Ridiculous Opinions #259
My cats woke me up this morning.
These dumb cats are used to being fed at a certain time of the day (before we go to school), so if you want to sleep in on the weekend, you must suffer their wrath. Our youngest cat will meow at you until you acknowledge her, and if you refuse to acknowledge her, she will jump up on the bed and crawl all over you. I tried shutting the bedroom door, but she learned a neat trick, which is to pee on the floor in front of the bedroom if she gets locked out.
Stupid cats.
And speaking of cats, I spent the week thinking about the debate between Harris and Trump. I’m a little bit fascinated by the world in which we live. My overall opinion is that most human beings are rational, sane people. But I’m shocked at the outsized voice that the irrational have, how the general public seems to lap it up, and how that group of radical conservatives have figured out the secret code to bend society to their will.
I remember back in the 90s when Fox News started and people I knew would talk about it. “They’re crazy on that channel,” they would say. “They say the craziest things!”
To which I would reply, Then why do you watch it?
“I only watch it because it’s hilarious,” they would say.
But as I have said before, ideas are like viruses. All of these folks might have watched Fox over the years for the entertainment value, but Fox news was the toxoplasmosis of political news consumption, and it has infected the brains of one-too-many people.
For those of you who are not in the know, toxoplasmosis is a cat parasite. If you’d like to read up on it, go here. Basically, you get it from dealing with cat feces. It’s mostly harmless, but there are weird theories about it.
It has been postulated (and I am heavily paraphrasing here) that mice and rats that were infected with toxoplasmosis lose their fear of cats, almost as if the disease makes its spread easier by telling the rats that it’s okay to be eaten by this cat, considering the disease can only reproduce inside the cat’s stomach.
The virus basically changes the brain chemistry of its host so that it can more easily reproduce.
And that’s a little bit like what conservative media has done over the last thirty or so years. We may have laughed at the crazies on Fox News when it first began, but it was ingested nonetheless. And slowly, it began to change the brain chemistry of the people that consumed it, so that it could continue to perpetuate itself.
I’m sure that some of the opinions that we thought were radical back in the 90s would seem absolutely quaint today. In the 90s, we would look at some hot take from a conservative and think, “Can you believe he said that?” But our brains have been so infected by this disease that we can now look at a former president saying, “They’re eating our pets…” and chuckle to say, “Can you believe he said that?” before moving on with our lives. It’s insane that this is the case.
We’ve all been infected.
Things that should seem absurd, from the statements of politicians all the way to how conservative pundits look, are things that we are non-plussed about today. That’s weird. All of this is weird. And we shouldn’t just shrug it off.
I would venture to guess that conservatives nowadays are at the far extreme of what this Fox News/Toxoplasmosis spectrum might be at this point. When that orange-faced moron can’t string together a coherent sentence and when he flouts the law without consequence and no one on the conservative side bats an eye, then it would seem that this disease is at a self-immolating point.
Remember, the lifecycle of a virus is unsustainable. It will keep chipping away and chipping away at its host until its host is dead, and thus the virus is dead. Sure, it will always be there in some form or another, but I’m starting to hope that we are at the end of this particular cycle of this thought virus. The rhetoric has descended to a point where it won’t be long before a major politician just straight up starts touting the Final Solution as a way to solve the problems they have with people they don’t like (we are ridiculously close to that point now). And then those that feel that way will either play out their scenarios in reality or be destroyed. Let’s hope it’s the latter and not the former.
So, Randall P. is hopeful for the future when it comes to these things. I think this particular brand of conservative toxoplasmosis is on its deathbed, and I look forward to a day when I no longer have to hear the name Trump ever again. He was a once-in-a-lifetime figure and the world will be better when he is gone from public life. Ideally, we are all developing immunity from his disease.
There’s nowhere to go but up!
Unless we just stay right here at the bottom…
