The Mice and the Cat

Once upon an autumn day,
     The sky a cloudless blue,
A happy young mouse was making his way,
     As happy young mice will do,
When all of a sudden, to his dismay:
     “There’s a mouse body—no, there are two!”

The bodies were lifeless, their fur was torn
     And speckled a bloody red.
The mouse knew he couldn’t pause long to mourn,
     Though he briefly bowed his head—
The other mice he had to warn
     Or they’d quickly all be dead.

He ran to the barn, where the other mice were,
     And loudly spread the alarm:
“Two mice are dead! In the yard! And their fur
     Is torn! There’s a cat on the farm!
I saw an orange blur! And heard a low purr!
     We’re all in danger! To arms!”

Then all of the mice—there were nine—gathered round
     The mouse, who spoke his concern:
“We must kill that cat! We must catch! We must pound!
     We must batter, or drown, or burn!”
The other mice listened, then thought—some frowned—
     Then they all spoke their minds in their turn.

An erudite mouse spoke first, with a sigh:
     “Pray temper your artless zeal.
Relations with cats are complex—they defy
     Your all-too-simplistic appeal.
A subtle hand, a sophisticate’s eye:
     I assure you, that’s the ideal.

A peace-loving mouse then gently said,
     “Your eagerness gives me a fright.
You lust after storm and strife, which I dread:
     You’ll bring on a terrible blight.
If we fight that cat, much blood will be shed:
     The worst thing of all is a fight.”

A jittery mouse then gave out a toot:
     “But why does the cat hate us so?
We must have done something to start this dispute:
     It’s that we must hasten to know.
The causes that matter are those that are root:
     Let’s learn them, and battle forgo.”

A comfortable mouse piped up from his seat,
     “Hey, why are you rocking the boat?
I’ve got a nice house, and plenty to eat
     And drink (though I don’t mean to gloat),
And I’ll soon have a pension that can’t be beat:
     Please put down a ‘No’ as my vote.”

A clinical mouse then came to the fore:
     “Are you ill? Are you right in your brain?
No healthy mouse would seek such a war,
     Would welcome such gore and such pain.
You seem to want conflict forevermore:
     Dear sir, you are clearly insane.”

An elderly mouse then softly spoke:
     “My friend, you are very young,
And youth always looks for foes to provoke,
     And youth is always high-strung.
Pray let me the wisdom of age invoke:
     Call for peace, or hold your tongue.”

A timid young mouse then had his say:
     “To fighting I’m quite averse.
Perhaps we could all keep out of his way—
     He won’t find us if we disperse.
Attacking will anger him, then we’ll all pay:
     I fear it would make it worse.”

Then a skeptical mouse said, “You haven’t yet
     Set forth any evidence hard
That the cat killed those mice—perhaps they just met
     With an accident in the yard.
Against the creation of phantom threat
     We always should stand on guard.”

A cooperative mouse was the last: “I suspect
     That much wisdom has here been shown.
We expect that you’ll show the proper respect
     For the group, and not act on your own.
It wouldn’t be fitting for you to elect
     To mount an attack alone.”

Then the mouse who had started it all said, “Friends,
     Your words have held me in thrall,
But I fear that doom for us all impends
     If I heed your gentle call.
Though it’s peace I crave, the cat contends—
     I must fight, for the sake of us all.”

The Dean’s Box

“By the time I moved to Calcutta [in the late Seventies], a
communist government had come to power in Bengal. One
of its first acts was to name the street on which the US
Consulate stood after Ho Chi Minh. Otherwise too the
intellectual climate was suffused with hostility to America.
Our heroes were Marx and Mao, and, moving on, writers
who had taken our side in the Cold War, such as Jean Paul
Sartre and Gabriel García Márquez.

I became a member of the local British Council, but would
not enter the library of the United States Information Service.
Then my wife got a scholarship to Yale, and I reluctantly
followed. I reached New Haven on a Friday, and was
introduced to the Dean of the School where I was to teach.
On Sunday I was taking a walk through the campus when I
saw the Dean park his car, take a large carton out of the
boot, and carry it across the road to the School and up
three flights to his office.

That sight of the boss as his own coolie was a body blow to
my anti-Americanism. My father and grandfather had both
been heads of Indian research laboratories; any material
they took to work or back—even a slim file with a single
piece of paper in it—would be placed in the car by one
flunkey and carried inside by another. (Doubtless the
Warden of an Oxford College can likewise call upon a willing
porter.) Over the years, I have often been struck by the
dignity of labour in America, by the ease with which high-
ranking Americans carry their own loads, fix their own
fences, and mow their own lawns. This, it seems to me, is
part of a wider absence of caste or class distinctions.
Indian intellectuals have tended to downplay these
American achievements: the respect for the individual, the
remarkable social mobility, the searching scrutiny to which
public officials and state agencies are subjected. They see
only the imperial power, the exploiter and the bully, the
invader of faraway lands and the manipulator of international
organizations to serve the interests of the American
economy. The Gulf War, as one friend of mine put it, was
undertaken ‘in defence of the American way of driving’.”
   — Ramachandra Guha, “What We Think of America,” Granta 77, 3/28/02




A dean totes his box up the stairs,
Confounding an onlooker’s code:
In what land does an eminent chair
Serve as coolie, disgraced by his load?

A people who seek subjugation—
Inveterate bullies, the lot—
Who plunder to fatten their nation
And would rather be cruel than not,

With a lust for power demonic
And a fondness for robbing the poor,
Hellbent on a world hegemonic,
Just itching to start up a war?

Or a country concerned with essentials,
Tired of customs with no useful part,
Where hard work is perceived quintessential
And the practical raised to an art,

Where careers are thrown open to talents,
Where caste has been left behind,
Where mobility generates balance
And competence stands enshrined?

Is it bullies in search of new servants
Or a people too busy for airs?
Let seekers of truth be observant
Of that dean with his box on the stairs.

Song of an Animal Lover

"Police charged a 32-year-old animal rights activist with the
first political assassination in modern Dutch history
yesterday ....

Volkert van der Graaf is accused of firing five shots from close
range into the chest and head of the far-right [sic] leader Pim
Fortuyn, and, if convicted, faces a maximum 20-year [sic] jail
sentence. ...

[van der Graaf’s] ... work for an environmental campaign
group, Milieu Offensief (Environment Offensive), made him
well known to farmers in the Netherlands' conservative
'Bible belt.'

Each time they sought to change their farming permits, they
would come up against Mr van der Graaf, first in their local
council, then in the national courts. Peter Olofson, a farmer
with 800 cattle on his land just outside Harderwijk, said the
murder suspect 'was like a dog: he would not let go. ... He
was a fanatic, he was out to destroy all the farmers in the
area. It was animals, animals, animals—he didn't care about
people.'

The two men met three or four times and Mr van der Graaf
revealed how strict his eating habits were. 'He tried to cut
off eating all meat. He's a super-vegan—no milk, no honey,'
said Mr Olofson.
...
Police are investigating potential links between Mr van der
Graaf and an unsolved murder in 1996 in nearby Nunspeet,
when a council farming advisor was shot dead at close range
while jogging.

... Mr Fortuyn ... was not outspoken on the environment. [He]
was a dog lover and had also criticised factory farming
methods.

But he had also attacked the green movement and suggested
loosening of controls on farmers, particularly those in the fur
trade. That may have been a particular challenge to Mr van
der Graaf, who was an expert in deploying the minutiae of
the law against the factory farming he despised."
                           — Stephen Castle, Independent, 5/9/02




Through gently rolling countryside
     I often take my strolls;
I love to watch the tender mares
     Attending to their foals,
I love the woodland creatures wild,
     The squirrels, rabbits, voles—
And if you do not love them too,
     I’ll drill you full of holes.

I love to see them frolic in
     Bucolic pastures spread;
I love to see them led inside
     Of rustic barn or shed.
The threat of farming factories
     O'erflows my soul with dread—
And if you don’t agree with me,
     I’ll fill you full of lead.

If only everyone would learn
     My lesson all humane:
To shy away from causing fel-
     Low creatures any pain,
And know that any harm to them
     Is evil or insane—
And if you say that is not so,
     Then say auf Wiedersehen.

How Nice for the British!

“It is one of those silent, brooding mornings in a small Dixie
town: already hot and humid just after breakfast-time. There
is hardly anything here: just a shop, a filling station and a
building with a sign saying Total Fitness, though judging by
the rusty chain holding the padlock, that has been closed for
a long time. There is hardly anyone about either, and they all
move slowly: partly because of the heat, partly because they
cannot do otherwise. The average weight of the population
appears to be around 20 stone. The name of the place,
without a word of a lie, is Chunky, Mississippi.

...

Obesity is now said to be responsible for 300,000 American
deaths every year—that's 100 times the number killed on
September 11 ..."
      — Matthew Engel, “Land of the Fat,” Guardian, 5/2/02




How nice for the British! Their chronicler of Dixie
Is still on the move, still chasing after hicks: he,
Like some Anglo Rocky, like those old Timex watches,
Takes a Lileksing and keeps on ticking out botches.

Chunky, Mississippi! How many hours with gazetteer,
Sweaty, bleary-eyed, to find perfect target for his sneer!
Was Obese, Oklahoma, not to be found? No Lardass,
Louisiana? (Look out, yankees: next stop, Athol, Mass.)

Eager not only to point out rotundity,
He does math too, and shows, with air of profundity,
How much more destructive are sweet, fatty snacks
Than militant Islamic terror attacks.

Thanks for kindness extended to strangers? Such chumps.
Glimpses of steel that stands against tyrants? Just schlumps.
Fellow feeling toward dauntless allies? Too fat.
How nice for the British! A reporter like that.