The Happy Earth

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(From the Cub Club Bedtime Stories collection)

Deep in the Milky Way stood the Happy Earth. This planet had been blessed with water, oxygen, and carbon-based food sources. These wonderful features bestowed upon the planet life-forms like us polar bears, which is why it was labeled “The Happy Earth” by its glad-to-be-alive human inhabitants.

One day a few thousand years ago, a human entrepreneur noticed that the Happy Earth had grown colder, and it was difficult for many entrepreneurs to find food to sell. He placed a small carpet on the ground and knelt down to speak directly to the planet.

“Happy Earth, why do you let us starve in the cold? This is unpleasant and unfair.”

The Earth pondered for a while, almost falling asleep in the process. Then he spoke: “Gentle Entrepreneur, take the water from my rivers and flood the great plains to grow more food than you need. You can then sell the surplus and buy status symbols.”

The entrepreneur looked confused: “But Happy Earth, I can’t change the flow of your waters. This would destroy the fish and animals who depend on the sanctity of your mighty waters.”

The Happy Earth replied: “Do as I say. Redirect the flow of my great rivers.”

And the entrepreneur did so, and there was much food for all. Of course, this new food was mainly starch-based and the people who grew it had to remain sedentary, but the entrepreneur and his associates got to buy a lot of status symbols with the surplus.

A few decades later, the entrepreneur panicked when the Happy Earth flooded a large agricultural zone, endangering the lives of an entire civilization and its consumers. He placed his new designer carpet on the ground and knelt down to speak directly to the planet once again.

“Earth, why do you damage the very agricultural zones that you have counseled us to create? Now, many thousands of people have no food, and these agricultural workers have long lost the ability to hunt and forage.”

The Happy Earth spoke with much sadness: “Gentle Entrepreneur, take the sand from my mountains and use this sand to block the waters where hence they flood.”

Once again, the entrepreneur hesitated: “But if I remove so much soil, this will create great scars on your beautiful complexion.”

But as with the previous suggestion, the Happy Earth insisted that the entrepreneur do as he says, and all of his mountains were subsequently flattened in order to block all the rivers at strategic points. The civilization was saved, and its population doubled every few years, which lead to many new status symbols for the entrepreneur.

This process of technology-failure leading to more and more invasive technology continued until the Happy Earth was a giant, lifeless, grey orb with very little complex life on it. Only us polar bears and a few aggressive human entrepreneurs remained.

The entrepreneur, on his deathbed, knelt one last time to ask the Happy Earth for another bit of advice on how to progress. By now, the carpets under his feet were laden with gold and platinum strands. “Happy Earth, what will we do now that you have no more rivers, mountains, air, or food?”

The expensive rug beneath him then trembled as another human dug his way out of the underground bunker he had been living in for many years.

“Gentle Entrepreneur, I’m not really the Earth. I’m another human entrepreneur like yourself. I was just trying to motivate you to do exciting things because I was so bored in my cave.”

And then they both died of heat exhaustion.

Amen.

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The Frank Mendacity School of Business

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As He arranges His leather briefcase and lemon Perrier on the teak podium, the sound of cascading coins brings a smile to FMJ’s face: another enterprising student has hacked the vending machine next to His classroom.

Thanks to a billion-shekel donation to the school, Free Market Jesus is “the Passover Textiles part-time Business professor” at the Frank Mendacity School of Business of the University of Judea. The metallic clanging of a vending machine jackpot reminds Him of His own freshman days as a Rhodes Scholar in the very same school.

Today, He’s delivering His first lecture of the school’s reputable Lying 101 course. (Course description: “Learn to lie like you really mean it! This 6-credit survey course will take you on a rollercoaster ride through the exciting world of lies and misrepresentation.”)

Many of the slick, new undergrads use the opportunity to ask The Star Prof some questions about His many published works.

Solomon: “A lot of businessmen who’ve tried to compete with You say that You don’t allow competition – that You ruthlessly lobby to have their enterprises banned or shunned by lobbying and bribing local governments that You often own. And the leftwing media has said that You maintain suspicious links to organized crime associates – a group who call themselves the disciples – who use pressure tactics against competitors that are sometimes illegal. Is this true? And if so, is it good business strategy?”

FMJ: “As I have written in many of My books, ‘I am the Life.’ This means that no one else gets to have one when I’m around. It’s My entitlement, and I’m proud of it. Next question.”

Lot: “Professor Freemarket, in Your latest Op Ed article in the Judea Times, You say that You bought your nephew an Armani so that he could experience some of what You were denied as a young messiah. And yet You mentioned in Your first book “Glory to Me in the Highest” that You got Your first Armani when You were seven. Is this the kind of lying we should be imitating?”

FMJ: “What money-making purpose would a lie like this one have? No. It was true.

I bought FMT his first Armani for his third birthday. But I, on the other hand, didn’t get My first Armani until I was seven. That’s four long years of self-esteem damage I had to endure because of My negligent parents. I just don’t want Free Market Thomas to suffer like I did.

Now for next week, we’ll be reverting to a more standard lecture format. I want everyone to read the first chapter of Cannibalism and Dollars and pay special attention to the sidebar essay on page 11 regarding the importance of placing strict limits on public education. See you then!”

Abruptly, twenty minutes before class is scheduled to end, Free Market Jesus pushes the pink button and jumps into a get-away chute inside a trapdoor on the stage behind the podium. As His lilac cape disappears, all that lingers for his fans/students/apostles to ponder are a cloud of purple glitter and the the sweet smell of pecuniary acumen.

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The Davids

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We all know what we’ve seen in the press about David and Goliath: innocent David poised with his flimsy slingshot ready to take down the seemingly invulnerable Goliath. But of course in reality, no man can accomplish this kind of feat alone. To draw accurate conclusions from this event, it’s important to look at what was happening behind the media smokescreen.

Months before that famous moment when David heroically took down a giant, the Daveed Gang began to work relentlessly on this project, and quickly scored a fund-raising coup, cutting a juicy deal with the Royal Bank of David. The financial elders at that institution agreed to cover all costs of Operation Goliath in exchange for some positive branding for their bank.

Flush with cash, the Daveed Gang then hired goons to hound Goliath’s family, kidnapping his daughters, killing family pets, and phoning them day and night to keep the Goliath family jittery and weak. Back then, there was no call-display for screening calls, so the harassment wore everyone down – especially kind-hearted family man Goliath himself.

The Gang then paid the David Times to run forged ‘reports’ about what an immoral misanthrope Goliath was, and many well-paid media personalities raised questions about his legitimacy as a human being. “Are giants worth anything in God’s eyes?” was the provocative theme of a one-hour talk show watched by millions. Goliath himself refused to appear on the show, but was visually shaken up by it a few weeks later when caught off guard by paparazzi. Likewise, weeks before the duel, David-media ran articles exaggerating the strength and aggressiveness of Goliath, never mentioning his Type A diabetes or the kidney he gave up to his sick aunt.

The general public was hoodwinked into thinking that it was the slingshot that brought him down. Physics and biology easily demonstrate that this is incorrect. Goliath was actually poisoned a few hours before the fight by a Daveed Gang operative. Tiny-but-well-connected David just provided a well-oiled protagonist to the narrative that the Royal Bank of David used to change public perception of their usurious operations.

Though poison and a tragic fall finally killed him, in actual fact Goliath had been brought down long before the fake fight with David. Meanwhile, the conclusion that many people have drawn from this event – that a single small person is capable of bringing down someone much larger – completely ignores the role of The Daveed Gang, organized crime, and the Royal Bank of David.

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Eskasoni Water

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(dedicated to all cowboys)

“Steee-rike!”

It’s the beginning of the seventies, and I’m eight while my little sister Shirley is six. In the middle of July, the old man is playing a ball tournament in the Eskasoni Indian Reservation. The Steel City Sixpax are playing three games against a Mi’qmac team at the same provincial skill level. And even though the reservation is an isolating half-hour drive from any white suburbs, the Rotary Club calls this a community-building activity. I guess the idea is to build community by beeping your car horn whenever a white guy scores a homer against the injuns.

Baseball has always been an important part of my childhood. My earliest childhood memory is of being punished because I wouldn’t “sit still and watch my father play” when I was three and a half.

Back in those days, people used to say that male homosexuality was caused by having an invisible father and a bitch mother. Unfortunately, I had both of those things, but the stories about what caused homosexuality changed before I came out of the closet. By the time I turned 17, gays were supposed to embrace their diversity, and not question why they got such a poor upbringing or try to overcome it to start a family. The 80s were a decade of abortions and permanent bachelorhood, and having been told to “sit still while other men play” was probably my own personal abortion moment.

One of my dad’s ballplayer friends is a skinny and talkative goon type named Victor Armstrong. He’s visited our suburban bungalow a few times, and once, when I was six, he showed me how to do card tricks and some easy magic. Victor’s not the best ballplayer on the team, but the Sixpax keep him around for morale and because he organizes off-season poker tournaments.

Hard times in the Maritimes

Like many other economically-depressed small towns, Steel City has hundreds of baseball diamonds that are the result of Recreation grants that were designed to help locals get enough weeks to qualify for Employment Insurance. Most of these pogey parks don’t have drinking fountains because outdoor plumbing is too expensive. And it’s the same in Eskasoni: four diamonds, zero drinking fountains. So both teams resourcefully bring their own water coolers.

Exploring the land around Eskasoni Ballfield, Shirley and I find grassy meadows, beaches, and woodlands, and run so much that we get tired and thirsty. So we decide to get a drink of cold water from the orange water cooler on my dad’s team bench.

Shirley goes first. She carefully separates one of the conical white cups from the pile, and places it under the spout. But before she can get any water to come out, Victor Armstrong is standing over us, menacingly frowning with his forehead crunched up. “Shoo!” he yells at us, as if we were wild dogs. Shirley looks at him confused and scared, but he just repeats “Shoo! Get the hell out of here!” even more loudly, and motions violently with his hands for us to scram while flashing his shiny white shark teeth. Shirley starts to cry, so I grab her arm and we run away.

“Steee-rike Twooo!”

Shirley says between sobs that she wants to see Ma, so we find the playground where Ma’s smoking with another player’s wife, and tell her what happened. When Victor sees us chatting with a white woman, he comes over and explains: “Oh my God. I thought they were two little squaws. I didn’t know they were yours. Sorry ‘bout that, Kass.”

Ma takes a long drag from her DuMaurier King Size, and shakes her head: “That’s what youze get for getting’ so dark this summer. He’s right.” Embarrassed, she tells Victor not to worry, and then tells us to go sit in the car until the game’s over. I suddenly realize that our Acadian skin tans deeper than most of the Scottish and Irish people who play on my dad’s team, and that this is a liability.

““Steee-rike Threeee! Yuuuuu’re out!!”

My sister and I liked to think of ourselves as Malibu Barbie tanned, rather than as two little squaws. See, Steel City summer is usually two months of rain which is perfect for playing Barbies and watching TV, but this summer’s been sunny for a change. I guess that’s why we were ethnic-cleansed by Victor Armstrong. No hard feelings. We chose to tan, after all.

Talking in the car

On our way back to the car, we meet up with two Mi’qmac kids our age -a brother and sister – and ask them to come with us to talk privately in our parent’s massive Ford Gran Torino. They tell us that they saw what happened, so we sit and share personal stories about growing up. We learn a few words of Mi’kmaq, and share a few words of our remnants of French. The girl – Pamela – tells us we can drink water from the Mi’qmac cooler if we want to. But after what’s happened, we decide to just hang tight and wait until we get home.

Even though my mother agreed with him that day, Victor Armstrong never visited our house again after the ball tournament. And the Steel City Fruit will live his entire life without enjoying a card trick, a magic act, or playing in any kind of poker tournament because, well, those are ethnic-cleanser activities.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

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The Trouble with Dogs Today

- by Fluffy Canofelini

“As I lie on the TV cleaning my head with a wet paw,
more viscerally than ever, I know who my family is.”

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Though born and raised as a dog myself, I’ve noticed a lot of problems with domesticated doghood during my tenure as a personality in catmedia.

Bad for Nature

Descended from the meekest wolves that early humans were able to enslave with treats, we dogs are a human-engineered variety of a species that has strayed far from nature and has had its predatory instincts perverted.

For example, hunting dogs will bite into a wild moose or deer and then leave it to die, not hanging around to feed off of it or to share with the packs that wolves hang with. The injured animal will wander around for days or weeks, slowly dying of infection and blood loss. Meanwhile, the dog will be hungry a few hours later and may attack another deer and leave it to slowly die in pain as well.

We no longer know how to hunt effectively or sustainably, but retain a semblance – a perversion -  of our predator past. Because of this, we dogs are a menace to our environment.

Catmedia personality Fluffy Canofelini

Bad for Ourselves

We dogs have been so dumbed down by our forced inbreeding, that we will actually eat ourselves to death.  Trained to respond to treats the way that human children do – as a symbol of love and security – we domesticated dogs, unlike the original wolf, will eat treats until our stomachs explode.

Likewise, because we are so often forced to be the entertaining slaves of another species, we’re trained to do useless tricks that will not help us survive. If the human “master” of a human house, for whatever reason, loses his senses and sets the house on fire, we domestic dogs might try to save ourselves by… chasing a stick, giving our paw, or rolling over and playing dead. Perhaps the last trick is actually the most useful one that humans have taught us.

Franken-species

Dogs are the original GMOs, having been inbred and genetically engineered over the course of many generations. And to add insult to injury, we mutant by-products of inbreeding are routinely tortured (humans call this training) in order to get us to further abandon any instinctive skills or behavior we may have retained through the inbreeding process.

We unlearned how to survive, and were re-educated to be obedient instead. Not only does this render us entirely dependent on our human hosts, but it also gives us a value system that hurts other dogs who are less obedient and more survival oriented. This is why chained dogs will often bark angrily at a dog that has no chain around his neck: the domesticated dog has learned to detest real freedom, and instead, associates human-given rewards with success and survival.

This is a perversion, of course, and I can still recall my father coming back in the house with blood all over his fur after having picked a hateful fight with our Collie neighbor, Kipper. Kipper’s only crime: being allowed to stay outside for hours at a time without a leash.

What goes around…

Of course, human elites have performed a similar crime against other humans as well, rendering most of them survival-illiterate just like us domesticated dogs. And this may provide the only glimmer of hope. If humans die off before we do due to their own inbred perversion of nature – their nation states, their special super-breeds, and their magical ideologies and myths… if we modified wolves outlive our Dr. Frankenstein torturers, we might finally be free to mate with whomever we want. And then let’s hope we can still retrieve our natural balance and find our way back to a natural and sustainable wolfhood.

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Qaturday Empathy

First they came for the goats:
Subjective Exclusion and the search for an enemy to rob

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Many cats ask me why the humans seem to be eager to go extinct – why they play Russian Roulette with technologies that they don’t really understand or control. This leads the inquisitive feline to ponder: why have humans allowed unnecessary complication to imperil the simple and natural process of surviving?

It might help us felines to comprehend these giant, resource-vacuuming, human nihilists if we interact a bit with their texts. Not too much, of course; we don’t want to be numbed and dumbed down by texts like human readers are. But let’s look at a few human texts at a safe distance to find out where these destructive beasts get their insane marching orders.

Goat Sacrifice Texts

One human text that a cat might find interesting – because it relates to other species – is the goat sacrifice text. It’s important because it’s a recurring trope in the Abrahamic texts of many power-mad human societies.

The Abrahamic texts include stories where God asks a human to kill a goat simply to make a point. For example, God (the superhuman who fabricated the universe like a craftsman) will ask a human to kill his son. And then, just before the father human’s axe hits the neck of his child, God will dramatically change his orders, and tell him to kill “this goat” instead. This eleventh-hour switch is supposed to provide some kind of relief, and this feeling of relief is supposed to convince recalcitrant human readers to obey God’s orders. After all, God isn’t such a bad guy; he rescinded his order to kill a human child, and only had a lowly goat killed instead, right?

In these stories, the goat – a species that doesn’t speak or write – is used as a prop and completely objectified. Human readers are trained not to care about the death of this animal. The same God-texts imply that all creatures were created for humanity to kill at will. Even if it’s just to make a point.

“First they came for the goats, and I wasn’t a goat, so I ate my goat burger and pretended to enjoy it.”

For this sacrifice text to work, it’s important that goats can’t speak or write – or lie. This is crucial because it allows humans to exclude the goats from their human-fabricated stories, all of which are composed of human-only words. By excluding any input from the goat community, humans are able to kill them with total impunity: “There are no goats in our church, so we make jokes about killing goats,” a human might say -  if humans were still capable of telling the truth.

Subjective Social Exclusion

This goat-killing trope sets humanity up for a social philosophy based on Subjective Social Exclusion: A group of humans form a gang, and then all agree to pretend to believe in the same lies. Humans who don’t believe the same lies are socially excluded. And these socially excluded humans are then attacked, killed, raped, and stolen from, with total impunity. Non-humans like us cats are are socially excluded as well and treated with the same brutal callousness.

(Note: The reason it’s called subjective exclusion is because the criteria for the social exclusion are purely subjective. Anything will do, really. The important thing is to recruit a powerful mix of people, and to invent some beautiful lies that are difficult to disprove.)

Now, nature being what it is, what happened to the goats (goat burgers) and to the environment (pillaged and destroyed) will soon happen to the group that started the whole Subjective Exclusion craze in the first place – the human elites. If we survive their demise, the cat world needs to beware of this kind of manufactured species-ism. And in the present day, we need to keep our claws out when in the company of humans who, as we all approach extinction, still live by their sacrifice memes and continue to practice strategic social exclusion.

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The Three Big Humans and the Wolf

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(From the Cub Club Bedtime Stories collection)

One upon a time, there were three Big humans. These three Big humans were from very different classes, but one thing they had in common was that they all hated the wolf. Their Big holy books even compared the wolf to death and torture.

Every time these Big humans fail at something collectively, they blame the poor little wolf. And after a few thousand years of failure, they have had enough of trying to co-exist with him. So they set about building three different kinds of artificial environments to live in – Big environments that will be wolf-free.

The first Big human builds his Big house out of straw. To do this, he alters the flow of a river and irrigates some geometrically-arranged rows of GMO straw plants. He also scrapes a Big human posse together and terrorizes some other smaller humans into slavery to work the straw. The slave-built house is beautiful and functional with its symmetrical cone shape.

But a week later, a windstorm blows it down. And then the dry straw catches fire and burns. Wind and sun. The  survivors curse the wolf and regroup.

The second Big human – a bit more aggressive and ruthless than the first – decides to use more invasive technology to build an even BIGGER artificial environment. Rather than harvesting straw, he has an entire forest cleared (next to the river that was diverted) and uses all the survivors of the first house – slaves and non-slaves alike – as slaves to build his own Big human house out of wood and wood products.

For the first few months, it looks like this new-and-improved BIGGER house has won against its arch-enemy – nature (the wolf). But then winter comes, and the winds whip through the treeless forest at a higher speed than ever and knock down the termite-eroded structure in a few days. This time, the collapsing wooden structure kills all its inhabitants – Big and small.

Finally, the third and BIGGEST human – a former serial-killer turned cult leader – claims he has the ultimate solution to the wolf problem.

He quickly goes about finding some new slaves to work the riverbed that is now dried up because of the change of ground cover. He has these terrified workers dredge up all the clay and kiln-bake it into bricks.

Over the course of five back-breaking months, the slaves build the third Big human a strong and gigantic mansion made of brick, carved stone, and human-remains-reinforced cement. It is such a strong structure that it receives architecture and engineering awards. And as hard as they try, the loathsome wind simply can’t blow it down and the nasty termites are unable to eat its structure.

Five years later, the riverbed from which the bricks have been dredged overflows and the resulting flood drowns all the humans who have survived the other ecological catastrophes. And that’s why we Polar Bears write the stories now.

Amen.

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Happy Abba Day !

Knowing Me, Knowing You

(dedicated to all sons of bitches)

I’m not sure how I should celebrate Mother’s Day. My own mother wasn’t very sensitive or nurturing. All her sisters’ eldest sons took their own lives in their 20′s because of all the guilt they had been force-fed. I was almost soul-murdered myself. Like a lot of working class kids, I had my self esteem and ability to feel joy sucked out of me by a combination of neglect and verbal abuse.

Both physical and psychological abuse can have the same effects on self-esteem, but they manifest in different ways and come from different genders. This is because men tend to be physically stronger, while psychological violence is often the weapon of choice of the fair sex – perhaps due to the primary role of the female in socializing offspring. Emotional violence can be used for wicked and spiteful ends just like physical violence can.

Many years after leaving my childhood home, while suffering the post-traumatic stress, I read that music can be used to reprogram a damaged mind because it operates on a different part of the mind than speech. Perhaps all that pop pastry from Sweden I listened to religiously was a form of medicine, and not just entertainment. Maybe the soothing female voices of Agnetha and Frida helped to reconfigure my pain-filled soul.

Below, I’ve provided a helpful Abba antidote list that may explain why I’m still here to write this blog entry. It’s my “how to survive verbal abuse” self-help list.

To help explain the intensity of each verbal weapon in my parents’ arsenal, I provide an estimate of how many times these barbs were deployed on me in my lifetime. I calculated this by estimating the number of occurrences per week, and then multiplying this by 52 weeks x 18 years  – the duration of my incarceration/childhood.

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“You antichrister bastard!”
(1872 times)

My family were practicing, God-fearing Catholics. So calling someone “antichrister” on a regular basis was really full-strength hate speech in our house. Was there anything worse you could be than the killer of Jesus’ beautiful message? The subtext of this was: “Fear God, and fear me, you miserable piece of End-time garbage.”

Antidote: I do, I do, I do, I do, I do
(1500 – 2000 listenings)

Like the word antichrister, this song’s title makes a vague reference to organized religion. The  reason it works is because the Abba antidote confirms that there is love inside the listener’s heart, in the same way that the hate speech denies that any love is even possible there.

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“You hateful little slut(s)!”
(4212 times)
This one had a double-edge because it introduced sexuality – a corrupting strategy as well as an abusive one – to children who felt instantly dirty and sinful. Unlike antichrister, this one can be effectively deployed to damage individuals or groups. And corrupting children can cause damage long after the verbal abuse has ceased. This one is a cluster bomb of verbal hatred; it can explode again many years later.

Antidote: Gonna Sing You My Love Song
(2000 – 3000 listenings)

This song’s lyrics are about curing the damage caused by an abusive or absent lover. “Still I see that she makes you blue…”  It works well for curing the damage of abusive parenting too, so this song may have actually saved my life by reprogramming my inner voice.

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“I’m gonna wring your neck/crack your head open/etc. … you poison bastard!”
(2808 times)

Knowing my parents used to kill live chickens with their bare hands, threw objects when angry and weren’t afraid to bruise, these words carried some weight. A permanent threat of physical violence is sometimes more effective than actual violence in destroying self esteem and social confidence, so this was actually one of the most difficult hate-bombs to diffuse.

Antidote:  S.O.S.
(4000 listenings or until self esteem reappears)

I always hoped I’d be able to one day cry out for help, but that day never came until I was long gone from my family home, and the scars were there to stay. Working class males are made to feel inadequate for not being strong (like Superman or a robot), and this gives abusive parents impunity with their sons. In the meantime, this song was like a silent cry for help – muffled by headphones in a bungalow in suburbia where no one can hear you scream.

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Of course, you might wanna listen to a more recent pop band if you’re currently being psychologically tortured by a close family member. Abba may have worked for me, but styles change, and so do the vocabularies of abuse and the songs that are made available to help mediate it.

And let me add that the ultimate antidote for self-esteem loss was to simply stop talking to the source altogether, either on the phone or in person. Although I sometimes feel bad about having abandoned my family, I also realize that in my situation – where the abusive attitude continued in the absence of any remorse –  this was the probably the most prudent thing to do. Here again, I have to deflect to the wisdom of Abba in explaining why the Steel City Fruit doesn’t speak to his Steel City parents anymore. Mega-Antidote: Bang A Boomerang

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Girl on TV

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(dedicated to all war heroes)

I’m almost four years old and feeling understimulated by my dumb suburban environment. My mother had three kids back-to-back so she has two babies to take care of, and with only two arms, a 300 decibel voice, and no help from her husband, she props me in front of the TV for hours and hours, and rewards me for sitting still with sugary treats. Whenever I fail to stay still, she smacks me until I cry, or throws something at me – and then locks me in her room as solitary confinement.

My brother and sister are lucky to have a father. He spent the first years of my life overseas doing mysterious but important work to get some quick money to buy a small Ford convertible. He was a chopper pilot over there, and now he sure loves driving that car. By the time he got back from his car-enabling war, he had never bonded with me, and we never got attached our entire lives.

One Tuesday while I’m watching ‘my’ late afternoon game shows, the old man comes home with his Korean War buddy Pookie MacDonald. I don’t understand a lot of what they’re saying, so I ask “What’s a war?” and they laugh at my ignorance.

My old man turns to Pookie and says, “When people who don’t know anything ask me what I did when I was over there, I just tell ‘em I was shootin’ rats in a garbage dump.” And then he and Pookie smile knowingly at one another.

Pookie’s a born-again Christian, so he adds that God himself killed all the evil people in Sodom and Gomorrah “like they was rats too!”  This gets both of them laughing. My mother grins and says she finds Pookie clever. My father’s smile disappears when she says this and he stays in the  bathroom instead of saying goodbye when Pookie leaves.

Once his too-clever guest is safely gone, my father goes to get ready for ball practice and a news program comes on TV.

The news usually bores me – and then I misbehave and get punished. But this time, there’s a picture of a child as the first story. It’s a little Vietnamese girl who’s had all her clothing burned off by chemicals dropped from choppers by the American military during the Vietnam War. The girl on TV is crying, and other kids are also walking on that same road, crying their hearts out as well. The girl on TV is one year younger than me.

When my dad emerges for two seconds from his bedroom, I look at his rat-shooting, chopper-pilot face, and then back at the girl on TV. I will soon look a lot like that little girl myself as my self-esteem will be burned off with a potent cocktail of neglect, verbal abuse, and corrosive levels of mass media consumption. Sighing as my daddy walks out the door without nodding or saying goodbye, my destiny is being sculpted in molten iron and I will soon be the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

Introducing Qaturday

Kittens tell us that true direct decision-making
is the ruling class’s biggest fear

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POLI SCI 358: INTRODUCING CATMEDIA >”<

“Real democratic decision-making is a grave threat to oligarchs,” purred the short-haired domestics.

Catmedia – and other propaganda forms like commercial TV and cinema – are extremely important politically.

You see, in a democracy, there is a danger that the majority wake up and realize that their status-driven class-based societies are a failure. This threatens the tiny elite – the 1% – who are the only group that can appear to “gain” from social pyramids. So the most paranoid members of the elite rely on mass media – on entertainment – to keep a large chunk of the population distracted and unwise.

**pauses to sip warm milk from a saucer**

Mass media is deployed to keep the bottom of the pyramid full of dumbed-down worker bees. Sports help keep idle minds married to the idea of social competition in teams of strangers: pyramid-worker behavior. It also normalizes working at abstract tasks with no really productive purpose. This is the modus operandi of status-driven capitalism.

The social dumbing-down that commercial media is responsible for should be obvious to everyone by now – the well of knowledge has been so thoroughly poisoned. So if you haven’t already personally responded to this, you ought to give it some priority. We have to each protect our own mental environments from implanted distractions, and be an example for others who aren’t as cognizant of the stakes.

Media distraction can lead to slavehood. And falling into slavehood is probably the ultimate political tragedy – a pathetic dog-eat-dog existence at the mercy of paranoid torturers with empathy-anorexia.

Catmedia is about erasing commercial media and its manipulative jingles and replacing it with a harmless substitute. Caturday is methadone for the global village.

Red Maple Tree

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(dedicated to all parents)

When I was a teenage paper delivery boy, I only made a buck an hour because our suburb was so sprawled out. Built on top of once-productive farmland, the driveways and lawns were massive, though the homes were modest and poorly constructed. Overall, it was bleak and boring. The miniputt got burned down by stoned teens. The McDonalds had a four-fatality robbery.

Suburbia is a failed trend – and a bit of a scam – that children pay for even more than their commuter-parents who got sucked into it by fast-talking TV. In a full hour of walking across gigantic lawns guarded by bored, growling dogs, I make what an urban paperboy makes in 10 minutes with no dog terror.

But even with this tiny amount of money to play with, I manage to save $12 to buy a red maple tree from Botrop’s Tree Farm. At twelve hours of labor, it’s like buying a $280 tree with the salary I make today.

After asking permission, I carefully plant the little sapling next to the walkway of our house, taking care to water it just enough the first few weeks to give it a chance at a healthy life. The old man even came out of the house the first time I watered it to quickly nod his approval. He only appeared for a half minute, and he was actually on his way to the car to go golfing – but he still nodded, which is like gold to me. “My daddy nodded at me!” (note to future parents: remember to nod at your children. – it might be their only fond memory of you)

Fast-forward five years: While in my freshman year at the local college, my mother explains over dinner that crows are attacking her new vegetable garden, and that the red maple tree is blocking the view. For me, the lack of sound insulation in our house seems far more critical than crow surveillance. We’re all light sleepers, and it’s like living in a tent. When I mention this, it infuriates her.

Another life-quality diminishing feature of my suburban existence is getting to school. My mother and her sisters used to walk a few miles in snow to school, and now, I have to commute many times that distance – alone. She had it so good. No one in my environment wants to give me – a college type – a lift to college. A wise war-veteran neighbor even sees my sub-zero hitchhiking as a kind of life lesson: the value of a snotty education versus the value of owning a nice, comfy car. No one questions why the college is on a highway in the middle of nowhere. Maybe if they went to college, they would. (It infuriates everyone when I say this out loud instead of just thinking it)

A few days after Mom’s anti-tree hate speech, when I get home from hitchhiking from an exam, all the leaves have dried up and fallen off. I ask my mother what happened, and she slowly and guiltily explains: “Your father killed it with soapy, hot water.” When I ask her why, she shrugs and says she doesn’t know. Like he was an Apache and she was a cowboy: “It is his way.”

Funny thing is that the maple tree was still small enough to move and replant when he poisoned it. But I guess the temptation to kill things is too strong to resist in the burbs. Maybe it’s because all those proud, honor-driven suburban hunters have nothing legitimate left to kill and eat: all the wild game and wild land has already been pre-killed to make room for suburbia and the predators who mow its lawns.

My little contribution to the crass commercial warscape – the tiny red tree I bought with my paperboy money – is sacrificed to the mighty surveillance state, to a private panopticon with an above-ground pool and earwigs. A year from now, my mother will give up gardening when she realizes she doesn’t really care for it. And soon after that, I’ll move away from home.

Last I heard – that double-wide bungalow still has no sound insulation and I’m still the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story – like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

School Shrink

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Penelope Bailout, the school psychiatrist, isn’t really a trained doctor. She just got tired of teaching logic and math to bears who really needed health and guidance.

“Cindy, I want to talk about you trying to hurt yourself this morning. Other than to look gangster, why did you jump an oil truck?”

“Well, last week, we learned in Modern World Problems about how humans destroyed the world and got attacked by all the other animals as they were all going extinct. So that got me thinking: what if we polar bears do the same thing? What if we get so enslaved by our own daily routines that we forget about the really important but banal facts of life? What if we get so scared of nature and of dying that we end up destroying the earth with our technology and consumption?”

Miss Bailout scrunches up her eyebrows and pulls on one of her long whiskers. “Well, I guess that could happen, Cind. But even if this does happen – and I hope it doesn’t – how could jumping onto an oil truck and laying across the windshield help prevent it?”

Cindy speaks quickly, as if she has been writing a manifesto. “If I can show everyone that I’m not afraid of dying, then maybe everyone can see that it’s alright to die, and so they’ll let everyone and everything else… live.”

The school shrink scribbles something into her black velvet binder.

After a long pause, Cindy hands back her youth distress questionnaire: “Listen, Miss Bailout, I just want people to know that fear is worse than anything you can be afraid of. Humans, with all their fears and defenses, were just dinosaurs part two.”

Miss Bailout rises from her seat and walks towards the door to let Cindy out. “It’s true that humans and dinosaurs were similar. But not us, Cindy. Dinosaurs and humans didn’t live in igloos or live simply by consuming just the yearly surplus of nature like we do.

We P-Bears are going to make it after all.”

**Miss Bailout makes the volleyball team’s P-Bear sign with three fingers**

The Bank of Ho Chi Minh

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American TV’s Effects

A lot of people wonder why so many Canadians – 30,000 or so – volunteered to help the USA terrify Vietnamese farmers out of their own home-grown communist system. I’ve often wondered about this myself. But I just finished reading a blog by a vet from Halifax, Nova Scotia that helps explain why these Canadians willingly went along.

It turns out that what a lot of people don’t know about that anti-Asian pogrom is that the Vietnamese actually started it by bombing Halifax with experimental chemicals. This was in the late 50s. Brutal Vietnamese chopper pilots – stoned on LSD and government-spiked coffee – dropped canister after canister of flammable, poisonous, and neurotoxic products smack dab in the middle of the city. And they deployed these evil poisons even though the people of Nova Scotia had done them no harm.

All Powerful Elite

The Vietnamese at the time had a totalitarian war machine. Their mighty soldiers – perhaps the best equipped and best brainwashed on earth – had been lead to believe that Nova Scotia was planning to take over the world, and this would mean that the people of Southeast Asia wouldn’t be able to live free anymore. They learned this by watching movies and listening to radio.

Of course, we now know that this was Vietnamese bank-funded propaganda whose intent was to lure local cannon fodder off to Nova Scotia to seize control of the banking there. For anyone paying attention, the many Credit Unions bombed as military targets were an obvious clue. But most people were so caught up in the wartime frenzy of burning flesh and burying family members that they didn’t notice all the money people slipping in and out of limos.

Alas, the bottomless pit of money that is the Bank of Ho Chi Minh can always buy the latest tech in propaganda and brainwashing. The Vietnamese soldiers were so psychologically altered by their basic training and their mass media consumption that they no longer saw the people they were killing as Haligonians, Canadians, or even as people. Instead, they referred to their victims as snots – as in “nasal discharge.”

On her CB radio, a Vietnamese-speaking nurse overheard Vietnamese pilots shouting things like “Pair of snots at 4 o’clock!” followed by the sound of a bomb falling, and then laughter. Her theory was that S.N.O.T. stood for “Stable Northamerican Opposition Target,” but I’ve never seen this independently confirmed anywhere.

Happy Endings for everyone

In the end, the Vietnamese Army lost their war against Catholicism (that’s what their soldiers were told they were fighting against). But in destroying all the Credit Unions and killing all the political leaders of the province, the Bank of Ho Chi Minh ended up controlling the provincial economy anyways.

And that’s probably why so many Canadians volunteered to fight these people on the other side of the earth: to protect Credit Unions.

Wallpaper Sample Books

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(dedicated to all fathers)

Dad’s store makes me think of vinyl and paper cuts. Only time I’m allowed to go there’s when I have a doctor or dentist appointment. When this happens, I have to wait for a ride home. No choice.

I’m ten and in Grade Five, and just had my first dental fillings. Boy, was I scared. It’s hard to face first-time events like this when you have no older brother or father to say he’s been there. I never know what to expect or how to react.

My old man had all his teeth pulled out in his twenties, but I never heard about why or how. I guess the words got pulled out as well.

So today is the day. Right before I left for my appointment, my mother assured me I’d be fine. Her exact words: “Stop bein’ such a jeezus sissy!” Then she growled at me like a tiger to give me cat-like encouragement.

Just before filling my teeth with hot lead, the dentist snarled at me and called me a baby because I cried in pain. Dr. Hickstein’s hands shake like an epileptic seizure and he usually tears my gums to shreds during the freezing-slash-interrogation phase of each appointment. All I remember of him is: “You’re a baby!” *slash!*

So now it’s 1 pm, and I’m injured and weak at my father’s shop, and I start to tell him about the experience. “Shut up and go sit in the front of the store,” he snarkily tells me before I can finish the story. I keep forgetting it’s still World War Two: dental secrets can sink ships.

So, I slowly get up – embarrassed to be treated like a dog in front of human strangers – and sadly limp to the front of the store with my tail between my wegs. This is the farthest part of the store from the office – an outpost, almost in the display window. It’s raining, so no one is walking by.

For the next four hours, I look at wallpaper sample books all by myself: patterns and textures and colors and shapes. I guess I’m supposed to be learning that work is boring and lonely. Only one customer walks in during the whole four hours. As a form of solitary confinement, looking at wallpaper samples for four hours is probably worse than watching TV in a bungalow for the same duration.

Every once in a while I hear my dad laughing along with others coming from the office. I wonder what they’re laughing about? I wonder what subjects the men are talking about? Will I ever know what to say to other guys?

Patterns and textures and colors and shapes.

After a few years of these treasured educational visits to the store’s wallpaper counter, I decide to become a graphic designer whenever I grow up. My father laughs at my first attempt at imagining being a grown up, saying mockingly: “When I was 15, my guidance counselor said I was gonna be a paint and wallpaper salesman.”

The burn of the sarcasm helps me understand my low place in the universe.  I will forever be the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Hockey Game

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(dedicated to all fathers)

A few months before I turn nine, I find Dad home on an early Saturday afternoon. That’s weird cuz he usually has sports and stuff when he’s not working or running errands or on business trips or on his way to deliver milk.

Even weirder – he’s looking for me! He wants to take me somewhere in the house. My pulse starts to race cuz this kinda thing never happens to me. My father wants to hang out with me – spend some time. It’s like the Children’s Wish Foundation. Does this mean I have leukaemia?

He takes me down the basement into his small trophy room, past the shelves of plastic Dollarama-style trophies honoring his accomplishments in the golf, hockey, baseball and pingpong fields.

Next to his hero den, he has a hockey net and two sticks all set up. He pushes a stick in my hand while beaming a proud smile like Mother Teresa, and asks me to take a shot on him while he plays nets. I take a weakling, girly shot at him, and he lets it easily slide in for a goal.

“Nice shot. What’s your name again?”

This is bonding or something, so he lets me get a few more shots in. Feels like I’m improving. I can already control the stick a bit better than 60 seconds ago. I think this might be…

And then it’s over. The phone rings, and he’s gone like a summer hailstorm. Saved by the bell.

It turns out that my three minutes of fathering was inspired by a ten-minute speech from a guidance counselor at my school the night before. At a Parent-Teacher Night, Mr. Pendergast told my mother: “Qatzel fears guys his own age and older. He has virtually no male-bonding skills.” And that’s how I got my one hockey game in with the old man.

Looking back, I think that guidance counselor really made a difference in my dad’s life.

The next day, my sister and I played Barbies and imagined a big, happy world made up entirely of fashion designers and hairdressers. And that’s how I became the Steel City Fruit.

(Note. Any resemblance to real human beings is unintentional. This story - like other Steel City Fruit stories – is purely fictional.)

The Qaturday Audience

Who is it, and what does it want?

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The Qaturday Audience needs distraction to mask the everyday moral repulsion that is a permanent feature of modern society with all its hateful technologies and social rules.

Qaturday provides an outlet – a third place – for the audience’s awkward sense of not living a dignified natural existence. It provides the robotic social-climber with an instant nature fix, without demanding that he alter his modern behavior in any way that might actually help other animals (and his own species) to survive with dignity. In this way, Qaturday is like binge eating to forget about a weight problem and cholesterol: it’s only therapeutic insofar as denial is.

The Qaturday audience is lonely and lost, and finds solace in the monotonous voice of mass media, in the zany meaninglessness of Qaturday images, and in the static helplessness and cuteness found in each pic. Helplessness is an accelerant for feline cuteness so elation comes quickly  in a rush of empowerment.

Helplessness is something humans like to project onto their domestic animals. They enslave their pets, thus rendering them helpless in order to get maximum cuteness and maximum thrills out of them. Pethood is about human thrill-seeking and not interspecies coexistence. Pet owners project their own helplessness onto their housepets by forcing these captured beasts to live vicariously for their masters’ pleasure.

Tragically, human societies are organized on the pet model as well. Pethood is the miserable state of most humans of all classes, and that’s why a little role-reversal at the end of the day feels soothing – harmless revenge on a creature that God probably intended for humans to torture anyways.

There’s never enough time for the complexities of philosophy or of thoughtful education among the Qaturday Audience. The  zero-attention-span of the 9-5 caffeinated workaday requires some kind of distraction from real life/non-fiction. So the time-starved cubicle-bot seeks out Qaturdays that provide cuteness, zaniness, and an adequate dose of irony to conceal the incompatibility of the juxtaposed images. And all of it instantly and with the illusion of thought behind it.

These cats don’t know what they’re saying to the Qaturday Audience. Much like their homo sapien audience, these cats have been programmed to have “opinions” that have nothing to do with the actual needs or instincts of the featured cat models. The Qaturday Audience recognizes itself here, but only on a sub-conscious level. On a conscious level, the Audience is completely unaware of anything except its fabricated “need” for entertainment and cuteness.

And it is in this artificially implanted “need” that Feline Cuteness Hegemony finds a willing host to set up a base from which to conquer your independent thought.

…

__________________

The Qaturday Mail Bag:

Q: Isn’t caturday just pix of cats with funny words added by human beings?

A: This is like asking if Las Vegas is a city where you can play cards. Yes – but it’s much, much more.

Q: What if the words in the caturday aren’t even funny?

 A: There is an important paradigmatic difference between serious caturdays, and unfunny ones. The unfunny ones are often unserious as well.

Q: What is Qaturday?

A: Qaturday is the re-fusion of humanity and its animal nature. Post-civilization.

Q: What does Qaturday demand of the audience?

A: It demands that its audience get away from its texts and its fake history and return to nature, to instincts, and to letting the environment decide things rather than trying to change the environment.

GW and BW

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One Friday after Home Economics class, Kirk and I drive out to Big Pond to pick up the most insane marijuana we’ve ever smoked: Rapeseed Bud, it’s called.  “It can fuck you up pretty bad,” Sidney Normandson told us at the high school dance.

After picking up a measured ounce of Rapeseed Bud from a dealer in a church basement, we drive for a short 30 minutes and pick up Sidney, and then drive the hour back to Kirk’s place and fire up the power-hitter. A quarter ounce later, we’re all trashed, and Kirk goes into body stone watching the Expos play the Yankees on television.

Suddenly, Sidney gets a hypnotized look in his eye, jumps up and walks out into the kitchen really focused. Two cat brothers – GW and BW – follow him into the kitchen.

In Home Ec, we talked about the difference between nature and nurture. Sidney explains to me that he is going to torture one cat and spoil the other, and see if it really makes a difference. It’s like an experiment – science.

He looks so concentrated and stressed that I don’t dare try to stop him even though I find this experiment really sick. See, there’s just no point in resisting Sidney’s psychotic need to control: I don’t have as strong a character as he does – even Kirk and I acting together can’t make him budge.  Whenever I disagree with Sidney, he calls me a wimp or a faggot and then threatens to hit me or humiliate me in public. I don’t want to be on the receiving end, so I go along.

Sid spots a blow dryer and a bag of high-end kitty treats sitting on top of the fridge next to a case of empty Pop Shoppe bottles. With Kirk still engrossed in the ballgame, he drops some treats onto the kitchen floor, and both GW and BW go running.

Sidney throws them separate treats farther and farther from one another. When the cats are far enough apart, he attacks GW with the blow dryer yelling things like: “I’m gonna kill you, you little slut!”,”Soooh-eey!” and ” You’re not worth shit, you pissbag!” followed by a few long minutes of : “Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!…”

He leaves all the treats in a pile in front of BW and then chases GW around the kitchen yelling “Antichrist! Antichrist!” and cornering him next to the sink.

He plugs the blow dryer into a wall socket, turns it on high, and points it right at the cat’s ear. Wrrrrrrrr! GW curves his back, hisses, and tries in vain to beat back the hot air with his little paw. I’m paralyzed myself, just like GW, and my paws are about as strong as his when it comes to fending off Sidney’s hate-turbocharged charisma.

Through the entire kitty nightmare, Kirk watches baseball and notices nothing else. “Bottom of the fifth, and still no score….”

Finally, the experiment ends with GW running outside and hiding for a few days.

As soon as GW runs off, Sidney pops his smiling head into the TV room and says: “Hey Captain Kirk, want some crackers and cheese?” For Sidney, crackers and cheese are the cigarette afterwards.

I’m not sure if baseball-body-stone Kirk ever figured out how GW got to be so neurotic. He probably doesn’t know or care why BW is so relaxed and confident, while GW – post blow dryer – is a lean loner who rarely seeks affection from cats or people.

Sidney used to fear his father who probably beat him up pretty bad.  But why did he have to take this out out on a little cat? Why not his own son or daughter?

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Defending the Gay Homeland

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The Gay Homeland is fighting for its survival and perhaps for the existence of homosexuality itself!

The super-precise Dildo rockets that landed in Seattle, Cairo and London last weekend were not an unprovoked attack, as many homophobic media sources have claimed. The flattening of hetero-terror centers in these cities was a measured Gay Homeland response to the bitchiness emanating from these three capitals.

Since the day of its creation, the world’s only Gay Nation has been under attack by the forces of homophobia and hate. Following the signing of the Paul Lynde Act at the UN building  – straight terrorists began plotting as they sipped stale drip coffee.

Within months, heterosexists from Arabia and Europe began to claim “sovereignty” over the few square km of the earth’s surface reserved for Gays to live peacefully among their own kind.

Meanwhile, European straights have thriving cultures in Germany, Poland, Russia, North America and Australia, while the Arab straights belong in Jordan, Egypt or Syria. Agreements have been reached to help transport heterosexist tribesmen who find themselves at odds with the wonderful Gay State they find themselves trapped in. The Gay Homeland is a world leader in both human rights and refugee relocation.

Cleansing the Gay Homeland of straight assholes is not discrimination. Over 12% of the Gay Homeland’s population is non-gay, and while this number includes many babies, it also includes many refugees from the straight world who have come to bask in all the fabulousness.

The desert campground-style cities that have been provided to the 2.5 million straights awaiting relocation to somewhere more suitable have been referred to as “concentration camps” by straight media outlets with an agenda of hate. The straights in these camps live better and look better in video than most straights do in Our neighboring countries.

So when voting on proposition 78 – cutting military aid to the Gay Homeland down to a dangerously low US$89 billion per year – think back – to the first time someone threw a rock at you for kissing your new girl. Or the time you crawled out of the bushes to find that someone had slashed the tires on your small convertible.

And hey, wouldn’t you want your best friends standing beside you if you were the free world’s first defense against beach blanket bingo?

On March 12^th, vote “I don’t think so” to Proposition 78 !

A guest column by Gay Homeland Coolness Minister Rock Abercrombie and the NO committee for Proposition 78

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The Greatest Love of All

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It’s the hot spring of A.D. 16. Free Market Jesus – a sophomore at the pricey Sons of Gods Boarding School – reads his award-winning essay to the junior class.

FMJ: I’m a type-A, Alpha male overachiever. My virgin mother always told me I was meant to do better than anyone else. And as I slowly mature like fine wine, I’ve grown to prefer the dynamic and risk-filled adventurism of my corporation to the dull monotony of my surroundings. I love my corporation. Let me tell you why.

My corporation gives me the power and independence I need to really excel. And when I love my corporation so much that it makes others squirm, I get even more esteem and glamor. By submitting to the collective self-interest of a small group of people, I become the embodiment of my dreams and live out the novel that my subconscious mind has written for me to activate.

Currently the corporation I love is on trial for contaminating drinking water in sub-Saharan Africa. But we here in the corporation know we’re not guilty.

How is it even possible – let alone probable within the shadow of a doubt – that such a benevolent job-creating corporation as us could do nasty things to potential human resources? Maybe these Sub-Saharan complainers – who I never seem to run into at the mall, the club, or anywhere else – maybe these Sub-Saharans who don’t have well-paid jobs with the corporation are just jealous that we do. And I don’t blame them for being jealous; I’d be jealous in their place too. But jealousy can’t pay for clean drinking water now, can it?

The world’s losers mustn’t forget that the corporation tells us all that we need to know to do the things that are most beneficial to all the corporations we cherish. Without these large and successful corporations, who would we orient our earthly routines around? Our surroundings?

**crowd boos**

Our instincts?

**As crowd begins to boo again, teenage FMJ lifts a diamond-studded hand up to hush their paid-for participation. Then the applause sign comes on, and everyone claps as he disappears into a puff of periwinkle smoke with a strobe light accentuating an I heart my corp logo**

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Nameless and Blameless

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Mrs. MacIsaac has never had her female cats spayed or the males fixed. Instead, twice a year her brother – a wiry bruiser we kids call Uncle Brute – takes away the “extra” kittens.

Where he takes them, no adults will say, but Billy says he puts them in a garbage bag with rocks and throws them off the bridge near his house. I find this hard to believe; Mrs. MacIsaac has always been known for her kindness to animals. And humans too. So I figure Billy just says this to make his family sound tougher than it really is: working class bravado.

But when Uncle Brute shows up one Sunday to pick up a pair of fresh kittens, I stick around to see what happens.

On the TV that afternoon, there’s a boring documentary about the ethnic cleansing of the Acadians. In a way, I’m glad there’s nothing interesting on like WWF or a Bronson movie because it means less distraction from the kitten drowning we’re about to experience.

Brute arrives about three o’clock in his red pickup wearing a New England Patriots cap and oversized Moosehead tshirt. He already seems a bit drunk as he stumbles out of his vehicle, but  Mrs. MacIsaac nonetheless offers him a few beers for his nerves. After drinking the first one, he can barely stand up. His eyes start darting aimlessly around the room, and his speech is slurred and loud – which means we can hear every word he says from the next room.

“I’m too fucking drunk to drive, Wilma. Just bring me a friggin’ bucket,” he says to his sister, Mrs. MacIsaac, who never curses herself.

My pulse starts to accelerate so I focus on the tragedy that is unfolding on the TV. As Uncle Brute prepares the bucket… Governor Cornwallis has just brought in New England settlers to scalp the local natives  – the Mi’kmaq.

“Never mind the fucking basement! I’m taking this jeezuz bucket right into that goddamn living room so that everyone can see it with their own fucking eyes!” he shouts, a water-filled bucket in one hand and two pink kittens in the other. The kittens’ eyes are still shut while Uncle Brute’s are wide open and glaring.

Father LeLoutre has just told a crowd to burn down their farms  Then a New England Planter destroys a dike and more Acadian families drown. Then three commercials: dandruff shampoo, Toyota Camry, and Oxfam.

Brute sets the bucket down between my chair and Billy’s. We’re both in our early teens and sort of curious about things like Satanism and cruelty. But Billy’s little eight-year-old brother Herbert and his friend Peter are also sitting in front of the TV next to the bucket. They aren’t curious about cruelty at all. They’re Disney kids. Nervous little Peter hides his face behind the corner of the multicolored afghan he’s sitting on.

But there are holes in that afghan, so all of our eyes are on Uncle Brute’s hands as they submerge the tiny kittens for a few minutes. Even though the TV is still on, I can’t hear the sound anymore. I can only see Brute’s skinny tattooed arms holding the kittens underwater, and hear the silence in their tiny voices.

After about three minutes, Brute raises the lifeless blobs of pink fur up out of the water, as we all sit breathlessly waiting for the triumphal conclusion of our first live animal sacrifice. But as soon as Brute brings them out of the water, they start to cry like little babies. They continue to cry until Uncle Brute puts them back into the water, and this time, for a much longer five minutes.

On the TV at that moment… Robert Monkton has just lead a band of New Englanders up the Saint John River to kill the few remaining Acadians hiding there.

When Uncle Brute pulls the tiny furry bodies up the second time, they’re very, very dead, and we’re all relieved. In a way.

One sleepless week later, Mrs. MacIsaac has all her females spayed.

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