-eyed dragon.
Image from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/aww/comments/8ksn7q/this_is_why_we_cant_have_blinds/
Alex Jones is in the midst of a lawsuit regarding his promoting the conspiracy theory that Sandy Hook was a hoax, perpetrated by the parents of dead children. One of his attorneys (Mark Enoch) has tried to argue that Jones was engaged in “rhetorical hyperbole:” According to the LA Times,
“Maybe it’s fringe speech. Maybe it’s dangerous speech,” Enoch said after playing portions of an Infowars episode. “But it’s not defamation. That is rhetorical hyperbole at its core.”
Because it’s rhetorical hyperbole, Enoch is arguing, Jones can’t be held responsible for the actual damage his actual words did, including that members of Jones’ audience have relentlessly harassed and targeted people whose children were murdered by someone who should never have had access to a gun.
This attempt at deflecting responsibility–Jones isn’t responsible for the consequences of what he said because he was just engaged in rhetoric–is common in demagoguery. Jennifer Mercieca has noted that Donald Trump regularly relies on the rhetorical device “paralipsis”: a rhetorical “device that enables him to publicly say things that he can later disavow – without ever having to take responsibility for his words.”
That specific rhetorical figure is part of a larger strategy that people engaged in demagoguery almost always use, which is that they make claims in the public sphere for which they refuse to be accountable. It’s a kind of rhetorical “plausible deniability,” which is when someone in power wants to order something to happen while maintaining the cowardly escape hatch of being able to deny they actually wanted it. If things go wrong, or the act gets exposed and condemned, the person who made the command can say that I didn’t really mean that. One of the most famous instances (which James Comey alluded to in his testimony) is when King Henry II wanted Thomas Becket killed, but didn’t want to say so explicitly. So, instead of saying, “Go kill him,” he is supposed to have said, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Several of Henry’s courtiers understood what he meant, and did what they knew he wanted. His later attempt to claim that isn’t what he meant didn’t work, and he had to do penance.
Most people don’t do penance for it, as all of us know who have ever had a bad boss, cowardly co-workers or relatives who wanted to say things for which they wouldn’t be held accountable. They either engage in indirection, as did Henry, or they refuse to put things in writing, make sure there are no third parties on phone calls or at meetings, use dog whistles. Or, and this is really the most pathetic claim, they say it was “just rhetoric” or “I was just making a joke.” That is, they are claiming they didn’t literally mean what they literally said. They’re saying they meant to be understood figuratively, except they did really mean what they said. They just don’t want to be held accountable for it.
Imagine that I hit your car. And you said, “Hey, you hit my car,” and I said, “I was just kidding,” or “It was just driving hyperbole.” You’d say, correctly, that, regardless of my intentions, I hit your car, and I’m responsible for the damage.
Jones is trying to argue that, although his rhetoric totaled peoples’ cars, he isn’t responsible because he was engaged in rhetorical hyperbole. But he wasn’t. Hyperbole is deliberate exaggeration meant to show that the rhetor is so committed to a position (or the in-group) that s/he is willing to say irrational things. It’s only rhetorical exaggeration if the rhetor believes that the audience is recognizing it as such. The Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times (334) defines it as:
“A figurative device using self-conscious exaggeration to emphasize feelings and intensify rhetorical effect.” So, if hyperbole is a rhetorical figure, it’s self-conscious and deliberate exaggeration. If what Jones was saying about Sandy Hook was self-conscious exaggeration, and he didn’t mean it literally, then, once he realized that people were taking it literally, he would have made it clear that he was speaking figuratively. But he didn’t. So, either he did really mean it, or he was rhetorically reckless. It’s like giving someone a gun and telling them to use it for target shooting, but not taking it away (although you could) once you know they’re using it for threatening people.
Jones was trying to dodge responsibility for the harassment, but his attorney’s argument that it was rhetorical hyperbole makes him consciously responsible.
John Mulaney, in an episode of The Sack Lunch Bunch, answers a kid’s question about the show, about whether it’s sincere or ironic. He says something along the lines of, “If people love it, then it’s sincere; if people hate it, then it’s ironic.”
Except for a brief period in college when I was living places that wouldn’t allow cats, I have had cats my whole life. I love them. And anyone who lives with cats knows their enviable ability to recover quickly from disgrace. No matter what they’ve done—missed a jump, fallen off a table, gotten entangled in blinds—they immediately adjust themselves, look you straight in the eye, and very clearly say, “I meant to do that.” Mulaney is advocating the cat strategy for handling failure—refuse to admit it was failure, and just claim you meant it all along.
I think it’s hilarious when cats do it, but really sad when humans try to make the same move. Humans do it through claiming they were just joking or teasing or triggering the libs, but they weren’t. They were only joking when they realized they were hopelessly entangled in the blinds and look like fools.
In a culture of demagoguery, when large numbers of voters have abandoned thinking like citizens and have just become fanatically attached to doing harm to “the other side,” then a political figure who wants to succeed needs to out-fanaticize every other candidate. So, one candidate says, “We’ll hold firm on this,” and another says, “We’ll secede over this!” Perhaps that advocating secession was just intended as hyperbole, but if all the political figures of that group make the same claim, it’s no longer hyperbole. It’s a policy on the table. And then all the political figures are hopelessly entangled in the blinds. The responsible thing to do would be to try to walk it back. The cat approach to politics is to pretend you really meant it all along.
I’m completely willing to believe that Alex Jones promoted a narrative about the Sandy Hook shooting he didn’t believe, but that doesn’t make it rhetorical hyperbole. That makes it lying. He was willing to endanger the families of children killed at Sandy Hook because promoting a lie even he didn’t believe would profit him. It wasn’t rhetorical hyperbole; it was the nastiest version of Machiavellian careerism. He is claiming rhetorical hyperbole because he was just brave enough to put forward a narrative he liked, but not brave enough to own that he had put forward that narrative.
He’s a rhetorical coward.
I spend too much time crawling around dark corners of the internet arguing with assholes or watching them argue, and this is one strategy of trolls. They make claims they really mean, like the cat deciding to take on the blinds, and only claim it was all deliberate when they are thoroughly entangled and looking like idiots for what they said. A lot of trolls who suddenly claim they were just triggering the libs are just cats pretending they meant to get caught in the blinds. These people are argumentative cowards. They aren’t argumentatively brave enough to do the hard work of rationally supporting their arguments (which is why, if they really lose, they threaten violence—an admission that their position is unarguable). If you can’t make a real argument, you don’t have real arguments to make.
This is why I would not actually want any of my cats to be in a leadership position, even the one named Winston Churchill. They’re all about their dignity, and not about policy. Besides, all cats are anarchists.
There are other people who make claims from which they later walk back (sort of), but it isn’t the “Shit, this attacking the blinds thing was a bad choice.” These are people who use hyperbole or humor to test the waters.
People who are testing the waters say, “Segregation now! Segregation Forever!” or “I’ll go to Canada if this person is elected!” or “We’ll bomb them!” They want that policy, but they also want plausible deniability if it turns out that policy is unpopular.
These people are a different kind of coward. Unlike the cat who attacks the blinds and then is not willing to admit they made a bad decision, they’re deliberately cowardly about their own arguments. The cat is brave until things go wrong, and then a coward about its dignity. These people are cowards from the beginning. They know that they want to advocate a policy they can’t defend, so they make that argument in a way that maintains plausible deniability. They present a policy they want to support, all the while intending to disavow their advocacy of that policy if the reaction is too critical (something that happens all over the political spectrum).
And, if you ask me, that’s one thing that Alex Jones and Donald Trump have in common. Jones advocates conspiracy theories about a lot of things, perhaps something like anyone who disagrees with him, or any event that conflicts with his scapegoating narratives about who is good and who is bad. Trump dabbles in calling for violence against his critics, going for a third term, making the government openly single-party, inciting civil war. Neither is engaged in rhetorical hyperbole. I think we should consider that both have been testing the waters for just how far their base will go.
