Celebrity culture really annoys me. It's bad enough when humans do it. I'm a Celebrity Get me out of Here, for instance, shows the innate trashiness and lack of intelligence of the human species.
But now cats are muscling in - Doing the Rounds with Oscar. What's so special about Oscar? Just a cat that lives in a nursing home. A street cat named Bob. There are thousands of cats on the street so why highlight just one of them?
The latest celebrity memoir is Tilly the Ugliest Cat in the Shelter. This really infuriates me as it seems she is proud of being ugly. We cats are graceful and beautiful. Why sink so low as to be proud of being bad looking?
Yesterday, I felt I simply had to express my feelings about this ridiculous trend in celebritising cats. I sank my teeth into the offending book!
Yours
Disgusted of Brixton
Dear Disgusted of Brixton,
I share your loathing of celebrity culture. Its meaningless and the pathetic humans that take part in it. I don't know even who they are most of the time. My interest in TV is focussed solely on wildlife programmes and I usually just sleep through the rest of it. MIndlessness may appeal to humans: but not to me.
I am less sure about this trend for feline memoirs. Is it a step forward that, for the first time in years, cats are becoming celebrities? In one sense I think it is. Putting felines in the forefront of literature must be a good idea. True, we have had Saki's short story about Tobermory, and several Thomas Hardy poems about cats, but the idea of cat personalities has never really made it into the lower forms of popular literature. Till now.
Like you, I feel some of these books are frankly undignified in their appeal to those dumb creatures who are our pets. Yet humans, intellectually limited as they are, really seem to like these stories. I am not sure why but I feel we should encourage our inferior species to study us. And these books usually contain one or two necessary bits of information, the pill below the sugared surface so to speak.
Yours still pondering,
George.
