Giving Thanks for Cats, and other small guardians of civilization
A reader with the eldritch and unspeakable name of Nostreculsus writes:
Although cats are disgusting vermin that must be put down, I must warn against any plan to consume their meat in a stew. It is just too dangerous. Science tells us that cats are infested with symbiotic parasites that lodge in the brains of those unfortunates exposed to cats. These parasites then control the minds of the human victim, convincing him to shelter cats, to feed cats and to serve all cat purposes. There are even sad cases where the infested human’s perceptions are so disordered, so that he finds the cats “cute”, and “fluffy”, rather than as the diseased and repulsive beasts they truly are. Any such infested humans should be reported for medical decontamination at once.
At least, that is what the parasites from my faithful golden retriever, Scout, are telling my brain. He is truly man’s best friend.
This is almost as amusing as the scene in Tanith Lee where the great demon prince Azhrarn, upon discovering the mankind does not like snakes because of the slitted eyes and sinister pride and sleek cruelty of snakes, takes a snake and pets it, giving it fur and feet, and releases upon man the race of cats, who men love, because of the slitted eyes and sinister pride and sleek cruelty of cats.
I am totally kidding about the cat cooking. Without cats, out first ancestors who settled down from a nomadic life and grew grain and raised city walls would have been eaten out of their grain supplies by rats, and civilization would have never begun. All writers owe our livelihood to cats, since the first writing systems were apparently to tally grain or write down the names of the kings of walled towns. So, a few thousand years of catlike lazying around and doing no work is small price to pay for all the efforts of all farm cats for countless years keeping the rat population down.
Now, of course, after the last election, we realize that the rat population has returned, and the voters voted themselves all the seedcorn in the grainhouse, and all the rats feasted and feasted again with so called stimulus packages that magically reversed cause and effect (as if consuming goods could somehow produce goods) and various inflationary quantitative easing schemes. Oh, where is some Egyptian devil-goddess with the head of a cat to call down vengeance upon this nation with a swarm of slitted eyes cats, sleek and cruel, to eat all the hordes and hordes of rats rising like an endless tide to consume our civilization? Where, O God, is the archangel in charge of cats? Send us, Lord, St. Gertrude of Nivelles!
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
