Keith Parsons--FELINOPHAGI? (EATERS OF CATS?)--Guest Essay, but on a Tuesday!
Guest essay by Keith Parsons Tuesday, 24 September 2024
I don’t usually post Letters, by guests or otherwise, on Tuesdays, but this is timely and I already have another guest essay (by Clinton Tankersley) lined up for Wednesday.
FELINOPHAGI? (EATERS OF CATS?)
by Keith Parsons
Do Haitian immigrants eat your pets? Only the congenitally weak-minded would believe such a story. It is one of those preposterous urban-legend memes that play upon people's irrational fears and their feelings of revulsion and disgust. We have heard plenty of them over the years: McDonald's hamburgers are made of worms (neatly debunked when it was pointed out that worms cost more than beef), Kentucky Fried mice, etc. The disgust is weaponized by associating it with the objects of tribalistic loathing: Chinese eat rats; Jews bake matzahs with the blood of Christian children; Indian restaurants make curry out of cats.
Now it's Haitians stealing and eating your pets. As I say, only those with room-temperature I.Q.'s would believe such a story. Unfortunately, that is millions upon millions of people, as Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the purveyors of this preposterous slander, are well aware. Of course they are aware that it is a ridiculous lie, but in a campaign based upon ridiculous lies, it is just one more, maybe distinguished by its particular absurdity and odiousness. When the idiot vote is a large part of your base, you pitch to them in their own idiot idiom. Hey, if you believe that Elvis is still alive, that the moon landings never occurred, that Democrats run a pedophile ring, and that you can cure covid with horse dewormer, then immigrants eating dogs and cats is not much of a stretch.
Of course, such vile canards are nothing new. Since the founding of our republic, nativists, know-nothings, and immigrant-haters have resorted to the same tactics. Immigrants are dirty. They spread disease. They are prone to vice and crime. They will outbreed real Americans. They eat the wrong foods, speak the wrong languages, worship the wrong gods, and are the wrong color. They are lazy and shiftless and looking to use services and benefits that should go to real Americans. They doesn't speek no gud English like whut we does.
All of this is lies. First-generation immigrants on average work harder and commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. They strengthen the local economy and revitalize declining communities—like Springfield, Ohio. However, ridiculous lies have real consequences. For centuries, the "blood libel" justified the persecution of Jews. Lies about immigrants motivated the notorious 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act that established strict quotas on "undesirable" immigrants (the ones from "shithole countries" as Trump so delicately phrased it). Life in Springfield has been seriously disrupted since the Trump/Vance lie prompted violent morons to issue terroristic threats.
BTW, it is odd that a hoax about what people eat would issue from this quarter. Trump would eat a rhinoceros rectum if McDonald's put it on a bun.
How do you fight such outrageous lies? "The gods themselves strive in vain against stupidity," is a quote attributed to German poet ("Ode to Joy") Friedrich Schiller. The stupid are too stupid to realize their own stupidity. In his early debates with evolutionists, creationist Duane Gish often surprised his opponents with the fluency and copiousness of his bullshit claims. Later debaters caught on, however, and some, like Ken Saladin of Georgia College and State University and eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher mopped the floor with Gish. However, creationists are too stupid to realize when they have been creamed, and they never change tactics, always reiterating the same hackneyed lines (e.g., evolution is "only a theory").
Actually, not every stupid person is born that way. Some are born stupid, some become stupid, and some have stupidity thrust upon them. The prevalence of stupidity in our society changes from time to time. It is now at apogee. Why? In 2009, Journalist Charles P. Pierce wrote Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free. If we were idiots in 2009, we are brain dead now. I think we are even stupider now because stupidity has so many enablers. When someone says something crazy, those reporting on it should say "That's crazy!" Instead, the allegedly liberal media engages in what one writer called "sanewashing," that is, engaging in interpretive contortionism to represent the wacko as coherent.
Something like this (imaginary dialogue):
"Joe Biden has opened the borders to an invasion of diseased, criminal, rapist, degenerates."
"Ah, so you are saying that the current administration is too lax in the enforcement of immigration laws."
"These illegal invaders steal and eat your pets."
"So, you find some of the culinary preferences of immigrants to be distasteful."
"They should all be rounded up and put in gas chambers. Hitler had the right idea."
"In other words, you think that current penalties are too lenient."
Crazy is crazy. SAY IT!
Can stupidity be fought? Ridicule helps. Praise be to whatever genetic gods made Tina Fey the doppelganger of Sarah Palin. Whatever madness seized John McCain and led him to name Palin as his running mate, that moment marked the excrescence of sheer, dumb-butt stupidity into national politics. In her appalling interviews, Palin evinced a cluelessness and vacuity of such depth and severity that it was scarcely believable. Tina Fey's impersonation was brilliant, hilarious, and devastating, driving home Palin's fatuity even more effectively than Palin's own interviews.
Ridicule has been used before against the forces of darkness. Baltimore Sun reporter H.L. Mencken attended the 1925 "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, and his scathing reports excoriated the "anthropoid rabble" of Tennessee fundamentalists. His most famous line nailed the decline into preposterousness of the once great William Jennings Bryan: "He is the tinpot pope of the Coca Cola belt and the friend of those preachers who belabor halfwits in corrugated iron tabernacles behind the railroad tracks." Ouch. So humiliated were the fundamentalists by Mencken's and others' mockery, that they were in retreat and not much of a presence on the national scene until the "Reagan Revolution" of the eighties gave us Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
The problem is that ridicule is at best a temporary fix. It may chase away the purveyors of stupidity for a while, but, like Camus's plague rats, they just bide their time waiting until the moment is right to spread their infection again. Nothing can eradicate stupidity. Like disease, it is a permanent feature of the human condition. Maybe, though, some things can be done to check or slow its spread. There is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to address the spread of disease. I wish there were a Center for Stupidity Control that would aggressively attack every ridiculous claim and meme that bubbles up into public consciousness.
Of course, there is the Center for Inquiry, Michael Shermer's Skeptic magazine, and various fact-check sites. They all do splendid work. However, it would be ideal if they could pool their talents and resources into one umbrella organization that would be strictly nonpartisan and have no agenda except truth. They would play no favorites, debunking the perniciously false wherever it is found, no matter whose political, religious, or ideological sensitivities are offended. The situation is too dire to worry about whose widdle fee-fees might get hurt. Truth matters. As Voltaire said (paraphrased), whoever can get you to believe nonsense can get you to commit atrocities.
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"They doesn't speek no gud English like whut we does." 😂 Appreciate this for both making me laugh and for demonstrating effective satire for fighting stupidity (I see what you did there).
I like your idea of the CSC, but the realpolitik of it is that the partisans won't agree on the definition of "stupidity" (which is, in and of itself, a reflection of the rampant stupidity of our time), just as they cannot currently agree on the definition of "disease" when it comes to the CDC. There was a brief time when gun violence was considered a public disease by the CDC, but as soon at they started to do studies and reports, they were shut down by congressional conservatives, backed by the gun lobby. That was the 90s, I believe, and look where we're at in the country right now when it comes to gun violence, especially school shootings.
So the only chance for the CSC would be nonprofit/NGO, perhaps funded with equal seed grants from 2 billionaires--one on the left and one on the right--such that they'll have no strings attached and no perceived bias. Alright, that's my contribution. Next! Who knows any billionaires?
"He is the tinpot pope of the Coca Cola belt and the friend of those preachers who belabor halfwits in corrugated iron tabernacles behind the railroad tracks." This quote from Mencken regarding William Jennings Bryan is to me a perfect example of what not to do. The plague currently infecting, and possibly about to overwhelm, the United States thrives on feelings of victimhood, and resentment at being looked down on by intellectual elites. Every time stuff like this is repeated, a Trump loyalist is born.