ne moment, it’s Tabby Thursday, and the next moment your world is turned upside down! Can you believe it? The counterrevolutionary canine propagandists have outdone themselves. I received a subversive propaganda pamphlet in the mail conveniently titled “Drool: Issue No. 1” (henceforth Drool), and it’s a slick production to say the least. The pamphlet shows a plethora of doe-eyed dogs in the best possible light (known as "filler material" in the advertising industry) combined with advertising for dog food (known as "content material"). That's a quick and important lesson in how public relations aka propaganda works. There’s even an illuminati-style logo in bas-relief on the back cover of Drool. Some PR agents have clearly been hard at work for many years on this mind-boggling chicanery. In an ode (or should I say odious homage) to dogs, the agents of propaganda have even cleverly rebranded the classic cat derp as “candid photography.”
And why would they send this propaganda to a die-hard cat residence? Purrhaps this is a global conspiracy to sell dog food to cats? Prove that dogs are the best thing since sliced bread? Throw cats into an identity crisis via a vicious psyop? Or is this just the apotheosis of dog-eat-dog capitalism on how to sell products using whatever means necessary? Curiouser and curiouser! Are we living in a Drool World dystopia? We sorely need a cutting-edge analysis of this insidious dog propaganda and PR blitz. It’s a pity that an entire Caturday has to be squandered away on this tedious but necessary task.
This Drool dog hagiography (note that research shows a strong, negative association between worship attendees and cat ownership) glorifying putative dog quirkiness looks like a copy-paste job followed by a search and replace of ‘cat’ with ‘dog.’ Furthermore, those with a tenuous grasp on reality cannot possibly comprehend the vast chasm between the affected and sycophantic quirkiness of dogs and the self-effacing-nonchalant-but-omnipresent quirkiness of cats. What do dog PR agents know about cat world reality? Zilch. That’s why they’re propagandists and shameless purveyors of fake mews. This also proves beyond doubt the accuracy and profound insight of the old adage, “Cats Rule, Dogs Drool.” Drool makes the outrageous claim in its pages that "Canis Familiaris is the superior species.” Strong claims need strong evidence, but is there any actual evidence or is this just a bit of fake mews like the one where we incessantly hear that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election? Turns out, the initial claim of Canis Familiaris being the “superior species” is not what it seems. As you did deeper into the pages of Drool, it turns out that the claim made is only a small one: "Dogs are superior to hoomans." In other words, the claim to superiority is a shallow one—the comparison set consists of exactly two species: Homo Sapiens and Canis Whatever. So the gist of this wild fanfaronade is that Canis Familiaris is superior to Homo Sapiens—that’s it. Talk about hasty generalizations and small sample sizes. Now any species with inside knowledge of humans knows that achieving superiority over Homo Sapiens is not exactly an achievement of any sort—it’s the default even if you do nothing at all. So the claim made in this propaganda piece is essentially vacuous—i.e., it conveys a sense of superiority while actually containing no real information at all.
In another section of Drool, cats come under assault again in a canine glamor puff piece. We have a dog named Lennox trying to attain stardom by proxy by hanging out with a rising Broadway star. While I think the Broadway star is pretty hip (she acknowledges the role of her privileged position and color in her success), sadly, she does appear to favor dogs. She certainly would've been a valuable CWD ally. But it’s Lennox’s kowtowing to her and riding her coattails that bothers me. The dictionary defines “kowtow” as “act in an excessively subservient manner.” Is it a coincidence that kowtow rhymes with bow-wow? Lennox should’ve instead taken this opportunity to highlight the rising inequality in New York City and elsewhere by speaking out against the benighted human oligarchy instead of trying to look cool on the subway by proxy.
As an aside, it was Edward Bernays, the father of modern propaganda, who designed and implemented a campaign in 1929 to get young feminists to light up cigarettes in public (“torches of freedom”) as an act of “emancipation” during New York’s Easter Parade. These guerrilla tactics seem to have worked and the publicity stunt received a lot of media coverage. You can see that there are multiple levels of duplicity at work here preying on the psychology of unsuspecting women whose only emancipation would turn out to be lung cancer. What does this have to do with dogs? Unfortunately, a lot. In the image below, we see a clueless dog participating in the “torches of freedom” psyops campaign, once again riding the coattails of a young feminist—just like Lennox on the subway with the Broadway star. Unfortunately, the list of Edward Bernay’s crimes is quite a large topic that cannot be adequately covered here, and whether cats wish to emulate his nefarious purrpaganda techniques to further Cat World Domination (but not cancer) is an open question.
Photo: Library of Congress
Sources
- Drool — Issue 1
- Noam Chomsky (interviewed by David Barsamian). War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies. International Socialist Review, Issue 37, September–October, 2004
- Iris Mostegel. The Original Influencer. History Today, Published 06 Feb 2019
