Cat Show 12/11/2020

VG: I stopped by my favorite liquor store the other day; wanted to buy vodka that I never tried before: they called it “black fig vodka.” In the store, I ran into the owner, who told me that he is doing very well, thank you very much. People are taking to drinks like fish to the water. Which made me think. I mean, my life in Moscow under the sclerotic Brezhnev regime was nothing but a very long and rigorous preparation for the Covid-ridden United States of today. Same drinking, same social distancing from people you don’t know, same refusal to look into their eyes, same unsmiling faces that warn you to keep a social distance or else. There you were afraid to talk to strangers, because they might be KGB informers. Here, you are scared of talking to them because they might be committed Democrats with pronounced Trump Derangement Syndrome, ready to denounce you for a wrongly placed mask or for the less than ecstatic attitude toward Holy Vaccine.

ALICE: Life in Russia must have been awful. Can you imagine all these evil people spying on you, or banning books and harassing journalists? Here, on the other hand, people censor you, or denounce you, or blacklist you all for the good reasons. We all know that racist retrogrades with reactionary opinions should be censored, and – if you support Trump, which is even worse – you have to locked up in the mental institution for re-programming.

Furthermore, I’ve heard, Russia is even more awful for cats than for people. Apparently, they don’t neuter male cats in Russia. Can you believe it? Imagine nasty Hobbs harassing me day and night? He is bad enough as he is. And Hobbs demanding sexual favors? What an awful thought!

HOBBS: Nobody would demand sexual favors from you, Alice. One has to be a masochist to ever want to sleep with a progressive Democrat. Who wants to hear: “I find your demands for intersectionality highly objectionable? Or, stop requiring this positionality from me? Or, I don’t want you to objectify my hind legs!

ALICE: Hobbs, you and your dirty mind can’t even comprehend the meaning of these important concepts, which progressive Americans use to unmask the power structure that demeans and commodifies females. Americans are doing a great job at neutering male cats. For a simple reason that there are too many cats in the world. And of course, there are also too many people. It is high time we start neutering males of human species as well. Who needs these aggressive brutes to begin with? Just look at Russia. If Russia wants to join the civilized world, that’s what they have to do: neuter their males.

HOBBS: Not sure about that. Europeans are not worried about over-sexed Ukies or Poles. They have plenty of wild f..kers of their own. What they don’t want is one thing: smart Eastern Europeans. The ones who might challenge and question them. So to get into EU any country should initialize the program of brain neutering. That’s exactly what Ukrainians and other EU wannabees from Eastern Europe have started long ago. That’s what Ukraine’s Maidan was all about after all -- the biggest operation of lobotomy known to mankind.

VG: You mean, the second biggest. The biggest one was turning Americans into voting for Biden.

HOBBS: Agreed. It has to be big. How else can you make 77 million Americans vote for senile dude who thinks that his son is running a successful business in Ukraine and China, while snorting cocaine in some unidentified bedroom.

ALICE: There was no lobotomy involved. In fact, we are talking about 77 million Americans who preserved the integrity of their brain by reading NYT and watching CNN, which is apparently the only way to remain sane in this country. And as far as those who voted for Trump, they didn’t even need lobotomy. They were born mean-spirited, nasty, racist fools to begin with.

VG: Well, guys. The election is over, and we need to concentrate on the future. What do you think of all these appointments that Biden has done so far? What do they tell us about the future?

ALICE: It is so naïve to think about the future. We should live in the present and enjoy the moment. Every day I wake up and meow with joy that Trump has lost. I intend to savor every moment at least till 2024. This is an accomplishment worthy of the nation that was the first to step on the moon. We’ve done it! We’ve got rid of the dangerous demagogue who forced New York literati refer to “fascists” more frequently than they refer to “avocado” or “latte.” We, who felt so awful about wiping out the native population of this land, and introducing a brutal institution of slavery in their stead, are finally given a chance to redeem outselvews. By voting Trump out, we rooted out evil, we’ve corrected the historic wrong. What a glorious moment. Faust was looking for a moment when he could say, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön.” Well, here it is. So who cares about Biden and his appointments?

HOBBS: Alice is obviously embarrassed to comment on these ridiculous appointments of all those “have-beens” whom Biden dug out from under the rubble of Obama history. People say, he is getting senile and Alzheimery. Absolutely not true. He must have had a great memory to find these guys. So we might expect more of the same. You, Vladimir, noticed himself that whatever Ukraine does well, United States does even better. So Ukrainians have elected the comedian as a President. And there were a lot of expectations: there would be change, there would be laughter, there would be joy! Not really. Same rhetoric of hatred, same neo-liberal economic failures, same corruption. Well, expect US to outdo their model. That’s all.

VG: Well, I guess, I bought my vodka for a reason. For the same reason, other Americans are buying their vodka. For the same reason, Russians were buying theirs. Vodka and military -- were only two booming industries in Soviet Russia. And so they are in this country.