A look askance at power structures on the day of the cat

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A few weeks ago, JD Vance swung through Minneapolis for a cheap publicity stunt in front of the former home of the Third Police Precinct. While it was almost certainly intended for a national audience who have never set foot in Minnesota, never mind Lake Street, it did cause a little local hubbub. Our mayor, Jacob Frey, was quick to come to the city’s defense, touting its various charms in social media posts in the days that followed.

But an interest in a loaded political symbol like the Third Precinct is not the only thing these two men have in common. Earlier this year, they both made national headlines for disparaging comments they had made about cat owners.

Back in February, at the Minneapolis Downtown Council’s annual meeting, Mayor Frey said the following about remote workers, “When they stay home, sitting on their couch with their nasty cat blanket, diddlin’ on their laptop. If they do that for a few months, you become a loser.”

When he was selected as Donald Trump’s running mate this summer, Vance came under fire for comments he made in an interview back in 2021, suggesting that the Democratic Party is run, in part, by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

There’s a theme here: People with cats are miserable losers.

Not only are we miserable losers, but we’re choosing to be miserable losers.

And not only are we choosing to be miserable losers, but our collective choice to be miserable losers is so powerful that we are ruining not only downtown Minneapolis, but the very soul of this nation.

It’s all a bit much, don’t you think?

And, look, as a cat owner, I can take a joke. Even a not very good one. But there is something bigger at stake here: power. And the men who wield it.

As George Carlin once said in an interview with Larry King, “Comedy, traditionally, has picked on people in power.”

When powerful men make jokes about relatively powerless people, the jokes fall flat. And so does the criticism. But it’s a lot easier to make a crack about people with cats than it is to take some responsibility for the choices you have made as a person with political power. These two men are representatives of the two major political parties, which have jointly overseen massive wealth redistribution from working people to the billionaires over decades.

If cat people are miserable losers, perhaps we’d be a little less so if we could afford our vet bills, never mind our rent and health insurance.

And yet, this isn’t really about cat people. Both Frey and Vance felt safe making cutting remarks about cat owners, because we are, ostensibly, a group of people you can make jokes about. We’re not a protected class — and nor should we be!

But if they feel comfortable punching down on cat owners in public, who are they punching down on in private?

You only have to look at their actions and the policies they support to find out who they really see as miserable losers. Vance has ridden a wave of MAGA-brained, racist, xenophobic, anti-trans misogyny to a Senate seat and a shot at the vice presidency. Here in Minneapolis, Frey has demonized unhoused people for years, while continuing a brutal policy of encampment sweeps that his own chief of police admits doesn’t work. Both demean their own constituents who they’re elected to represent — constituents they clearly don’t feel worthy of compassion or concern.

Cat people are not the victims of these men’s policies — just of their “jokes.” But today, on National Cat Day, we’ll raise our voices and say we object to being used as a way for powerful men to deflect from their own shortcomings.

Amanda Zimmerman is a Minneapolis resident and work-from-home cat mom.