Skip to main content

Blue Dog Cat


We have a Blue Dog Cat.

You have heard about Blue Dog Democrats.
They are the people who would rather, almost,
instead-of-being Republican, be Democrats,
and their constituency elected them.

Now, in Congress, they know that, back home,
their voters are on the edge of being Republican,
so they dare not be the Democrats they say they were.

That is how Orphan, our cat is.
She is a Blue Dog Cat.
She says she likes me.
She sleeps on our bed.
She snuggles up, and purrs,
and then, suddenly, she remembers
that she comes from a long line
of killer cats, so she bites me!

She does that every time she becomes afraid!
Sometimes I just yelp, and put on a bandage.
The last time, I had to go to the emergency room
for a shot, and a bottle of pills, and a lecture.

But I trust her.
She is on my side.
She purrs and snuggles.
It is just that she might kill me.

I know what the option is:
I might get to her first!
I cannot bring myself to do it.

My name is not Barack Obama,
but I do think of him, and those Blue Dog Democrats.

So my suggestion to Barack Obama
is that he treat those Blue Dog Democrats
like I treat my Blue Dog Cat:
don't quite trust them.
I try to make it clear to my Blue Dog Cat
that if she messes with me,
I am going to whack her upside the head
until she understands that one of us is in charge.

It is working out pretty well.
She really does want to be a good cat,
but she is afraid of her own demons.
She needs a few of those demons
because she is, actually, a bit odd, herself.

"Come on, Orphan! Good kitty!
Does the good kitty want to vote
for universal veterinary care?"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more