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Mavis the rattling cat
Friday, April 25 2003
Every close-knit community comes to speak its own unique dialect. The more close-knit, cultlike, and irrational the community, the more incomprehensible and pathological the language. Outsiders listening in on the conversations are left scratching their heads or, if they're wise to the world's absurdities, entertained by the goofiness. Fortunately for the most hermetic of cults, there aren't many outsiders with access to their internal dialogues, and opportunities to be mocked are few. Back in the late 1990s, however, quite a number of cults (in the form of internet startups) took stabs at producing online content, and on many occasions their editorial staff proved incapable of preventing the wacky cult-only terminology from spilling into publications targeted at a more general audience. Back when I worked at College Club, for example, insider terms routinely leaked into online copy, despite the best efforts of the overworked (though otherwise capable) two-person editorial staff.
One could say that the entire United States, driven to madness by nineteen Saudis and Egyptians armed with box cutters, has turned inward in a way that to outsiders might seem weird and cultish. What is up with all those plastic car flags? Why exactly have we renamed French fries? Who exactly are these people who have consolidated their control of government with the last election? Why do images of man-on-dog intercourse come so naturally to them? Why exactly do so many of them pine for the days when Strom Thurmond delivered speeches about the "nigger race"?
Just as in my days at College Club, the insider-speak has a way of leaking out, and when it does, don't think it doesn't get noticed. Such slips of the tongue reflect the machinery of the underlying thinking and denial and qualification are impossible. This is one of the most incontrovertible aspects of Freudian theory. It seems only yesterday that America was all about globalization. American corporations were launching websites in dozens of countries, forcing us to click on maps of the world as a first step to the humble device driver pages we'd come for. But after September 11th, it suddenly became fashionable to deny that there was any other part of the world. Even viewers of supposedly-internationalist CNN were forced to watch a waving American flag whenever they checked in for their news. America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America, America. The more flags, the greater the patriotism. Perhaps by shouting "We're number one!" loud enough, nobody would crash planes into our skyscrapers anymore. Hell, if a dog says "woof!" exactly the same way enough times in a row, his master does eventually come home from work.
Then I read in Salon about America's aborted attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Arab world, a program whose unstated hope was to make terrorists put down their box cutters and become Pepsi drinkers instead. I didn't see any samples of the copy offered to the masses of potentially friendly Pepsi customers, but I couldn't help but wonder how many patently offensive phrases inadvertently crept in. After all, most of the potential proofreaders with Arabic language skills are off rotting in secret detention, or else trying to deny their roots.
Gretchen has been working for months now at the Kingston SPCA shelter. She volunteers there as a cat person, letting furry felines out of their cages and seeing that they get necessary human affection. One of her charges was Mavis, an old grey cat who had been seized from a would-be animal "rescuer" (her rescue had consisted of a life locked in a kitchen cupboard). Gretchen soon recognized Mavis as the least-adoptable cat at the shelter. She had a scruffy coat, was very thin, and possibly suffered from diabetes, though no one had ever succeeded in drawing enough blood to make a proper diagnosis. Gretchen arranged with me to adopt Mavis as a foster cat, though the actual adoption had been delayed by our South Africa trip and a pending abuse case against Mavis's "rescuer." Today, though, we finally had the go ahead to pick her up. We got to the SPCA just as a minivan full of squealing children arrived for their five minute tour of the cat room. Along with Mavis, we also got Mavis's favorite cat bed, where she'd spent most of her time whenever given free run of the cat room (a privilege all SPCA cats get on a rotating basis).
Back at our house, we released Mavis into the upstairs master bedroom's bathroom (the classy bathroom that we designed and built ourselves). Our dog Sally (who had come with us to the SPCA) took an immediate interest in the new cat, and she mostly manifested this interest by intensively smelling Mavis over and over again at intimate range. Since she only eats wet food and doesn't groom herself particularly well, Mavis smells enough like fish that even I can detect it. Our other two cats, Edna and Noah, were alarmed by the new cat in the house. They kept a distance and occasionally growled or even hissed. For all their bluster, though, they were clearly more frightened than anything else. They were considerably more disturbed about a new cat than they've ever been about strange dogs in the house. As for Mavis, she's been around the world and seen a lot of things. After spending an adoption-free year in the SPCA's cat room, she's seen cats come and go and Edna and Noah weren't anything special to her. As for Sally, she wasn't any big deal either. Mavis only complained after Sally overstepped the bounds of propriety and began humping her.
I spent much of the afternoon working on putting up a railing on the new back deck catwalk. For some reason it turned out much better and more solid than I expected. After that was done I turned my attention to building a little concrete block and stone stairway down to the back yard from the front. Well before dusk I had to call it quits, though, because I was being attacked by clouds of irritating flies divebombing into my hair. Sally was also being attacked by these flies, but she managed to keep their numbers down by snapping at them and running around like a crazy.
After awhile I let Mavis out of the bathroom so she could roam around free and learn to deal with Sally and the cats. She proved much more social than expected, following me into the laboratory and sitting in a nearby chair while I typed. Sometimes she'd shake her head and I'd hear a weird rattling sound, as if there was some loose mass in a hollow cavity within her head.
Mavis in a new cat bed Gretchen recently bought.
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