The Topic of the Moment (satire)

I have no doubt that history will bear me out on this – of all the crimes that can be laid that the feet of Roboseyo, that most nefarious and pre-eminent blogger among expatriates in the ROK, the greatest and most heinous of all such misdeeds is the one he has only recently confessed to, that of poking cats with sticks.

It’s just wrong, cultural relativism be damned, and I don’t care what is considered “normal” in Canada.

Don’t do it. Don’t poke cats with sticks. Just, don’t.

The admission is contained in this recent blog entry, and if you can believe it, it’s presented almost as an aside, some trivial bit of self-disclosure within a much longer and less interesting discussion about an altercation on a city bus. There, you see it? You have to scroll down quite a bit and look hard. What’s most noticeable is the lack of remorse being expressed. Although he does say that it’s something he “used to” do, implying that he has since discontinued the practice, I find it distressing that there’s not more emphasis given to the wrongness of the activity.

Now, I know there are going to be some among us who will say, “Aw, come on, Bob. Lighten up! Who among us has not, if only once, poked a cat with a stick?”

Well, I’ll tell you something, Bucko – I have never poked a cat with a stick, and I never will, either.

I’ll say it again: Don’t poke cats with sticks. Don’t do it. Just, don’t

There are a lot of good reasons, but I’ll only mention a few right here. First off, they don’t like it. I mean, it’s bound to be a little painful for them, and possibly more than a little, depending on whether the stick is sharp or blunt, and depending also on how deep and forceful the poking happens to be. Offhand, I doubt very much that anyone – anyone – could poke a cat without said feline experiencing some amount of pain or discomfort. Certainly not with a stick.

Therefore, of course, it is cruel, and this brings me to the second reason not to do it: cruel behavior will nearly always make you look bad, eventually. Yes, even if the knowledge is made known years later and by self-confession. That means, of course, that it has the potential to create a bad impression in others’ eyes, and you don’t want that, now, do you?

I’ve racked my brain trying to think of mitigating reasons or circumstances or some underlying cause that would justify poking a cat with a stick, and I’m sorry to say that I’ve come up empty. It’s possible that there exists, somewhere, a cat that is so ornery and ill-tempered that he might be improved upon by the application of a judicious poke. But, friends, let’s be clear – not with a stick!

There is, of course, the Just-Wanted-To-See-What-Would-Happen Defense, but I’ve never bought into that. As I recall, and at the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, there were several defendants at the Nuremburg Trials who offered this line, and absolutely no one at the time felt this was sufficient reason to annex the Sudetenland, let alone all that came after. The same skepticism was returned years later when this excuse was given by the guards at Abu Ghraib. In any case, even the dumbest of children (and there’s no evidence anywhere to suggest that Rob was ever anything less than bright) can make a pretty accurate guess at what the result will be if you poke a cat with a stick.

Though it is well-known from TV crime dramas that animal cruelty is often associated with sociopathic personality typology (and is nearly always observed as a precursor-behavior to serial killing) I want to dissuade anyone from harboring even the barest of suspicions of anything of the kind with regard to Rob. If there ever was any danger of such thing at any time in the past I have no doubt at all that he is quite past it by now. I’m sure that not everyone who ever poked a cat later continued along the continuum of events that leads to severed torsos placed in unmarked graves. Pretty sure.

I have the ability to say that I have met Rob on exactly one occasion when beer was in the vicinity, and he seems a good man, at first glance at least. He struck me as very clean. There was no facial hair, and being a Canadian, of course, he knew more about hockey than I ever will. He’s courteous and looks you in the eye when he speaks to you. Basically, you look up “nice guy” in the dictionary, you know what you find? A picture of Rob, that’s what.

He probably does feel bad about the whole cat-poking thing, even though he has so far neglected to express such sorrow. Perhaps it runs too deep, far too deep to express in words, and we’ll never know exactly how much it has affected his later development.

Rob is a man who is very able to see a large number of sides to any issue – he’s famous for this, actually – but about this one I don’t think there are any sides at all. There’s only one possible viewpoint to have: Don’t poke cats with sticks. Don’t do it. Just, don’t.

For a moment I did reconsider, briefly, whether to invite him to a birthday party I’m planning for early October, primarily in deference to my wonderful and magnificent cat, Kwenchana Obama. I’ve decided he will be welcome in my house if he decides to attend, though I will of course stash away anything on the premises that looks like a stick, and I’ll look him over once or twice to make sure he didn’t bring any himself.

I figure everybody deserves a second chance.

PS – As I noted in the comments section of his blog, his post comes in at No.2 when you google ‘poke at cats with a stick.’ I’m gonna search the same terms this time tomorrow and see if this post edges him out.

[Note: This piece is clearly marked as “satire,” partly because I wanted to avoid the kind of misunderstanding Michael Breen had to suffer through last year at the hands of the good people at Samsung.

The real Topic of the Moment is, of course, the video getting passed around on the ‘net of a 20-something American English teacher verbally and physically harassing a Korean senior citizen on a bus. It’s a serious thing, and worthy of discussion, but since everyone else is talking about it, it’s completely unnecessary for me to do so.  I do confess to being amused that when this kind of thing happens, everyone and I mean everyone feels a need to weigh in, and right away, long before all the facts are in - and perhaps due to a streak of contrariness in my nature, I decided when I sat down today that I would choose any topic except that one.

For the record, my own position is this: Don’t yell at and hit old people, on the bus or anywhere else. Don’t do it. Just, don’t.]