Cats, Dogs And Systemic Extermination

There are people who are like dogs, and there are people who are like cats. When dogs are in charge, they want to make the cats into dogs. That of course does not work. Cats are cats; dogs are dogs. No matter how much the cat tries to become a dog, that is never possible.

I was once with a magnificent visual artist named Julia. She was married to a severely violent Reagan conservative, and he kept saying such things as “why can't you be like other wives.” She was a Christian, and she was praying to God that she become normal. Of course God did not grant that prayer. That is because God does not want us to fit whatever is considered normal in any given time and place. God wants three things from us: To be our best, to be righteous and to treat one another well. This man was doing none of the above, and his misuse of the Christian authority over his wife for completely wrong purposes made him by far the bigger sinner.

Religion aside, there is the issue of what happens when a cat chances to be born among dogs. This is usually a bad experience both for the cat and the dogs. A cat will never be a normal dog. Not if you threaten it, not if you bully it, not if you medicate it, not if you psychoanalyze it, not if you preach hellfire and tarnation. And even if it tries to be a dog, it will never become one. Which means that, no matter how much the cat attempts to disfigure itself so as to be pleasing to dogs, it will never be anything close to enough.

Now of course cats can be bad to dogs as well. I knew a young man in Melbourne who was very macho and wanted to join the military; but his parents, who were Melbourne liberals, did everything that they could to keep him from doing so. That is wrong; anyone who wants to join the military should be able to do so, even if he has a criminal record, for as long as he is willing to serve. I knew of a man in Oregon who was raised by hippies. He was of the astrological sign Taurus, and the people around him kept going on about how Tauruses are greedy. In neither case do we see rightful behavior. Cats being bad to dogs is just as bad as dogs being bad to cats.

However most of the abuses have been done by dogs to cats, and not the other way around. Dogs keep waging extermination campaigns against cats. In 1930s and 1940s it was them damn Jews. In 1950s it was them damn pinkos. In 1990s it was them damn perverts and sociopaths. Now it is them damn narcissists. The biggest problem with the latter concept is that it would pathologize the world's most important contributors. If it is narcissistic to seek great success or to have original ideas, then everyone who's had great success and everyone who has original ideas is a narcissist; which means that the world owes vastly to people with this disorder.

Another claim that the dogs like to make about the cats is that they lack empathy. The question to ask is, for whom? If I am a cat and you are a dog, I will not empathize with you and you will not empathize with me. You will see me as some kind of monster. I will however empathize a lot better with another cat.

In recent times, we have seen cat types of men getting treated as criminals and cat types of women - who are usually very beautiful - becoming punching bags for one or another kind of jerk. Both were seen as dangerous, and concerted efforts were made to disempower both and exterminate those whom they could exterminate. Many people thought that the cat phenomenon was unique to “the sixties generation.” So that when I came along acting like a cat, that was disturbing to many people. Of course I endured many attempts to wipe me off the face of the planet, but I was gifted with nine lives, maybe even more.

So how can cats survive in a dog world? Mostly by looking after one another. Cats need to learn to recognize one another and stick with one another and fight back all the attempts by dogs to exterminate them. I told some folks who were of cat persuasion that I will go into the dog world and scratch the dogs who attack them. But it will take more than that to make the cat species great.