Pouring My Art Out

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That, my fine, feathered friends, is a cat… seriously, you never saw a cat before? Oh, you mean the ramp thing? That is a long story. So, my daughter got a cat. Her name is Cleo, which may or may not be short for Cleopatra… no, silly, the cat is named Cleo, not my daughter, she is named Mollie. Try to pay attention.

“But Arthur”, I hear at least one of you saying… (which explains the quotation marks)… “you already have a dog!” I know we do, because I do pay attention. But we also have rats… no… not the cute pet ones… (which you can get for very little money, and probably save them from being eaten by pet snakes)… but the kind that crawl along our fence in the backyard every night, and have also taken up residence in the garage. The bad kind of rat… Don’t get me wrong, I love rats, and had them as pets when I was younger. You can train them to come when you call, they have hands… and I defy you to buy a pet with hands for 50 cents… and they will ride around in your pocket of on you shoulder… like a parrot… which cost way more than 50 cents… oh, and did you know that a rat’s nose can distinguish individual molecules of scent???

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So, that should explain the ferocious, rat-eating feline. The ramp is because, as we have already determined, we also have a dog. A dog that likes to chase things, but can’t climb fences… if she could, we wouldn’t need a cat.

Anyway, you can’t just introduce a cat and a dog by putting them snout to snout. It takes finesse… especially when the dog is a chaser, and has lived as the only pet in our house for years. So, Mollie’s boyfriend built this thing…

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It is a cat ramp that will someday allow Cleo to leave Mollie’s room at night and kill hundreds of rats. But it will also let us introduce the dog to her while she is protected, and has a place to run if it doesn’t go well. How cool is that?

Is being a dick a learned behavior, or are some people just born that way?

I wanted to take a break from following our screwed-up political crapfest, and for some reason I thought it would ease my worried mind to look around the world and see how the rest of it was doing. I somehow ended up observing France and their elections, and let me tell you, it didn’t make me feel any better. But it did make me… or the crack squirrels that live inside my head… start thinking about horrible people again.

I won’t name any names, but there is a woman running in the French elections who is the leader of a hateful, fascist party. It turns out that her dad was the leader, but she took over and then kicked him out. Which should be funny, but it isn’t. And that was when I began to wonder if she just learned to be an asshat, or if it had been handed down to her in her jeans… uh… genes.

Has there ever been a study done about this? I know that in the American South, bigotry seems to be sort of hanging on with a firmer grip than in other parts of the country. If a KKK member has kids that end up being racist, did he… or she… just teach them to think that way, or is it part of their DNA? Now obviously, there are people who go against whatever it is that their parents taught them, if only out of rebellion, but what about people who come from accepting parents and end up being haters? Is this evidence that bigotry is something we can pick up from other idiots, or does it, in fact, lead to the opposite conclusion? Are these people who suffer from some genetic aberration that cause closedmindedness?

In short, me… and the squirrels… want to know if some of us are jut predisposed to being complete jerks. Is it hardwired, or are some people just so stupid that they can hate large groups of people just because some other ignoramus told them too?

Tell me what you think.