Consider the following. It may yet bring a smile to your lips. But first, the bad news. For the past week, the far-right message boards have been lit up with news and speculation about happenings in Springfield, Ohio.
There is, of course, no proof that Haitian immigrants have been eating the city’s pets. Nor will there likely ever be. The statements from the mimic JD Vance and others are more shaped by decades of awful voodoo films than any of Haiti’s real history. But truth has never really stopped them before, and anyway it is considerably less interesting than ideology.
The mind of the American right is feverish. Even when it gets what it wants, it can’t help but feel deprived. More importantly, this deprivation is the greatest injustice in the history of our beleaguered Civilization (always with a capital C). The worst thing that can happen to this particular genus of mind is getting what it wants. And what it wants is to be disagreed with.
We know what this looks like. For the time being, the best way to spread slander is online, but it is also a realm where you can be endlessly trolled, mocked, disproven and contradicted. The peak of this is far in the rear-view (thank you, Elon), but it persists, and likely will for a long while. In fact, the more isolated this ecosystem finds itself, the more desperate and unpredictable it becomes in the world generally.
Some decide to up the ante, joining fascist or neo-Nazi groups (the kind which unfortunately are now rampaging through Springfield) or going lone wolf. They’re already calling in bomb threats to schools. Hopefully they won’t do worse.
Many others will never gather the spine, frustrated and insecure, unable to step out from behind their laptops. Soft and sun-deprived, they nonetheless believe they’ve been denied their rightful place at the front of the pack. They all hate themselves, which isn’t particularly unique. The depth of their masochism is.
And isn’t it fascinating how often they come back to cats? Before Vance was accusing Haitians of eating them, he was blaming them – or at least their female companions – for the fictional decline in birth rates. Predictably, the shrieking mobs followed suit, as they do now.
Which may be only fitting for our friend felis catus. As avatars for American decline, they are an interesting one. Maybe it’s because they were domesticated relatively recently, but these are creatures that weave in and out of civilization as they please. They’ve been portrayed as witches’ familiars, and shown up as sacrificial ingredients in the potions of made-up voodoo priestesses. They’ve even been deployed against the suffragettes. So here we are now. The childless cat lady is only a few steps up the ladder from the cat-eating immigrant, but whichever one needs to be protected depends on the context. Which anxiety will win out this week? It’s a familiar brand of selective outrage.
There’s another irony at play. Many of these people lighting up the online world’s passageways with colonial-era tantrums are cat owners themselves. And given their spotty health record, it isn’t out of the question that some of them have spent the past week whipping themselves into such a frenzy that their soggy sack hearts have decided it’s time to call it quits. Driven to a sweaty fever-pitch of indignation, their arteries finally collapsed in on themselves, and they collapsed on their keyboards.
Friendless and forgotten, they now molder and desiccate in their dark apartment. But their neglected kitty still has to eat. Which means that somewhere, almost certainly, there is someone who, having spent the last week of their life arguing that Haitians are eating cats, is now having their face devoured by a cat. The arc of history may not always bend toward justice, but it does have a deliciously petty sense of humor.
Header image is from Pet Sematary (1989).