Cats are Liberals, Dogs are Conservatives

In this season of political posturing and gamesmanship, of mudslinging and misdirecting, it’s hard not to get disillusioned. Romney said this, Obama did that, he’s a liar, he’s a jerk, he eats children, blah blah blah. It’s enough to make you want to change the channel.

It’s gotten so I see politics in everything now. From movies to television shows to reality television, I’m suspicious of hidden political agendas. As in “Survivor” has a conservative Darwinist agenda in which the strong are betrayed by the weak, but the strongest end up winning. As in The Lorax is an ultra-liberal anti-business pro-ecology diatribe aimed at our children.

I see it in our pets too. Dogs are actually conservative in their behavior; cats are liberals. Think about it. Dogs like the status quo. They get upset by change and if you make changes, they’re likely to pee on the carpet. Dogs are possessive. Give them a bone and they’ll go bury it. Give them enough bones and you’ll have a yard full of ’em.

Cats, on the other hand, do their own thing and don’t like to be told what to do. They roll with change; they encourage it. The like keeping you on your toes. Cats do nothing to earn their meals; they just expect someone is going to pay for it, but certainly not them. A cat may occasionally rub against you and purr like they adore you, but it’s an act. They don’t think you’re capable of taking care of them properly so they have to tell you how to do it.

Dogs need to be on a leash to get around. Cats run wherever they bloody well please. Dogs will crap anywhere but where they sleep. Cats need their own special place to crap – paid for at your expense. Dogs are loyal to their masters, even if they abuse them. Cats, well, they’re loyal to whoever feeds them.

Dogs like to earn their keep by watching out for burglars and illegal immigrants, at whom they’ll bark at until they’re hoarse. In fact, dogs are for building an 80 foot high electrified fence around the house with machine guard turrets with armed dogs manning them. Cats prefer a pampered existence in which nothing is required of them and they can get on the computer and watch videos of other cats, and occasionally play video slots.

Dogs believe in the sanctity of family and are welcoming to all guests; by way of welcoming you they’ll hump your leg. Cats are barely aware that you’ve taken a month’s vacation; as long as the water bowl was full and the food kept on coming they don’t care whether you come or go. Dogs believe in worship – after all, dog is god spelled backwards. Cats don’t believe in anything. Cat spelled backwards is tac and they think they got a raw deal because of it.

Dogs will eat anything, the worse for them it is the better. As a matter of fact, they prefer their chow to be manufactured in a third world country – it’s less expensive and tastier that way. Cats only eat homegrown organic cat food that has been prepared by migrant workers who are paid at a reasonable rate. Why shouldn’t they? You’re the one paying for it mister.

Dogs will yap all day and say absolutely nothing, kind of like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Cats will say nothing all day and leave you wondering if they’re as wise as they make themselves out to be, like Barack Obama.

Dogs like sex but only for procreation. Cats watch kitty porn on the Internet and masturbate while you’re not looking. Dogs prefer order and structure but little interference from the powers-that-be. Cats want the powers-that-be to provide them with an expensive kitty playground that they’ll sleep on once and never use again.

Dogs will lick your face with the same mouth they just ate their own poop with. You’ll have to chase down your cat and tackle it in order to get any sort of affection. A dog believes in traditional values. Cats think we should think for ourselves and develop our own values.

Dogs are territorial and will attack anyone who violates their borders. Cats are neutral and will glare at anyone who comes to rob the house but will do nothing about it. Dogs are like elderly people who make up so much of the conservative electorate; they sleep all the freaking time. Cats are like young people who make up so much of the liberal electorate; they go out until the wee hours of the morning and then they won’t tell you where they’ve been.

Dogs are into security; cats are into freedom. Dogs believe in fair trade (“go in the kennel for a Milk Bone? Sounds fair to me…”) while cats believe in shared wealth – as long as all the wealth belongs to them. Dogs like looking out at the world – from the safety of their living room. Cats prefer to go out and explore themselves, and might just defect to that excellent Brownstone on Elm Street if they feed him better.

Dogs believe in the American dream; cats are atheists. Sarah Palin is a dog – well, she’s a bitch. Bill Maher is a cat; doesn’t his hair look like someone licked it into place? A dog will walk into the room, yawn, stretch and then forget why he went in there in the first place. A cat will kill Osama bin Laden and then drag his carcass to the glass door in the back of the house so you can see his handiwork. Dogs are pro-business; cats are pro-regulation. Dogs do their duty; cats want to form a committee to discuss the nature of what their duty is before they’ll consider it.

So forget your elephants and donkeys; those are outdated symbols anyway. Cats and dogs are much more relatable to the general public anyway. I don’t know what it says about me that I’m a liberal who loves dogs but I suppose that means I can see the conservative point of view. Some of these examples might stretch credibility just a bit but one thing is certain; cats and dogs are more likely to work together to make things better for those around them than conservatives and liberals are these days.

Grand Old Hypocrisy

The elections are over and there is no doubt the American electorate has made its voice heard. The truth of it is that the voice of the American electorate has become a whining squeal of self-interest, whipped into a frenzy by Republican and Tea Party claims that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for higher taxes, increased debt and lost jobs. “A vote for the Democrats is a vote for Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. It is a vote for socialism and Sharia law.”

This past mid-term election was notable for its vitriol and its surfeit of advertising. The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that $858 million was raised by Republican candidates for House and Senate campaign ads, while the Democrats raised $759 million. This doesn’t include State gubernatorial elections or money spent on ballot propositions which were often just as contentious. That means that over $1.6 billion was spent on getting people elected to Congress, and when the whole bill is tallied, that number moves well north of $3 billion.  Now that’s just an estimate and the number could well be higher or lower, but either way that could fund a whole lot of jobs, people.

Politically speaking, I’m a reformed Republican. I supported Reagan back in the day and Bush senior. I felt very strongly that the Republicans reflected middle class values and were the party that looked out for the middle class. The Democrats, on the other hand, I believed were the party of special interests and of sinecures and pork barrels. I got these attitudes basically from my Dad, who was a staunch conservative – he had been an anarchist in his youth and believed that the definition of a good government was a government that stayed out of the people’s lives as much as possible. In many ways, I believe he’s right.

I no longer believe those things. While I don’t have great love for the Democrats, I think the Republicans have changed a great deal. I believe that their entire interest now is not only in keeping the wealth in the hands of the wealthy, but finding ways to increase that wealth, even at the expense of what’s best for the nation. I look at the presidency of George W. Bush and I’m appalled at what he did; the trampling of the Constitution in the name of Homeland Security. Allowing the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Gharib. And, lest we forget, the economic meltdown that occurred on his watch – one that came about because of the economic advisors he’d appointed putting their own selfish financial gains at the expense of the country.

What appalls me even more is that Republican advertising has laid the economic meltdown at the feet of President Obama, even though it occurred before he took office. The fiscal bailouts he made, we are told, yielded no results (which is a patent lie – not only did General Motors get back on its feet, it repaid its bailout loan years ahead of schedule), but the Republican blowhards conveniently don’t mention the billions that President Bush authorized for buying distressed mortgage-related assets; approximately $700 billion dollars worth (although nearly half of it wound up going to buying preferred stock in banks instead). This money didn’t create any jobs nor did it stabilize the economy beyond those of the banks who had made reckless loans to begin with. The Obama stimulus plan, so demonized by conservatives, was $825 billion dollars with provisions to create and save jobs, provide social assistance to those impacted by the recession (including providing money for homeowners to renegotiate their mortgage, allowing them to keep their homes) and tax rebates to the general public, which were seen not in a lump sum but over time in weekly paychecks.

For whatever reason, Democrats seemed unwilling to fight back against Republican smear ads who promised that Democratic candidates were “more of the same,” big spending Washington insiders. However, what are the Republicans but more of the same Bush-era sorts who would leave big business to regulate itself – and we all saw how well that worked.

I realize that this is somewhat of a sour grapes kind of blog this time out, but it is really depressing how many people seem more motivated by self-interest rather than in working together to make things better. Now, I know a lot of my friends and readers are conservatives and Republicans and I’m not saying that every conservative Republican is the spawn of Satan – although I suspect that if you looked carefully you might find some cloven feet on Dick Cheney – and I also realize that many Tea Party activists and conservatives are sincere when they say that they feel the best thing for the country is to repeal the Health care bill, lower taxes and eliminate deficit spending.

I don’t have a crystal ball, and I will certainly be the first to say that I may be completely wrong and Sarah Palin is a genius who gets what America needs better than I do. However, I vehemently disagree with her ideas and policies, and I believe that the American greatness lies in its ability to re-invent itself and rise stronger from adversity. However, I also believe that the American greatness lies in its compassion for those who need help, and when I hear candidates trash the Obama health care plan, I can only shake my head in disbelief.

First of all, the health care system needs reform badly. We are allowing medical decisions to be made based on the basis of cost rather than what is best for a patient as determined by their doctor. We have many cases of insurance companies denying treatments to patients that put their lives at risk; by the time the patient is successful in bringing suit against the insurance companies, they often have already died from their disease. There is evidence that doctors employed by insurance companies (as well as non-medical employees) were given financial incentives to deny care. There are far more of those types of stories than there are of Canadians flocking across the border to get care in the U.S. In fact, the Canadian health care system is consistently ranked higher than our own.

However, those that rail about the expense of “Obamacare” rarely have any alternatives to health care reform other than to have things remain as they are. Certainly the insurance companies would like to see that happen. We hear about small businesses being forced to carry health care insurance; the reality is that business that employ less than 50 people will not be affected; only those who employ 50 people or more and quite frankly, when you’re starting to get into that many people working for you, you should be offering health insurance.

There is also the same tired old refrain that the health care plan will bankrupt the country; the truth is that according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office which is as close to being impartial as any agency can be, says that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the formal name for Obamacare) will actually reduce the deficit by $143 billion over the first decade, then an additional $1.2 trillion over the second. Even if this weren’t the case, wouldn’t you think that helping people in need – sick people in particular – is only the Christian thing to do?

There just seems to be so much hypocrisy in the political debate these days, certainly not all of it on the Republican side but it seems to me that there is more of it on the right than there is on the left. As I said, I bear no love towards the Democrats who have failed in my estimation to deliver on their campaign promises of 2008, who continue to be just as in the pockets of special interests as Republican candidates are in the pockets of big business.

The sad fact of our national disgrace is that our elections are run by big money and only the very rich can afford to run for office, meaning that the ordinary citizen literally has no voice in national government. Both parties are just as much to blame for this state of affairs. We need to take money out of the equation of the election promise and impose term and spending limits as well as limit the ability for businesses, PACs and lobby groups to contribute to campaigns, as well as restrict access to politicians once the campaign is over. If the Tea Party would boldly come out for campaign spending reform, for transparency in the process so that we can see where the money for outside spending in campaigns is coming from, I would be more willing to give them some slack, but these seemingly simple, sensible things are something that conservative Republicans are fighting against. Recently, George Will spoke out against campaign spending reform on ABC News, espousing the donation campaign funds as a form of free speech, wondering “The question is, do you have to notify the government before you can speak on politics?”

Well, yes you do if you have an agenda. Money itself doesn’t speak but the source of the money does. If oil companies are donating millions of dollars for a senate campaign in Louisiana, don’t voters deserve to know that? That’s what I mean by hypocrisy; the unwillingness to conduct your affairs in the light of day, then portray yourself as the white knight charging in to save America. Personally, I’d like to know who’s paying for the armor before that knight rides into battle.

Politically Incorrect

Like many who are or were journalists, I have a great regard for Freedom of Expression. Like most writers, I believe that to be one of the true cornerstones to American democracy and the American way of life. It is also a responsibility that should be wielded with wisdom, courtesy and regard for others.

That said I have an inherent dislike for political correctness. Even if I disagree with the sentiment, I am a firm believer that the person expressing it has a right to do so, even if it labels them as a racist, a homophobe, a misogynist or a just plain asshole.

Some words are hurtful, no doubt about it. Maturity and compassion dictate that you shouldn’t use those words out of respect to others. Not everybody, however, possesses those qualities. Some people are immature and hateful, and express themselves accordingly. I tend to avoid people like that, but I wouldn’t come out and say they don’t have a right to say what they feel. Of course, I have the same right to tell them that they’re behaving like jerks.

I distrust anyone who says that such discourse shouldn’t be allowed. People shouldn’t make jokes that come at the expense of women, ethnic groups, religious beliefs or lifestyle choices, particularly on public airwaves where impressionable sorts will hear them and get the idea that sort of behavior is okay.

I disagree with that 100%. First of all, I try to give people credit for understanding the difference between telling a joke about gay people and being homophobic. Sure, there are people who don’t get it – but they’re not going to get it whether they hear the joke on a street corner or on the Tonight Show. Quite frankly, those people are ignorant and you could keep them in school for a hundred years and they’ll still be ignorant.

We have a culture that tends to respond to the lowest common denominator. I believe that most people have enough sense and maturity to be able to hear things that are unpleasant or even hurtful without having their day ruined. If someone makes remarks about my weight, my lack of hair, my age or my Cuban background, I chalk it up as someone who has issues and has to make other people feel bad in order to feel good. Some of those people need therapy, and others are losers to the core and can’t be saved.

I’m not saying that you should go out there and start using hateful language that’s sure to offend. Once again, it’s a matter of common sense. Offending people unnecessarily accomplishes nothing. Most people who go out there to offend people are doing it to get attention. Wise people simply don’t give it to them.

We don’t always act with wisdom, however. Instead, we raise a hue and cry about how people are supposed to act and tell people they’re not allowed to act in a certain manner. I, for one, hate to be told that I can’t do something. It is supposedly a free country after all.

When a comedian points out a foible that has a ring of truth to it, I laugh. Laughter is a very powerful thing. It can make an emotion more powerful, or lessen the power of another. When behavior is made to be ridiculous, that behavior becomes less threatening. Yes, some comedians can go too far from time to time, but that’s all right. When a comedian onstage makes a joke about gay men being catty or fashion-conscious, I understand that it’s a stereotype and a behavior that is being joked about; it is not an indictment against homosexuality.

You see, the problem is that some people don’t think that gay men or African-Americans or women can laugh at themselves, or perhaps that they shouldn’t laugh at themselves. I contend that if you can’t laugh at yourself, then when someone makes a joke about you, you are being laughed at; when you are able to laugh at yourself in the same circumstance, you are being laughed with. The difference is tangible and crucial.

Laughter unites us. It makes us stronger, and allows us to see our own faults. Humor can soften harsh realities. Sure, there are people who make jokes at the expense of others for the sole purpose of hurting them but for the most part, I believe them to be a very small minority. Most people who make jokes are doing so to get a laugh. It takes some inner strength to be able to laugh at ourselves, and that inner strength can be channeled in many positive ways.

We use political correctness as a means of shaming people into behaving a certain way, and that’s one of the things I despise most about it. For example, we’ve created a societal stigma about guys who watch porn. Obviously, they’re all perverts, right? They see women as objects and can’t have a real relationship because they disrespect women; if they didn’t, they would never look at a picture of a nude woman, or watch a movie in which women do all sorts of sexual acts with all sorts of people.

Now, I’m not one to deny that there aren’t guys like that out there, but I think a lot of women would be surprised that not every guy who likes porn is a lowlife scumbag would-be rapist. Not every guy is into porn but many that are into it are actually decent guys. They find the sight of a naked woman beautiful, and they are stimulated by the sexual act. They can enact fantasies that they would never dream of asking their mate to participate in by watching others do it. It satisfied a need in that regard, but we consider that behavior objectionable and we make people feel bad for having those needs in the first place.

That’s judgmental and arrogant to say the least. People feel what they feel; not everything we feel is polite or nice, but sometimes we just have to go with it. If people like sex – women as well as men – that’s only natural. Demonizing those people is only a sign of our own insecurity. Women who like sex are not sluts; they’re just women who like sex. Men who like porn are not perverts; they’re just men who like porn. That may not be a politically correct view but frankly I don’t give a rat’s ass.

Self-expression should be guided by one’s conscience and one precept alone; does it hurt anybody. If you can answer that question with a no, then fine. However, if the answer is yes then you should think long and hard about saying what you want to say. Common courtesy tells us that we should try to avoid hurting others as much as we can.

However, that doesn’t mean that we have the right to regulate how people express themselves. Our laws provide that truth is protection against libel, but no law anywhere on the planet protects us from offense. Being offended is simply a fact of life. I get offended nearly every time Sarah Palin opens her mouth, but I would not deny her the right to speak her peace.

We spend far too much time apologizing for what we say and how we feel. None of us are perfect and none of us are going to express ourselves perfectly. Most of us do the best we can and sometimes there are jackwagons out there who say things just to get attention; most of them are adolescent little boys who will eventually grow out of it although unfortunately, on the Internet, what you say is eternal and someday you may have cause to regret what you post. The 16-year-old dumbass who posts that illegal workers should be shot on sight, all Mexicans are inferior and that gay people are all going to hell may find those remarks coming back to haunt them when they run for office 30 years down the line. However, that 16-year-old shouldn’t be told he can’t say those things but personally I might sit that 16-year-old down and have a real conversation with them. Maybe he needs to meet a few Mexican-Americans and gay people. Maybe he just needs to learn the consequences of his freedom of speech. Either way, as hateful as remarks like that are, I can’t bring myself to say that they can’t be spoken or written. Telling people how to think and restricting what they can say just seems far worse than being offended by those sorts of remarks.

So to Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, I say go on and say that God hates fags. Feel free to picket at the funerals of soldiers who died in Afghanistan defending this country. You have every right to do so. It makes it easier to figure out that you’re a USDA choice, grade-A meathead with nothing valid to say. After all, I have the right to tell a guy like that to go straight to Hell and urinate on a Bible in front of his church if he has the right to say the things that he says, right?

Bread and Circuses

As a species, humans tend to be easily distracted. This isn’t a new fact; even the ancient Romans knew that if you gave the people bread and circuses, they would pretty much be satisfied with anything, no matter how despotic.

We are in much the same boat today my friends, except we’re getting Big Macs and digital entertainment. Our lives have been made so easy with gadgets and devices mean to give us instant gratification that we have become complacent and lazy. In the meantime, we have abrogated our rights to special interests, corporate lobbyists and other unscrupulous sorts.

From time to time we’re aroused from our stupor, particularly when our pocketbooks are impacted. Taxes go up? We take notice. The economy takes a header? We demand change. Yet we sit idly by while the financial institutions that we entrust our money to act irresponsibly in the name of chasing profits, while our climate is done irreparable harm and while our rights are eroded with legislation that on the surface is meant to “protect us.”

Most of us probably couldn’t name our congresspersons or local representatives. Only a very few of us are probably more than peripherally aware of their voting records. Fewer still are aware of any legislation out there other than the most controversial bills. A surprising number of the people who live in the United States are more than generally aware of how their government works.

It’s understandable why we got to the place we are. We have to work harder and harder to make ends meet; it takes energy and commitment to keep up with politics and the things that affect us. Energy and commitment are largely limited to young people, which is why the vast majority of political activists are under 40. After all, you can’t feed your family on a volunteer’s salary.

At one time, the newspapers (and to a certain extent radio, newsreels and television) were watchdogs on Washington and our local state capitals (and Ottawa and our local provincial capitals – insert your nation here). As the media has largely become corporate-owned, the media began to swing more in the direction of protecting corporate interests. Today it’s very rare for the mainstream media to do any investigation into things that don’t sell advertising.

The Internet is, in many ways, the last great hope for keeping the citizenry informed but unfortunately it has devolved into something of a shouting match where people on both sides of the aisle promulgate dubious facts which eventually begin getting circulation as gospel truth. How many people actually believed that Obama’s Health Care Reform would include death panels whose only job was to weed out the elderly?

Our political knowledge tends to be informed by 60-second soundbites we see on CNN or in political ads. Conservatives worship at the altar of Sarah Palin and her teabagging cronies; Liberals get their marching orders from Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. It’s like nobody has a mind of their own anymore.

And yet we all have our own causes. Some of us are passionate about animal cruelty; others are pro-life to the core. Some people are big supporters of gay marriage while others think that our borders should be protected more vigorously. Left, right and center, we all have opinions on things that matter to us.

We rarely do anything about them however, beyond voting on bills that support or threaten those causes near and dear to us and even that only when we feel motivated to. Until 2008, more people voted for the American Idol than for the American President in any given election year. Somewhere along the line, our priorities went haywire.

That’s because it’s far easier on our psyches to spend our energy on things that don’t require much thought. Thinking is really hard work. It’s much easier to navigate the headwaters of celebrity gossip rather than the often conflicting arguments behind financial reform. It’s easier to have our opinions handed to us rather than to formulate one of our own; if your family has always voted for one political party, you’re going to tend to believe in the precepts that party espouses.

I was like that too. My father was a staunch Republican and so was I, for quite awhile. However, there was always a niggling feeling in the back of my mind that I was fighting for the wrong team, and after my father passed away I did some soul searching and figured out that what I really felt strongly about were of a more liberal nature than the Republicans believed in. For the longest time, my political philosophy had been not to argue with my Dad, which was a shocker to someone who had always thought of himself as relatively intelligent. Like most human beings, I was prone to dancing to the tune that was being played for me.

At one point, it became obvious that following the herd was not as preferable as following my heart, so I broke with my dad’s beliefs and followed my own. We all do that to a certain extent – how many times have you said to yourself “I am not my parents”? – But we usually do that when we’re young. It’s much harder as we get older to change our way of thinking, particularly if it’s the way we’ve done things since we were young. Once you’re comfortable in your own skin, changing it is a tall order.

But you can teach an old dog new tricks, contrary to belief. Change is a matter of will, and we all have at least a dollop of willpower. It comes down to how badly we want things to change, and how willing we are to make that change happen, for change often involves sacrifice.

Sacrifice is sorely missing from our lives, the willingness to give up something we want for the betterment of others. My parent’s generation had it. My grandparent’s generation had it. Even the Flower Power generation had it. Somewhere between Woodstock and Live-Aid we lost that crucial element of our make-up. We’re far too busy texting and playing Mafia Wars on Facebook to take a look at the things that truly affect our lives. We act as if we’re living in a hotel, and whatever mess we make will be cleaned up by the housekeeping service.

Except it is our children who will have to be housekeepers and the mess we’re making may soon become too much for anyone to clean up. We have a responsibility to our kids – even if we don’t have any yet – to be caretakers for our planet and our society. I’m very anxious that the freedoms that I have always taken for granted be passed on to my son and his children someday; there’s a very real possibility that he won’t have the same rights and privileges that his mom and I have now.

We have to get off of the couch and switch off the television. We need to step away from the laptop and turn off our cell phones. We need to open our eyes and look around us. We have been seduced by bread and circuses. The trouble with that is that it only worked for a short while in Rome, and then Rome fell. I don’t want my children or grandchildren to see our civilization fall as well.