The great thinker Voltaire went to an orgy and had a good time, but declined a follow-up invitation. He said, “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” That’s how I feel about watching the WTF Network.

Here’s the setup: Out on the West Coast, a colleague is fighting for a cause that’s already taken him to some extremes. Apparently, he slanted his story in a way that fits the format of a TV series called “Most Daring.” (We’ve discussed the proposition that there is no such thing as bad publicity.) So for the sake of team spirit, I decided to watch it, and even turned the TV on a bit early, and caught part of a show called “Cops.”

You will have guessed that the title up there at the top of the page is a gag. Oh, the network has a three-letter name, but they’re a different three letters. I call it the WTF Network, because the words that come to mind again and again are – “What the f***?”

Take “Cops,” for instance. I’m sitting here with a cup of tea, engaging in the spectator sport of looking at my fellow citizens being violently arrested. WTF were the people thinking, who first proposed this as entertainment? WTF causes anybody to watch this genre of television? It’s hard to imagine anyone who has actually been a victim of police brutality, wanting to see this stuff. Or the families of anyone at all who’s been in trouble with the law which, these days, is most people. If I had a son, I wouldn’t want to see a boy his age and general description being taken down by the cops.

Is any of this stuff for real? How much of it is “re-enactment”? I can’t imagine any actor, no matter how underemployed or desperate, consenting to be brutalized in the ways shown here. A large part of this has got to be real, genuine police photography.

“Cops” includes a long, Academy-quality performance by a shirtless driver who is questioned by officers at the roadside. With just a slight tweak, this old boy could be on the “Blue Collar Comedy” stage. Can this possibly be spontaneous and real? Why does this dude so tamely allow his humiliation at the hands of the law to be filmed?

Is any of this stuff, on any of these shows, spontaneous and real? Are they seriously asking us to believe it’s all real? Okay, tornadoes and stuff like that. Fine. But other stuff is impossible to have captured in the way it is shown, under any conceivable circumstances. Is it only obvious to media professionals? Maybe it’s obvious to everybody. Maybe the entire TV audience, these days, is so hip that everyone knows exactly what degree of verisimilitude to infer from any given image. Am I the only moron too unsophisticated to understand that nobody believes anything they see on TV any more, and I’m getting all excited over nothing?

Pretty soon, “Most Daring” starts up. It offers:

—- A subway riot in Buffalo, where I once lived.

— -A train/trailer truck collision that seems to have been filmed from about 99 different angles. Does a railway crossing really have that many cameras pointed at it?

—- A high-speed chase, where two truckers collaborate on blocking the fugitive from passing them. When he tries to pass on the right, they pin his car to a guardrail. Cut to cop being interviewed, later. He says, “To this day, I don’t know who they are.” Are you kidding? They just rode off, like the Lone Ranger? “Who was that masked man?” “Dunno, we’re just an agency with the ability to tap every nationwide database there is, as well as review the footage we ourselves took. How the hell should we know who those truckers were?”

—- Some pedestrian bandito leans in the window of a car stalled in traffic and steals a purse. He weaves his hazardous way through a herd of vehicles, and is chased, and so on. The amazing thing is, the footage is shot from many different directions. No single, stationary surveillance camera took all these pictures. I mention this to somebody, who assures me: Everybody has camera phones now. Okay, say there were 20 people in the area, who could spare enough attention from driving their own cars to take pictures of the crook. How did it all wind up on this show? Did the producers send out a call throughout every possible channel, asking for footage of the event that took place on such-and-such street, on such-and-such date? Did everyone with a camera spontaneously realize they could sell their footage to “Most Daring,” and take the initiative to get in touch? Do people get paid for turning over their amateur videos? Do they get paid the same whether it’s real, or really real?

How does it happen, that cameras are always present for these weird incidents? Sure, security cameras are ubiquitous, the average person is photographed 300 times a day, bla bla bla. But how does all this artful tracking and refocusing come about? This isn’t the work of automatic camera mounted on a wall.

The editors work overtime. If for some dire reason, they don’t have shots from a lot of different angles, they just replay one snippet a whole bunch of times. A suspect on foot gets mowed down by a cop car, and we are treated to the sight of the impact at least half a dozen times. Apparently, they could just put that vignette on an endless loop and sell it to people as a standalone product.

At some point I realized this was the wrong TV show. “Most Daring” comes in several varieties, and this was “Commuter Chaos,” which I knew wouldn’t include the segment I was watching for. But I sat there anyway, wondering how much worse it could get. “Commuter Chaos” was a lot like “Cops.” In fact, I’m not even sure which things were on which show. But that doesn’t change the basic essence of the matter.

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Finally, the show I’ve been waiting for – “Most Daring: Bedlam in the Burbs.” The person I sort of know is supposed to be in this one. Some highlights:

—-  A backyard demolition derby. My inner libertarian says people have the right to do whatever they want with their own property, including destroy it. Still, whenever I see cars being gratuitously wrecked, I think of all the people who could really, really use a car and can’t quite manage to get one. What a waste.

—- Police chase a motorist through a semi-rural neighborhood. A guy comes out of a house and throws something at the fugitive’s car as it goes by. Further on, another resident comes out with a gun and shoots at the fugitive’s car. Cut to a cop being interviewed about the helpful citizen with a firearm. “He’s listened to the police scanner over a case of beer and decided to get involved.” Not a word about the wrongness of vigilantism, no word on any arrest of the gun-wielding citizen, nothing like that.

—- This guy tells his girlfriend to pick up a dog collar, and they’re walking along, and all of a sudden she yelps and falls on her ass. It is, of course, a shock collar, whose purpose is to cure gratuitous barking, and the boyfriend has the control in his pocket. We’re supposed to think it’s all spontaneous and the girl was surprised. Didn’t she wonder why somebody was filming her and her boyfriend on their ordinary, mundane stroll through the back yard?

—- There’s a real short clip of a guy firing some kind of long gun, and when it goes boom, his pants fall down. Okay, that was interesting. But why was anyone filming him, to begin with? The unaccountable presence of a camera at these boring scenes is a pretty good indication that a lot of what the audience is supposed to believe accidental, is really on purpose. WTF is the point?

Okay, fine, set up a gag and film it. That’s what Chaplin did. Nothing wrong with that. But these guys want viewers to believe their subject matter is real accident, rather than a staged scene. It’s not enough that an audience should see it and laugh at it. The creators of it also require the audience’s belief in its authenticity. Why?

Why would anyone be filming any of this stuff, unless they knew beforehand that something would happen to liven things up? Well, one of the reasons is that parents will take any amount of pictures of their kids. This is how we get such masterpieces as a little boy learning to ride a bike, crashing into a toy car. And little boy knocked off a trampoline. This is how we get nonsense like the Balloon Boy media circus, as a direct result of the WTF Network culture.

— Some moron douses a basketball with gasoline, lights it on fire, kicks it, and manages to set his foot on fire.

Is it only because I worked as a nurse, that I don’t see the humor? There really isn’t anything funny about, for instance, a hand whose digits are all fused together by scar tissue. I knew a man whose hand was like that. When he was a little boy, his brother tied a rag around his hand, soaked it in kerosene, and put a match to it. He probably told him it would be fun. The parents were Alabama sharecroppers. Reconstructive surgery wasn’t in the cards for that kid.

The argument for not televising jackass stunts: I knew a kid who tried to duplicate one of them, broke his leg, cost his parents a bundle of money and hassle when they could least afford it, because his mother was recovering from two major surgeries and his father had been out of work for a couple of years. Do we really need TV that encourages that kind of thing?

The other side: I had a relative, a couple generations back, who spent his entire life on a couch, in the kitchen of a farmhouse without plumbing or electricity. There was nothing else he could do, being permanently crippled by a fall from the barn roof. Maybe he was up there on legitimate business; maybe it was a jackass stunt. They didn’t have TV. Nobody had TV. Those Alabama folks had kerosene lamps, not electricity. Okay, it could be said that I’ve just demolished my own argument. Kids have always gotten hurt

But to go from “Boys have always done asinine things” to “Therefore we should televise the asinine things done by boys” is a leap of logic I can’t quite negotiate. (For somebody who doesn’t believe in censorship, this is a difficult position to be in.) Let’s start with the very real possibility that the basketball pyromaniac could have set the building on fire. There’s very little humor in a house fire, or a fire of any kind, really. People’s lives are devastated by fire. It’s the kind of thing a survivor never really gets over. I sure hate to typecast myself as a curmudgeon and a stick-in-the-mud, but fire just isn’t that funny.

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I include, as a target for scorn, “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which may be on a different network, but that’s not really important. On most of these programs, most of the material involves somebody getting hurt, with genital injuries especially prized. Again, WTF? Just as a baby can find endless fascination in a bunch of jingling keys, men find endless amusement in the sight of some other guy taking a shot to the balls. And for some unfathomable reason, men love the sound of emergency vehicle sirens and screeching brakes. What’s up with that?

One of these shows even has a motto, “There’s nothing funnier than pain, embarrassment and humiliation!” Maybe so. Maybe also, there’s nothing worse than justifying sadism and bullshit under the guise of humor. Maybe there’s nothing worse than a sense of humor that’s limited to pain, embarrassment and humiliation, and incapable of moving beyond those hilarious qualities. Maybe there’s nothing sadder than elevating funniness to the very highest echelon of values. Maybe… a lot of things.

Humor is great, it’s healing, it’s stress-relieving, yada yada…. But just because a thing makes us laugh, that doesn’t mean it’s intrinsically good. I’m sure there were concentration camp guards who found abundant humor in some of the stunts they got up to. There’s nothing sacred about humor, and if we’re able to see that there are different kinds of humor, and that some are more desirable than others, we are probably happier. The fun of “Blue Collar Comedy” can make you feel good for minutes at a time, and even affect your whole day. The humor of a guru can blow your mind and change your life. Why not aim high?

When negativity takes over my brain, I apply the Codger Test. “If I were 16 or 21, would I feel the same way?” (A song by Will Crist says, “I’ll help you remember your youth.” To which I reply, “No, thanks.” It is all too easily remembered. While I wouldn’t change anything, neither would I want to live through it again.) So I imagine watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” or, Goddess forbid, “Cops,” at one of tender young ages. First of all, in the Sixties, only a few science fiction writers (and Paul Krassner) could have envisioned the shape of media to come. If, as a young adult, I had by some magical means glimpsed this future, it would have been added to my list of reasons for suicide. So, that’s the Codger Test. Would my opinion then, be the same as now? Hell, yeah. Pacifist though I was, I might even have found it a good reason to put my foot through the TV screen.

“Cops” is particularly distressing. The law-and-order freaks and cop wanna-be types who justify this show’s existence, sit hypnotized by the flashing lights of the patrol car – exactly like strobe-mesmerized hippies at a rock concert, a class of people they consider deviant zombies. (Has anyone ever sued the show for inducing an epilepsy attack with those flashing lights?) I keep wanting to say, “This is pornography,” then I remember the word means “writing about prostitutes.” Does that apply to this show? I haven’t watched enough of “Cops” to know whether it covers hookers, and don’t intend to. Sometimes research is a waste of time.

But on another plane of cogitation, yes, this is prostitution. What is prostitution, but selling something that probably shouldn’t be sold? It’s the same kind of whoredom practiced by small American towns struggling for economic survival, that can’t think of any idea better than “Let’s build a prison!” – with all the enthusiasm of an old cornball movie, “Hey kids! Let’s put on a show!”

Another TV series I don’t intend to treat myself to is “Operation Repo.” Just the ad for it was enough. This is how our invisible rulers maintain control over the population. All they gotta do is, make half the people into government minions with weapons, and the other half into outlaws with weapons. Keep our sorry asses busy clobbering each other, while they get their hands on everything. And free Americans voluntarily subject themselves to this indoctrination. The whole WTF Network is about America wallowing in its own worst impulses, and ya know what? It’s okay not to like it.

Here we have a photo of a veiled woman. Its ostensible purpose is to provide a visual means of identifying the subject, to which one can only say, “Huh?”. The paradox is almost too much to contemplate. It’s hard to say which aspect of this concept is most stupid.

First candidate: the entire women-as-property ethos. I like to respect the religious beliefs of others, but dammit, making humans cover their faces, like all the rest of the misogynist creed, wherever it is found, is just repugnant. I’m not in favor of women wearing veils unless they want to, and surprisingly few do seem to want to.

So that’s the first stupid thing. The second is: even bothering to take a picture. A principle of equal treatment? People who have no faces are afforded the same opportunity as those with faces: a means to prove or disprove their identity and their very existence. Seriously, would this picture stand up in court as a solid ID? No? Then what is it doing on this passport?

Or maybe it isn’t so stupid. “We have the technology!” was the motto of the 20th century. It won’t be the motto of the 21st century, because humans won’t be around on the planet long enough to look back on the century with nostalgia, or to identify the most characteristic slogan of that century.

So, who needs a whole face? By now we must certainly have the technology to identify an individual from a photo showing one approximate centimeter of flesh. Which many Muslim women do show. This devout lady, however, reveals nothing.

The next stupid thing is, it gives the bludg an excuse to grab more identification markers. “Yes, modest Muslim women are allowed to wear their veils to be photographed,” say the authorities. “This is why we must also have an alternate means of ID, such as fingerprints. And of course we wouldn’t want to discriminate, so that means everybody gets fingerprinted”. Still, this ID method would not capture data from bilateral amputees, so there must be retina scans… and so on, ad nauseum, ad absurdum and ad infinitum.

The fourth thing, and I won’t call it stupid because that would be offensive, but it sure does cause a person to wonder. Doesn’t Islam forbid the making of images? And specifically, images of people? But in order to move about in the modern world, the leaders of the faith apparently are willing to cut the faithful some slack. Well, why not cut them some slack in the matter of veils, infibulation and, you know, that kind of thing?

Why isn’t The True Believer taught to 7th graders? Eric Hoffer wrote this marvelously illuminating book, and an understanding of it, achieved by even a small segment of the population, would make America a better place. It’s one of the books I always keep a copy of, around the place, in case I run across somebody who might get something out of it.

Here are some of the best quotations, all by Eric Hoffer.

The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.

Not one of our contemporary movements was so outspoken in its antagonism toward the family as was early Christianity.

Marriage has for women many equivalents of joining a mass movement. It offers them a new purpose in life, a new future and a new identity.

It sometimes seems that mass movements are custom-made to fit the needs of the criminal – not only for the catharsis of his soul but also for the exercise of his inclinations and talents.

Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable – it deliberately makes it so. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral.

The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others.

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.

The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.

However much the protesting man of words sees himself as the champion of the downtrodden and injured, the grievance which animates him is, with very few exceptions, private and personal.

In the eyes of the true believer, people who have no holy cause are without backbone and character… On the other hand, the true believers of various hues, though they view each other with mortal hatred … recognize and respect each other’s strength.

1985 flyer

Note: this is the text from the 1985 flyer. The quotations are in a separate post.

There is no such thing as nuclear annihilation insurance, and anyone who thinks there could be is tragically deluded. If you have a notion that nuclear war is survivable, if you think there would be anything at the other end worth surviving for, this message is for you.

Oh, you have a shelter? Is your bomb shelter equipped to withstand 30 million degrees F?

At this very moment people are making “contingency plans.” Plans for how to keep your charge account bills coming, through the U.S. Mail which is guaranteed to be up and running with only a single day’s interruption of service. Of course everyone will have an address, due to the marvelous evacuation scheme which promises to get everyone neatly resettled within three business days after global cataclysm.

Sound like a crock? You bet it does. Do you have any conception of how pitifully, laughably inadequate the evacuation plans are? Or any idea how naïve it is to believe there will be anyplace to evacuate to, or any way of getting there? Missiles arrive within thirty minutes of launch. How far can you drive on the San Diego Freeway during the biggest rush hour in history?

Even supposing that evacuation were workable, will you be one of the refugees or one of the hosts? Even if it were possible to survive a “limited” nuclear exchange, would you want to? Will you be among the many thousands of severe burn cases, or among the walking wounded whose job it will be to nurse them?

Nuclear War – If You’ve Seen One, You’ve Seen Them All

It can’t happen, you say? Consider this:

• The nuclear policies of both superpowers rest on the concept of “unacceptable damage” at the very least.

• The purpose of NATO is to initiate nuclear warfare.

• The present administration has ignored or refused six major chances to delay our present course toward apocalypse.

• Some very intelligent people say the chance of accidental nuclear war is quite good. In 1980 it almost happened – because of the malfunction of a 46-cent computer chip.

There won’t be any veterans of WWIII. There won’t be any Time-Life Books series about it. The probability is very high that the beginning of nuclear war would lead inevitably to the end of everything.

Nuclear War – Oh, No, There Goes My Career!

If you’re not horrified by the nearness of total destruction, you haven’t been paying attention. Nuclear warfare is not cost-effective. After it there will be no markets, no goods, no customers, no profits. If you’re concerned about any other issues it behooves you to first be concerned about nuclear war. Of course it has the potential to solve a lot of social problems. No more apartheid No more conflict between pro-choice and pro-life. No choice. No life.

Wasn’t Once Enough?

As Voltaire said after the orgy, when invited to another: No thanks. “Once is philosophy, twice is perversion.” As an anonymous teenager said after trying a popular drug: “Once is curiosity, twice is stupidity.”

The worst thing happening in the world today is the belief people have been brainwashed into, that nuclear war is acceptable, necessary, even inevitable; that the “other side” wants it.

In the street a man is beating his wife. One neighbor turns up his radio and takes care to stay away from the window. Next door someone peeks out through the shade. Another neighbor picks up the phone to call the authorities, realizing too late that the line has been cut. Down the block a man stands on his porch and watches, expressionless. Someone else rushes to intervene, not heeding the risk to himself.

We each have our own way of dealing with the rightly named Unthinkable: the prospect of total devastation of the planet and the death of everything on it. We can throw ourselves into partying and turn our backs on the horror. We can let it into the fringes of consciousness and pay it with nightmares. We can kid ourselves into complacency, blind faith in the leaders who will surely take care of us and bring about a “victory” for our side. We can stare it in the face, numb as rabbits paralyzed by oncoming headlights. We can try to stop it, using any and all means at our disposal no matter how futile or hopeless the task may seem.

Give Peace a Chance

A good place to start would be a weapons freeze: Stop all testing, production, and deployment of bombs, warheads, and delivery vehicles of all types. When you consider that enough nuclear warheads already exist to blow up the world about 70 times over, freeze is not such an unreasonable proposition. Better yet, and the only acceptable course if life on earth is to continue – TOTAL MULTILATERAL NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT. Quite simply, take the weapons down. Dismantle them. We figured out how to put them together, surely we can figure out how to take them apart.

Making a Difference

There is no such thing as Nuclear Annihilation Insurance. Not that we can buy with money. But there are other things we can do. Virtually every profession, religion, and ethnic group has a peace group within. Examples of these specialized groups include architects, atomic scientists, atomic bomb survivors, computer experts, lawyers, Asian Americans, Constitutionalists, mothers, gays, professors, librarians, doctors, teachers, and psychologists. In Los Angeles alone there are dozens of groups working for peace. If your town has more than fifty people in it, chances are there’s a peace group.

We need to find ways to let the politicians and general on both “sides” know they do not have our permission or approval in their insane pursuit of Armageddon. We can view Threads or The Day After to get a real feel for what it is we’re dealing with here. We can educate ourselves by reading some of the many informative books on the nuclear threat and the peace alternative.

Some people create art which expresses their anti-nuclear convictions. Some alter billboards and paint slogans on walls. Thousands of people will interrupt their lives to go on a nearly year-long walk to Washington in 1986, to make the elected officials and the rest of the country and the world aware of the strength of their feelings. Thousands are arrested every year in acts of civil disobedience directed against nuclear warfare preparations. Some have gone so far as to damage missile silos and other military property in protest. Some refuse to hand over part or all of the taxes the government demands to buy our destruction. Did you know the seemingly insignificant federal excise tax on your phone bill is specifically earmarked for military use? If we continue to pay now, we will surely pay later.

There are innumerable ways to make a difference, and all of them worth trying. No idea is too wild when compared to the alternative – the end of life on this planet. One prominent scientist proposed an exchange between the superpowers of millions of children – a war prevention plan which has historical precedent.

Wake Up Today: The Future Can Still Happen

The first and most important step toward turning this mess around can happen in only one place: the mind. Your mind. Believe that reversal is possible and that insanity can be ended. Believe that the people, the citizens, of other nations don’t want nuclear warfare any more than we do. Believe that people can say no. We can say no. And that’s the only insurance we’ve got.

P. Robinson 1985

RELATED: Nuclear Annihilation Insurance Quotations

Modern Dance

• I read somewhere that the guy who invented Popeye the Sailor Man was pissed off at his art teacher, who insisted that even cartoon figures had to be anatomically correct. So he drew Popeye with the big parts in the wrong places, just to thumb his nose at the rules.

• This is at Santa Monica College back in the early 1980s. For the sake of health and grace, I enroll in a Modern Dance class, but the first session feels like a ripoff. As the people gather to wait for starting time, someone is playing the piano pretty well. But when the instructor arrives, the musician leaves. The evening school budget doesn’t allow for an accompanist. So if we want music for our dance class…we can each chip in 50 cents a session, and she just happens to have a pianist in mind. Someone immediately raises the question: What about the $3 materials fee we already paid? The instructor says it’s a general fee charged in every class. Another student corrects her, saying that the materials fee is specific to each class, and many classes have no fee. By the second session I know it’s a ripoff. There are twice as many students as should be allowed to sign up – assuming, of course, that one of the basic conditions of a Modern Dance class is the ability to fling one’s limbs with abandon, and without physically assaulting another student. The place is so packed, only the front row can see what the instructor demonstrates. The rest are doomed to mimic the moves of the person in front of us, a not always reliable indicator. So for the third class meeting I show up early and stake out a place up front – to no avail. The instructor wears such a baggy, ballooning outfit, her limbs are obscured. She could be doing anything in there. This is no way to learn Modern Dance or anything else. I become, tragically, a dropout.

• I ask a friend to explain various technical things about electricity and computers. I ask a specific question and he tells me something that, while useful, is the answer to some other question that I haven’t asked yet. Meanwhile, I’m thinking it’s supposed to be the answer to the question I did ask. But it just won’t fit or make sense in that context, and I get frustrated real quick

Graphic courtesy of eggybird via this Creative Commons license

Under the “Trash Your Stylist” category, this tabloid included Sigourney Weaver with the following text:

The “Aliens” made her do it! No makeup, a shapeless dress – Sigourney’s a sci-fi sad sack at a New York bash.

First of all, I detect mascara and lip gloss, and it’s possible that Ms. Weaver used foundation also. These people want to see penciled brows, shadowed eyes, and lips of an unnatural color. To them, mascara and lip gloss aren’t makeup, in the same way that, to heroin addicts, marijuana doesn’t even rank as a drug.

She’s wearing blue, the color of the sky at oncoming night, and green, the color of growth and optimism. She looks comfortable, confident, and happy. What’s not to like?

I know, I know, thousands of these things fly around the webwaves. But these are my favorites of the ones I’ve seen.

This last one is a Mad Magazine Poster

In which the author expresses disgust at the arrest of Ron Mason.

To “hoard” is to keep to oneself either something that other people do want – like canned meat – or something that other people don’t want – like a garage full of used plastic cups.

A hoard is a hidden supply or fund that is stored up. In wartime, hoarding is seen as very anti-social. Under military rule, people are expected to not stockpile goods for their own use, or participate in the black market, or abuse the rationing system. But in the case of wartime hoarding, we’re talking about a commodity that the government says it wants to share fairly with all the citizens (and actually wants for its soldiers and its war machine.) Cans of beans, sides of beef, gold coins, or silk stockings – you’ll notice that these are all considered desirable items. To be engaged in this type of hoarding, a person would have to hang onto a supply of something that other people want.

Well, nobody wants these damn cats. That’s the problem. These cats were thrown away by humans. They’re either abandoned domestic pets, or feral cats whose parents or grandparents were abandoned domestic pets. It would be a real good idea for any agency that claims to care about the welfare of animals, to concentrate their efforts on the people who dump their cats.

And then there’s the kind of hoarding that applies to stuff people don’t want, items that “don’t seem reasonable,” according to one of the talking heads in this video. Keeping stuff that either is, or appears to be, useless. And usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. My grandpa had a room full of little bits and pieces of wire and transistors and knobs and so on, that seemed useless to most onlookers. But he could fix your radio or TV.

Another kind of hoarding applies to stuff that people didn’t used to want, but now they do want it, and the former hoarders turn out to be astute business people. When people hoard baseball cards or comic books and then make some money off the items, we call them entrepreneurs. If they hoard paintings, we call them collectors, and shower them with praise.

Here’s a description of the pathology of the animal hoarder: “Because of their sheer numbers, these animals usually aren’t cared for properly. Many become so ill that they die or have to be euthanized.” Does this sound familiar? It sounds like an official animal shelter, to me. The point here is, by any definition you can formulate, animal shelters hoard animals. And the level of care in official shelters is not necessarily as good as what the free-lancers provide.

Admonishing any animal hoarders who happen to read their webpage, the Mayo Clinic says the critters “deserve to live healthy and happy lives, and that’s not possible if you can’t provide them with proper nutrition, sanitation and veterinary care.” So according to the medical establishment, what you’re supposed to do with the animals is hand them over to a government agency that can’t provide them with proper nutrition, sanitation, veterinary care or, in some cases, as we’ve recently seen, can’t even provide our little four-legged friends with shade to keep the sun off them.

This quote is even more ludicrous: “A hoarder fails to provide the animals with adequate food, water, sanitation, and veterinary care, and … is in denial about this inability to provide adequate care.”

You want to know who’s in denial? The police who arrest Ron Mason for providing the amenities to the cats, and then charge him with being a hoarder, which is by definition someone who fails to provide the amenities. Denial is when bureaucrats think their shelters provide better care than concerned individuals with limited means and loving hearts. Denial is believing that adequate care is something only the State is capable to provide. Denial is pretending that the killing of healthy animals, because official facilities are overcrowded, constitutes “adequate care.”

Supposedly, the societal problem here is that too many cats are running around the neighborhood. So this guy gives them a place to hang out, where they won’t annoy the neighbors. In which case, keeping them to himself is not a bad thing. It is, in fact, a very good and beneficial thing. He ought to be helped, encouraged and subsidized, not prosecuted. One of the officials in the video explains why it’s wrong for Mason to give houseroom to these animals – because “they get everything they need here.” Exactly! So they’re not out bothering the neighbors! What is the freakin’ problem?

To make compassion for animals into a crime is outrageous. They’re talking about “the recidivism rate is 100%.” All that means is, people who are willing to feed hungry cats will probably always be willing to feed hungry cats, no matter how drastically they are punished by the State. They’re making it sound like the guy is a pedophile or something.

To make compassion for animals into a disease is outrageous. This alleged mental health expert says, “They get a skewed perspective.” News flash: the people who think euthanization is preferable to living with Ron Mason are the ones with the skewed perspective. Maybe somebody should ask the cats for their opinion on the subject. The officials are talking about sentencing Mason to ongoing mental health treatment and medication. They want to “help this person be okay” by assigning him a minder who come in daily. This is an unbelievably stupid use of resources. The whole implication that something is wrong with Ron Mason is unbelievably stupid. This is Cold War era Soviet Russia bullshit. Any time a citizen does something the government doesn’t like, just label that citizen mentally ill. We’re about one step away from compulsory lobotomization.

Ron Mason doesn’t create these animals. He doesn’t manufacture them or give birth to them. On the contrary, he’s tried to stop more of them from being born, by having them neutered. Even if he wasn’t able to have all the cats operated on, there’s still more of them neutered than there would have been if he’d never taken responsibility for any of them. What’s the freakin’ problem?

The spokesperson for the authorities explains that hoarding is having a whole bunch of something. By this definition, you know who’s hoarding? Orphanages hoard children. Or at least, they used to. Maybe orphanages have disappeared, like mental institutions, which used to hoard mentally ill people, until the state closed them and let all the mentally ill people out on the street, where they are so much better off.

The California penal system hoards prisoners. They got a whole bunch of prisoners, and they want to add to the number by locking up some poor targeted civilian who takes care of cats. Who else is hoarding? The vastly overpaid and incompetent jokers who run Animal Services, that’s who. They hoard millions of tax dollars and produce nothing – certainly not services – for anybody, animal or human.

Related:

Cats, Ron Mason, and Human Health

Video of some people who have gone way overboard in response to the cats next door

and the whole story behind what you saw there

The picture on this page is by brownpau via this Creative Commons license

Check out this video of a guy in LA being busted for having too many cats.

In the police briefing before the raid, they make this big fuss about triple gloves, and bleach footbaths, and how there’s urine and feces all over the property. Uh-huh, totally unlike the areas where their own dogs of war are housed, trained, and exercised. I’d love to hear from anybody who can verify that there are bleach footbaths in the LAPD’s K-9 facilities.

And the animals step in their own waste, the briefing officer notes, and track the germs around. I’m not crazy about that aspect of pet ownership. When a cat jumps out of the litterbox and then gets comfy on my pillow, I’m not happy. But it’s the same scenario millions of pet owners cope with in their lives. They just wash the pillowcase, or not, depending on personal taste.

You know what I worry about? People. I don’t like it when people use the toilet and neglect to wash their hands. I don’t like it when doctors go from one patient to the next without washing, and spread infection all over the hospital. I don’t it when somebody strolls over to the stove and tastes the spaghetti sauce and puts the spoon back in the pot. I don’t like it when people send their flu-sick kids to daycare. Though I certainly understand it.

The point is, more people get health problems from other people’s negligent spreading of bacteria, and polluted air and water, and from their own bad habits, than they do from animal germs. They get more health problems from eating animals than they do from taking care of animals. That’s not to say animal germs are desirable. Only that they play a relatively small part in the overall human health picture.

One uniform here talks about how having those cats is “not a sanitary way to live.” True, it’s less sanitary than maintaining a cat-free home. But – news flash – there is no sanitary way to live. It’s a shame, and we all do the best we can with it, but as long as we’re here on Planet Earth, our existence isn’t sanitary.

Threat to human health – you know what’s a threat to human health? The police. How many times do they descend like an invading army on non-violent citizens? How often do they carry out busts at the wrong address and kill innocent people? There aren’t enough electrons in this computer to cover the subject of what a threat to human health the cops are.

Excrement is a threat? Yes, it is. And the most copious source of excrement in this situation is the massive amount of bullshit spewed out from the mouths of these officials.

Related:

Animal Hoarding – What the Hell is That?

video of some people who have gone way overboard in response to the cats next door

and the whole story behind what you saw there

The picture on this page is by pkernaghan via this Creative Commons license

Patriot: a painting in oil by Dale Hartman