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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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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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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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(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.)

…

“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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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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(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.

…

Knowing Me, Knowing You

(dedicated to all sons of bitches)

I’m not sure how I should celebrate Mother’s Day. 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 by my parents myself – like a lot of working class kids, I had a lot of 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 themselves in different ways and usually come from different genders. This is partially because men tend to be physically stronger, while psychological violence is 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 trauma of it, 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 for some of the soul-destroying words of my parents.

To help explain the intensity of each weapon in their 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 that I endured them. If you would prefer a weekly estimate, just divide the total amounts by 936.

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“You antichrister bastard!”
(1872 times)

My family were practicing Catholics. So calling someone “antichrister” on a regular basis was really full-strength hate speech in my 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.)

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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.)

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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.