Remember this guy?
https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1007511271573524480
A good, cute story. Over to Ruth Ben-ghiat at CNN
The Minnesota raccoon’s journey has a deeper resonance
The small thin body slowly climbs the side of a 25-story skyscraper in St. Paul, Minnesota, clinging on for his life, his narrow paws spread painfully wide. His little face, seen at close range through the windows when he stops to rest, shows fear and exhaustion, but the windows don’t open and the office workers who film him are helpless to intervene.
Through the day and night, as he climbed and slept, the raccoon became a social media star, with his own hashtag (#MPRraccoon). His story had suspense and pathos: a creature that finds himself alone in an unfamiliar and forbidding environment, without access to food or water, embarks on a highly risky journey in order to survive. No wonder people around the world kept vigil.
#MPRraccoon’s story has a happy ending. He made it to the roof and was lured by cat food into a pen to be picked up by St. Paul Wildlife Management, treated and released into an appropriate habitat. “Goodbye friend!” tweeted UBS Plaza, the site of the animal drama.
Wait for it
This animal drama may seem trivial, but the emotion and attention it aroused carry lessons for us in America today. For many other small creatures are now in the midst of journeys they never expected to take, which are unlikely to have the good outcome of #MPRraccoon’s. I am thinking of the children of migrant families who in the last month, in accordance with a new policy of President Donald Trump’s administration, have been forcibly separated from all that is familiar to them, who are on their own journeys of survival, too terrified to fully rest, and often too young to understand what is happening to them and why.
Although José lives in a home, many other children in his situation may end up, like #MPRraccoon, trapped in the human equivalent of pens and cages. Government shelters already house thousands, but now, according to McClatchy, the Department of Health and Human Services — what a misnomer, in this case — is considering building tent cities to house the thousands of children they intend to capture. Texas is one likely site of the kinds of tent cities that are so familiar to us from the news about refugee camps across the world.
The cages were under Obama.
Anyway, you can imagine that this same Trump Derangement Syndrome continues on. Only in Liberal World with TDS do we see a cute story of a trash panda used for hardcore politics.
Everything is “about” whatever issue consumes the soul of whatever 27-year-old ignoramus is writing a news analysis.
In college I had a logic professor who liked to make fun of Freudian analysis who would say that to Freud everything was about sex except pigs, but pigs are round and to Freud round meant female.
Similarly, Ben-ghiat’s missive tells us much about Ben-ghiat and next to nothing about the raccoon, or Jose, or anything else.
This is why modern art isn’t.