I’m not religious, and for my parents this time of year is mainly an excuse for extra decorations, but that’s reason enough for Mom to put out the manger diorama she’s had since childhood. If I were inclined to make myself out to be some sort of Gaia-loving lefty nature-worshipper, which I’m not, I could get a lot of mileage out of reminiscences about the friendly gathering of animals in manger scenes bringing me more peace of mind than all the supernatural claims surrounding the humans depicted near them.
This, I suppose, is pretty much what the early Christians intended, or did unconsciously, when they lured in members of earlier pagan nature-cults with pastoral imagery and animal metaphors. Animals getting along across species boundaries has been a moving testament to the real universal (or at least widespread) potential for empathy, from the legendary lion (or wolf) and lamb of old to the surprising animal-pal partnerships attested to on YouTube in our own day—not to mention the grudging tolerance my parents’ Scottie and immense, 18-year-old Maine coon cat show each other. (I confess my parents’ ownership of Scotties was indirectly inspired by my late grandmother’s fondness for FDR’s famous dog Fala, but empathy must transcend political divisions.)
I missed a big annual Hanukkah gathering and a Christmas party due to a cold this year, but I got to see the cat and dog sit next to each other politely awaiting snacks, and that alone should keep me shored up emotionally for another season.
Contrast that warmth, lest you are so young or so cynical as to think instinctual responses are meaningless, with the deliberately unsettling overt occultism in Kim Kardashian’s new “Santa Baby” video (including an allusion to the tryst between furries glimpsed in a Kubrick scene, which is the bad kind of animal love). To clarify: I’m basically against religion, but Satanism is the worst one, not the best and hippest. Or perhaps in Hollywood nowadays they say wicca instead of Satanism, but we all get the idea.
Empathy being a good thing (and evil being bad), I can’t really object, even as a rather traditional superhero fan, to Sony this month transforming the Marvel character Kraven the Hunter from a ruthless big game hunter into both a friend to animals and a crusading hunter of bad men, little worse than a typical antihero. I can object to it being a mediocre movie, though, and the only silver lining here will be if its severe punishment at the box office finally inspires Sony to give up and let Disney handle all the Marvel characters.
If Sony instead tries to keep cranking out tepid films using second-tier Spider-Man characters—maybe the Jackal next, then the Beetle, Tarantula, who knows—it will be like making audiences endure years of protracted animal torture videos. Put the Sony superhero universe out of its misery. (No pardon for this Hunter! Come to think of it, maybe it’s not too late to try luring some far-right Republicans into the Kraven movie by emphasizing that it features a manly Russian defeating “the Rhino.”)
I’m only moderately more optimistic about next year’s James Gunn-directed reboot of Superman and the DC Universe, but I think we can agree that in the trailer, Superman’s dog Krypto steals the show, which helps.
I don’t mean to imply that animals are all sweetness and light, by the way. Not only do they kill for food, mates, and territory—and occasionally just for sport—but apparently orcas can be as callous as human fur-wearers (perhaps unsurprising, given our two species’ shared tendency to prey on seals) and sometimes, like humans, revive defunct 1980s fashion trends to look hip. Or at least, some killer whales have apparently recently revived the practice, briefly common among some members of their species four decades ago for reasons unknown, of wearing dead salmon on their heads like hats. They may just think it looks cool, one of the growing number of reminders our way of thinking is not so unlike other species’.
One member of our own species—or perhaps he’s supposed to be a cat, or perhaps a piece of feces—who tests the limits of empathy, though, is the X user by the handle CatTurd2, an utterly nuance-free, epithet-spouting Trump enthusiast with a bafflingly large following (and three ex-wives, reportedly). CatTurd2 is the sort of blind loyalist who calls any Republican who fails to go along with every single Trump plan a “RINO,” even when Trump (who wasn’t always a Republican himself, you may recall) is urging passage of a bloated, big-spending budget bill, as he was this month, along with the abandonment of legal limits on the gargantuan federal government debt.
At one point, CatTurd2 was denouncing those voting against the bill as “sellout losers” serving “big lobbyist” donors even as those in opposition included such fiscally-hardcore Members of Congress as Tim Burchett, Nancy Mace, and Thomas Massie, all of whom are in fact more anti-socialist and anti-Big Government than Trump is. Who needs bots when there are people—or cats or pieces of feces or whatever—as mechanical and predictable as CatTurd2? If Trump, or perhaps in a few years Vance, sinks to denouncing capitalism as an economic philosophy for “total dummies,” the likes of CatTurd2 will cheer—and call anyone who still sticks up for markets a hated enemy and, well, a pussy.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey
