Adorable Kittens Score Moral Authority

I now erode the running gag on TTH about adorable kittens, (Adorable Kittens Turn State's Evidence) by explaining: the news is always a little false, an elevation of one thing among an infinity of things- tragedies, glories, ordinaries.

With it's intrinsic self-importance, a headline elevates any ordinary event far, far out of proportion, turning the expansion of the scope of conflict into a political or economic advantage. So, adorable kittens are not the main topic of the nation's discourse. We have chosen not to write ceaseless headlines about them. Most of the money isn't in kittens.

What if it were? Hence, Adorable Kittens Fall off Warm, Boring TV into Piranna Bowl. The gag argues that Adorable Kittens are about as legitimate as 90% of our news currency.

A recent adorable kitten inspection revealed a warm, sticky, sappy little shred of hope for the real world. Baghdadgirl.blogspot.com, a 13 year old girl in Iraq who really does love adorable kittens, writes of them, posts cute photos (she somehow missed "Hang in There") escaping in the process the violence, fear and dread, giving this most ordinary obsession of young ladies an indescribable poignancy. On it, sweet random people encourage her, praise the silly kittens, and still whiny Americans chastise her for being upset about her father's car window getting smashed by a US soldier, or impling her fear is misguided, as if war wasn't really about hurtling metal into human flesh at high velocity. It is an acidic national characteristic to do what we wish and demand to be liked.

But on her blog recently was this little feedback item:

I know you probably get stuff like this a lot but I'm an American teenager (14) and I really like your blog. I was never in favor of sending troops over there and I'm still not. Until I saw your blog I had viewed Iraqis and all other Arabs as mindless killers and evil people. I'm very sorry. Very, very, very sorry. You have opened my eyes to see that Muslims are regular people and the terrorist are a very few. Every group or religion has a bad person in it. Sure, America has horrible people (like Bush) but it's the same everywhere. Anyways, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you very much for opening my eyes and getting the bigger picture of things. Thank you.

Clarity, sorrow, love and hope. All from kittens.