The Cats of War

Any citizen should be willing to give all that
he has to give in times of crisis.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

We spoil our kitties today. 

Spoil them rotten.

We spend $34 billion a year on their food alone—most of that wet food.

We serve our kitties beef, chicken, duck, turkey, rabbit, and fish. 

We serve them pâtés, chunks, chunks with gravy, chunks with broth, flaked, sliced, shredded, ground, semi-moist, dehydrated, raw, boiled, lightly boiled, steamed, lightly steamed, healthy, organic, natural, locally grown, gluten-free, grain-finished, cage-free, grass-fed, free-range, sustainably caught, non-allergenic, prescription-only, adult, lean, and vegan.

Our kitties are pussies.

The kitties of World War II were sterner stuff, the sort of tough felines you'd want around during a cat-astrophe.

They accepted sacrifice for a noble cause, and did so willingly.

Canned cat food had only just come onto the pet-food market when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

FDR (a dog owner) didn't pussyfoot around. He immediately mandated rationing, deeming cans "essential" and cat food "non-essential."

And so America's cats were dealt a double-blow.

Besides table scraps and mice, canned food was all they had known. 

Ron in 2021: What, me sacrifice? 

Now, the Axis was denying them that necessity.

But did cats complain about rationing? 

No! Like all good citizens, these purry patriots threw themselves, head to tail, into the US war effort.

The munched on mice and tables scraps for the duration—never protesting, never complaining, never losing the courage to go on.

Now that's pawsative thinking.

We could use more of it.

Grandsplaining

I'm often accused—unfairly—of mansplaining. 

While eager to explain why those accusations are unfair, I'd rather examine a more urgent topic: grandsplaining.

With two bright, inquisitive grandchildren, I often worry that I'll turn into one of those elders who "grandsplains." Or, worse, that I already have.

Grandsplaining needs no explanation.

"You should never cross your eyes, because one time they'll stay stuck that way."

"Don't swallow the seeds or they'll grow in your stomach."

"Ronald Reagan doesn't deserve statues because his tax policies destroyed this country."

"Hip hop never had a Lennon-McCartney to elevate it above noise."

That's grandsplaining.

But how do you avoid it?

The short answer is: you don't. 

You can only strive to avoid it, through constant vigilance and self-examination.

Whenever the need to grandsplain arises, take time out to ask yourself these six key questions:

1. Does my grandchild appear interested in hearing from me? If not, smile and shut up.

2. Did my grandchild say something demonstrably false? If not, let go of your inner pedant's urge.

3. Do I simply wish to appear old and wise? If so, just remember you once owned a plaid leisure suit.

4. Do I always assume the child knows less than I do? Guess what. You're wrong!

5. Did the parents ask me to instruct my grandchild in a scholastic subject? If so, it's probably okay to grandpslain—but you'd better know what you're talking about.

6. For just this once, can I resist the urge to grandsplain? If not, then at least keep it brief. There's no need to trace why a woodpecker pecks wood from Darwin's On the Origin of the Species back to Aristotle's Historia Animalium.

That's it. Asking yourself these six simple questions will reduce or eliminate the painful urge to grandsplain.

Try them!

Postscript: In my next post, I'll explain how you can also apply my self-questioning technique to combat mansplaining.

Above: Outward Bound by Norman Rockwell.

Sleaze Merchants

Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free,
sleaze goes right out the window.

— Cintra Wilson

Cover by Al Rossi

My first exposure to sleaze—I was age eight—was the paperback tower at the front of our corner drug store.

 

It was six or seven feet tall—dwarfing me—and pentagonal and would rotate unsteadily on a hidden axle when you gave it a whirl. 

Top heavy from its burden of potboilers, the tower always threatened to fall on me when I spun it. At the very first squeak, my inattentive mother would glance up from her shopping and siss at me, "Robert, leave that alone."

The book tower's presence in the drug store suggested to my eight-year-old mind that its weird offerings must somehow relate to grownups' healthcare (although I would soon discover a comparable rack of sulfurous paperbacks in the confectioner's store down the street—where absolutely nothing healthy was sold).

Although I had no clue at the time, three of the artists who created the covers for many of the books on display were among the finest illustrators of the day, rivals of the famous Norman Rockwell.

They were Norman Rockwell's lurid twins.

Al Rossi was a prolific magazine illustrator and a masterful merchant of paperback sleaze. He was the original cover artist for Junkie, a 1953 novel by beat writer William Burroughs (published under the pen name William Lee). The Bronx-born Rossi was a prominent supplier to Balcourt, a New York-based stock house that provided cover art to paperback publishers in the 1950s and '60s. A professional jazz musician until World War II, when he served with the Army in Europe, Rossi was compelled after the war to try his hand at illustration to make ends meet, attending Pratt and the Arts Student League to learn the craft. Before associating with Balcourt, he worked for several publishers of pulp magazines, the forerunners to paperback books. Rossi liked to use his male neighbors and their wives as his models.

Cover by Ben Stahl

Ben Stahl was exposed to fine art in the seventh grade, thanks to a scholarship he received to attend Saturday morning lectures at the Chicago Art Institute. After high school, he landed a job at a commercial art studio in Chicago that provided illustrations almost exclusively to The Saturday Evening Post. His success as a studio artist prompted Stahl to move to New York and go freelance. There, he began illustrating paperback book covers, as well as continuing to supply artwork to The Post (he illustrated more than 750 stories for the magazine during his career). Stahl soon earned a reputation as a serious fine artist and, along with Norman Rockwell and Connecticut illustrator Albert Dorne, co-founded the Famous Artists School, a mail-order course whose graduates include Pat Boone, Tony Curtis and Charlton Heston. In 1965, as his career was reaching its zenith, Stahl painted 15 life-size pictures of the stations of the cross and opened his own museum in Sarasota, Florida, to house them. But the paintings were stolen four years later and never recovered. Stahl was left nearly penniless due to the theft.

Cover by Paul Rader

Paul Rader, at age 16, was one of the youngest artists ever to have an art museum exhibit his paintings. His early mastery of portrait painting earned him awards throughout the '20s and '30s and brought him commissions to paint wealthy judges, lawyers, and businessmen in his hometown of Detroit. Rader switched to illustrating pulp magazines after World War II, finding the work more lucrative, and moved to New York, where he became another leading supplier to Balfour. When painting paperback book covers, Rader liked using professional models and actors, supplied to him by talent agencies. One of his favorite male models, Guy Williams, went on in the mid-1960s to play Dr. John Robinson in the TV show Lost in Space. 

Whether Rossi, Stahl and Rader set the floor of our society's sleaze index, I don't know; but I do know their art depicted truths—truths most Americans, Puritans at heart, wished to deny in the 1950s.

The risks they took in defying mores and good taste and giving free reign to sleaze may not have contributed to the world's trove of art, but these three artists helped millions of Americans remain literate members of the book-buying public, which is a lot more than you can say about today's media consumers.

Above: Cover illustration for The Bump and Grind Murders by Al Rossi. Cover illustration for The Creepers also by Al Rossi.  

Let Your Discourse be Short and Comprehensive

To practice his penmanship, the 16-year-old George Washington copied the entirety of Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation, a 110-page book compiled by the Jesuits in 1595.

Rules contained the standards of morality and etiquette for Colonial America's elite—the class the impoverished Washington was anxious to enter.

Showing humility and respect—especially before superiors—was the keynote of Rules. Humility and respect formed the very pillars of civility.

Rule 35 applied that civility to writing and speaking: Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.

Today, we'd do well to alter that rule: Let your communication with customers be short and comprehensive.

When your customer communications are long-winded, you show them they don't deserve your respect. You signal you think they're stupid. Not a formula for sales or retention.

Here's an example of silly verbosity from a large insurance company's website:

Property insurance is a type of insurance policy that can provide coverage for property owners or renters. Examples of property insurance include homeowners, renters, and flood insurance policies. These policies can provide coverage for damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. Let us help protect where you live and what you own with our different types of property insurance. Get a property insurance quote for your home, apartment, and more. We also make managing your policy easy with online access. You can make changes, request documents, and make payments.

The company asks you to suffer through nearly a hundred words, simply to tell you it will sell you property insurance. The same message could be stated in fewer than half the words:

Property insurance protects owners and renters from bearing the costs of damages caused by fire, flooding, theft, weather, and other risks. And managing a policy is easy: you can make changes, request documents, and make payments on line. Contact us for a quote.

By George, show customers a little respect! Sharpen your red pencil before you publish.

Let your discourse be short and comprehensive.

We're All Trash

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

— Emma Lazarus

Twice daily, some news item triggers me and I fulminate against my fellow Americans. 

Nowadays, they're stories about the unvaccinated—and their loathsome cheerleaders.

How can these fools deny science, eschew common sense, and cling so adamantly to moronic beliefs? How can they be such trash?

But then the words on the base of Liberty remind me: we're all trash.

Some trash gather at motorcycle rallies; some, at country clubs; some, on street corners; some, on private islands; some, in megachurches; some, in art museums.

Some trash don't gather anywhere, but sit alone on the couch watching Fox News or The Bachelor or reruns of Barnaby Jones; some sit alone watching TikTok, reading Facebook, or writing blog posts.

But, all the same, we're all trash.

You're here because your forebears were refuse.

The quality folks—the gifted, good-mannered, powerful people—stayed in the old country.

Only the trash came—or were deported—here.

That's American exceptionalism.

Get your shots, trashy people, so the rest of the trash doesn't catch Delta Plus (or, as I like to call it, Covid with Cheese).