The Grumbling Down Below

By David Simmons

"More and more I see people losing faith in once untouchable and untarnished institutions," the editor of a Vancouver-based news website said on Facebook recently. He was commenting about the "double standards" on how police deal with criminal activities by one of their own, adding: "This force is not the same one I knew years ago and standards have declined – both in terms of investigational skills and in terms of ethics."

Vancouver is not alone in this loss of faith, of course – far from it. And disrespect for the police is only a symptom of a malaise that runs very deep, to the very core of Western society. In Europe, decades of profligacy, waste and incompetent government abetted by bankers so blinded by their own greed they could not see – or, more likely, didn't care about – the coming collapse of the euro zone have led to a breakdown of order in Greece, with rumblings of anger and dissent ready to burst forth in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, France and even Germany. Meanwhile in the US, what began as a quiet protest in New York City against the collusion of finance and government shovelling the nation's wealth away from the masses and into the pockets of a tiny few has swelled to such a level, thanks largely to police incompetence and ham-fistedness, that even CNN can no longer ignore it.

As is typical of CNN, though, it has completely missed the point of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement. It sent a young reporter down to Zuccotti Park where, as veteran anchor Jim Clancy stroked his chin and nodded wisely, she found a lack of any "coherent" message from the protesters (who she claimed, amazingly, appeared to be outnumbered by media folk, even though the protest had been barely covered until the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge).

This lack of "coherence" of Occupy Wall Street has emerged as something of a theme, now that the movement, in the words of The Independent, has become "too big to ignore". Self-described British "leftie" Brendan O'Neill, in one of the most mean-spirited and scathing attacks on the protest to date, wrote in his Telegraph blog that the occupiers "spend their time spreading all sorts of demented conspiracy theories about modern political life. 'Corporations … run our governments', they claim, indulging in a David Icke–like fantasy that faceless men-in-suits puppeteer the political sphere. Apparently these evil men, not content with making squillions of dollars and starting billions of wars, have also 'poisoned the food supply through negligence', inflicted 'cruel treatment on countless non-human animals', and 'purposefully covered up oil spills'."

But it is the very incoherence sneered at by these reports that speaks most loudly of the unrest rumbling, like a dormant volcano, too far below the surface for behind-the-curve analysts to hear. They are like someone who criticizes an AIDS sufferer dying of pneumonia: "He is just lashing out, complaining about his lesions at one point, then about his inability to breathe, then about HIV, then about the fact that he can't afford antiretroviral drugs. And when pressed, he can't offer any cure for AIDS."

It is the disease itself that is incoherent: an economic system built first on paper, then on bubbles, and now on unsustainable debt repackaged and resold as "derivatives", while the basic necessities of life – food, shelter and health – are so downgraded in importance that vast numbers of people in what used to be called the Third World (now the "developing" world, though what it is "developing" into is never explained) don't have these things at all, while more and more people in the once-prosperous West are losing them.

The police in New York, or Vancouver or Toronto or Athens or Chelsea, are not the problem. They are only the armed force of a system that is not simply broken, it is shattered. Their pepper-spray canisters, their truncheons, Tasers and guns are powerless against the volcano, which must eventually erupt. Will it be a Pinatubo, a Mount St Helens, or merely a plume of noxious gas that quickly peters out? Only time will tell, but it's down there, it's down there somewhere. CNN and Brendan O'Neill just can't hear it yet.

On Onet

By David Simmons

One of the good things about living in Thailand is that I've never run up against that bane of the renter in Canada, the "no pets" policy. But it's not only Canada that permits this violation of the basic human right to animal companions; the Vatican Apartments also ban them, to the chagrin of their best-known tenant, Pope Benedict. His black-and-white shorthair Chico has to stay at his home back in Bavaria.

Our cat Onet takes full advantage of Thailand's tolerance of tabbies. In fact, she wanders off for days on ends sometimes, apparently taking up temporary residence in other townhouses in our neighbourhood that, we suspect, bribe her with squid, her favourite snack. At our place, if she wants squid and we're not paying due attention to her needs, she'll steal a package from the shop my wife runs in our carport, subsequently enduring the wrath of said shop's proprietress.

My wife isn't keen on cats. When she was a child, one bit her in the head while she was sleeping, and she still has the scar. But she puts up with Onet for my sake.

Onet's latest neighbourhood walkabout started last month, when we were all out of town for a short time. When we returned, the cat was nowhere to be seen for several days. Our eight-year-old daughter decided that when Onet did finally return, she would be thirsty, and so she filled a tub with water and left it in the kitchen for everyone to stumble over.

I had a look around the Internet to see if anyone besides Benedict shares my fondness for cats, and some of the "famous cat-lover" entries are not too surprising: Albert Schweitzer, Mark Twain, Florence Nightingale, Albert Einstein. I didn't know before that the Prophet Muhammad, who thought dogs "unclean", liked cats so much that they now reportedly hang around his gravesite. Sir Winston Churchill was very fond of a cat named Jock, while Adolf Hitler, like Napoleon Bonaparte before him, despised them.

Among my fellow linguists, Noah Webster defined the cat as a "deceitful animal and when enraged, extremely spiteful", while Samuel Johnson's cat Hodge was so "indulged", according to biographer James Boswell, that a statue of Hodge (with oyster) stands outside Johnson's former home in London. But the late Barbara Holland, who wrote the book The Joy of Drinking decrying the rise of "broccoli, exercise and Starbucks", suggested that both lexicographers had missed the point: "There is no cat 'language'. Painful as it is for us to admit, they don't need one."

Onet isn't around as I write this – out hunting birds, maybe, or stealing squid from the neighbours. That's OK; as many have observed, you can never really "own" a cat, and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted, "If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer." But at least I get to indulge in the simple pleasure of a purring cat in my lap fairly often, without having to go all the way to Bavaria. Benedict, meanwhile, has to content himself by issuing edicts against condoms.

In the end, it's a mistake to get sentimental about cats – they would consider that a victory, proof of their superiority, if they even cared that much. American humourist Garrison Keillor probably got it right: "Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function."