Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Very Best Fishes,

  Midnight Louie, Esq.

  If you’d like information about getting Midnight Louie’s free Scratching Post-Intelligencer newsletter and/or buying his custom T-shirt and other cool things, please contact Carole Nelson Douglas at P.O. Box 331555, Fort Worth, TX 76163-1555, or at www.carolenelsondouglas.com. E-mail: cdouglas@catwriter.com

  Carole Nelson Douglas Meditates on Mobs

  As usual, you have hit the nail on the head, Louie. The more lurid elements of life and death sell like gangbusters. And the fact is that very word derived from the federal raids to capture mobsters emphasizes that it’s always easier to glamorize the baddies than the goodies.

  The mob era that still lingers was built on greed, power mongering, and bullying, as were the centuries-long Irish “Troubles.” Hearing a British couple’s deliberately public, bigoted remarks against “the Irish” in an Irish hotel during a college trip spurred me to start my first novel, Amberleigh, on my return to the U.S. that very fall.

  What I’ve read of the nineteenth-century Irish diaspora, when the Irish were literally starved out of their own land and driven to emigrate, illustrates the lengths of brutality that bullying will go to. The Magdalen asylums are another. A year or so before the Good Friday Agreement between the Northern Ireland factions, I spent a gala convention banquet spellbound, hearing my dinner partner, a Roman Catholic widower rearing three children, talk about the spirit-shattering hardships of living in Protestant-dominated Ulster. Such institutionalized, mean-spirited bullying can’t be underestimated as one of the most dangerous and savage human traits.

  Those of us who love and adopt animals often save them from bullying situations. I write about cats because their storied “independence” means they will leave unkind or even “not perfect” situations. I write about dogs too, but I find their natures too tragic to address in darker terms. As animals with a pack organization and alpha and beta rankings, they’re always vulnerable to bullying by their own kind and others. As are humans. I’ve never seen a cat that wouldn’t run from abuse if it could. Dogs and too many abused women and children don’t share that gift, the instinct to be solitary for self-preservation’s sake.

  Apparently, Kathleen O’Connor did.