Tag Archives: Arkansas

This is Not How You Make a Point

Arkansas Democratic campaign manager’s cat killed and left for children to find, with political message scrawled on its corpse.

This is not how grown-ups say, “I disagree with your position on the economy.”

This is a chimpanzee threat display.  Pure and simple.  Except, honestly, that chimps are nicer in that they generally use inanimate objects to threaten each other.

This very human tendency for frustration to emerge via the arms when it can’t fit out through the mouth is why I had to wait three years to start working out what I had to say about the treatment of laboratory animals and the current state of the system.  My original expressions of outrage, while I was still open-mouthed and freshly damaged by the experience, might have looked a lot like this — flailing, gibbering, violent — except that I am a grown-up and I don’t argue through violence.  People don’t listen to what you have to say when you are hurting them — they just turn around and hurt you back.  And then it goes on and on, like chimps throwing rocks at one another.  This ultimately decides nothing except which chimp is bigger, and it certainly does not make the losing chimp likely to change its mind and side with the winner — it results in a very angry chimp who starts stockpiling more rocks.