Dark imaginings on the right

Curious attitudes keep surfacing on the right.

Last week Carl Paladino got himself into hot water by making remarks to an online publication. He said that he hopes President Obama “catches mad cow disease after being caught having relations with a Herford [sic]” and that he would like for Michelle Obama to “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.”

Amid the ensuing uproar he released a craven statement apologizing to “the minority community,” saying that he meant to circulate the remarks among friends instead of for publication, and insisting “I certainly am not a racist.”

Two things are immediately apparent: (1) Mr. Paladino does not understand how bovine spongiform encephalopathy is transmitted, and (2) he is in fact a racist. His apology merely illustrates how deeply political correctness has penetrated society; even people who make blatantly racist remarks do not want to be called racists.

The sorts of things Mr. Paladino said keep cropping up in recesses of the internet and have for the past eight years of the Obama administration. “Obama is gay, Michelle is trans,” &c., &c. But Carl Paladino is not some sweaty troll in a basement surrounded by canned goods and a private arsenal as he awaits the black insurrection. Six years ago Carl Paladino was the Republican nominee for governor of New York.

I don’t see people on the left speculating on what Donald Trump does between the sheets—perhaps the mind revolts at the image. I see people on the left attacking Donald Trump for remarks that appear to support racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes. Those are attacks on political grounds, and they mirror the attacks from the right on President Obama’s political actions.

But in the darker regions of the right this peculiar fascination with race and sexual behavior is a kind of chronic delirium. I’m an English major and a journalist, not a psychologist, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that remarks like Mr. Paladino’s are both politically and personally morbid.

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The late Mr. Saunders

We said goodbye to Saunders this morning.

A trip to the veterinarian on Wednesday yielded this information: He was suffering from a fever, he was seriously anemic, he had feline leukemia, and the prognosis was not good.

Kathleen and I made the painful decision that we did not want to prolong his suffering. So we brought him home and spent the day yesterday giving him treats, stroking him, speaking to him with affection, indulging his wishes, and saying farewell. This morning we took him to the Aardmore Veterinary Hospital, where he was gently put beyond the reach of pain.

You may recall from earlier posts that he showed up two years ago, an abandoned, hungry stray who immediately sized us up as easy marks. We fed him, we took him in, we got him treated by the vet, and we made him part of the household.

He remained determinedly indoor-outdoor, patrolling the neighborhood as if he were its mayor, paying visits to other households and depositing the occasional mouse (and sometimes a young rat) on our front sidewalk. He went out in the rain and the cold, and he gamboled in his first snowfall.

He was a handsome orange cat, quickly growing into those big paws we noticed on his arrival. And he was ever an affectionate cat, the sweetest-tempered cat, who purred loudly every time I picked him up. His presence in the bay window comforted and calmed us, and, like a dog, he came to greet me when I arrived home at night after work.

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But now he is gone, and I will think of him always as serenely dozing on his chair on the porch, savoring the sunlight and the fragrant breeze, the sweet, sweet stray who for two all-too-short years with us had food, shelter, love.