JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2006
The White House Sword: Sharp Thoughts on
Impulsive Acquisitions
You know
you’re in the
This must be what G.W. is thinking of when he talks about protecting “our way of life.” I mean, probably literally.
Now, I like blades a lot, probably to an unwholesome degree. Part of this is due to some deep symbolic resonance. Part of it is that I grew up in hick backwoods where everybody had crazy-ass knives, and, like many people from a horrendous place, I still have some perverse nostalgia for it.
In any case, when I see a title like “Knife Collectors” in the TV guide, of all places, I’m bound to tune in, just as a cat is bound to bat at a piece of string. And when it turns out to be a geeky guy pushing a claymore—and then when they add six more swords at the same price, include the Terminator and the Sword of Darkness—well, it’s time to break out the popcorn and get down to some serious blade-watching.
Yep, I only broke out the popcorn, not the credit card. The show, on the Shop at Home TV network, was mostly creepy and hilarious. But yes, ever so briefly, I thought about it—“Seven swords for the price of one…”
But I hadn’t seen anything yet. Next up was the Avalanche of Steel—more than 170 edged weapons for less than two bucks each. Mostly it was pocket knives—scores and scores of them. But you also got a couple Bowie knives, kitchen knives, even some kind of caddy covered with soup ladles which the host himself couldn’t identify.
But the Avalanche wasn’t rolling fast enough. It was time to sweeten the pot. You would get not only so many knives that you could cut something with a brand new blade every day from New Year’s through the summer solstice. You would also get…the WHITE HOUSE SWORD.
Its massive
blade etched with tiny bricks to resemble the
I leaned against a dresser, screaming my laughter into a pillow so I didn’t wake anybody else up.
This must be what they mean by the National Mall. And on the show rolled, with everything from grab-bags of “tactical” knives to instant battle-axe collections. The geeky host was even fairly amusing, at one point cautiously handling a sword and saying he didn’t want to create a “classic Web moment.” (I later learned he was referring to an actual accident that occurred on a former incarnation of the show on a former incarnation of the network, when a host banged one of those infamously cheapo fake samurai swords against a table to demonstrate its supposed strength, whereupon it snapped and speared him in the arm. It is indeed now a classic Web moment preserved at www.anthurian.com/wp/etc/ouch.mpg.)
It was
tempting to own something as ridiculous as the White House Sword, and to buy an
outrageous amount of weaponry just so I could say I did. Still, I know that
But unless the show’s hosts were lying—and who doesn’t trust a late-night sword salesman?—several dozen somebodies were sitting up in bed saying, “By Jove, I need about 50 pounds of knives and the world’s dumbest-looking sword!” How much drinking, insomnia and/or term-paper-writing avoidance would be necessary to produce such a mindset?
There is, of course, a savvy sales pitch involved. “Knife Collectors” doesn’t just employ the usual sales tactics: pre-planned “spontaneous” price cuts and deal-sweeteners, and patter that never mentions the considerable shipping and handling fee. It also pitches knife-purchasing as a get-rich-quick scheme—you, the customer, buy a bunch (er, make that “an insanely plentiful cornucopia”) of knives and become a dealer yourself.
Indeed,
this is one of the main businesses of
I’m not sure the Shop at Home TV prices are that good a deal as wholesale, but there’s certainly room for profit in the right market. Indeed, I’m pretty sure there’s a great market about a mile from me—I could take the Avalanche of Steel over to gang territory and sell it off in a weekend. (The White House Sword definitely included.)
If firearms were the weapons being sold en masse with a focus on extreme exotics and with the encouragement to become an arms dealer, I would likely be trampled to death as my mayor, city councilors, police officials, inner-city reverends and other hangers-on marched straight to Ooltewah, Tennessee to stop the madness. Indeed, horrific crime is why mail-order gun sales are illegal today.1
Not to go all NRA on you, but knives are used in tons of crimes. And frankly, in the hands of an average, untrained thug, I would far rather face a handgun than a penknife (much less one of Frost’s Humvee brand Bowie knives). It’s actually pretty hard to hit a human-sized target with a bullet at any appreciable distance; and while guns are essentially more lethal, they also tend to encourage a more removed brand of attack. Lots of thugs use them only to impress, actually restraining themselves from firing due to the weapon’s lethal nature. Even the most clumsy oaf, on the other hand, knows how to stab somebody with a knife, and the weapon by nature encourages close-up, confrontational crime. And, because knives aren’t exclusively lethal weapons, thugs seem to have less compunction about giving somebody a farewell slice or two.
Of course, this is all pretty paranoid in any case, and knife control would be both silly and doomed. Guns are fundamentally more dangerous and insane than knives. And in the end, it comes down to attitude. Gun ownership is a shocking taboo in my neighborhood. But the same residents in their tiny condos retain another outdated frontier weapon—the big dog—for the exact same rationales of vanity, romance and occasional protection. And they’re plenty dangerous to other people.
Knives have plenty of other uses, not to mention aesthetic interest. I always have a Swiss army knife on me, which spends its time opening boxes, removing splinters and occasionally offering up its toothpick: no street-fighting so far.
Still, as “Knife Collectors” broadcast on its own Boston-area station, I couldn’t help noticing that a good portion of its products are likely illegal in this city and state. And there’s the curious matter of the button-lock folding knives.
A button lock is a push button built into a folding knife that locks the blade into either the open or closed position. It is typically used to open the knife very quickly—you push the button to unlock the blade, then flick your wrist, causing the blade to snap out.
At one point on a recent “Knife Collectors,” the host showed off a button-lock model and said these were becoming popular for “conversions.” He then paused and said, “Well…,” then paused again, as if realizing he’d said something inappropriate. He then moved onto to another pitch.
“Conversion” means altering a button lock to turn the knife into a switchblade.2 Switchblades are illegal virtually everywhere.
Whether switchblades should be illegal in the first place is highly debatable; the ban seems mostly to be rooted in spooky aesthetics and their old-timey popularity among what they used to call juvenile delinquents. A knife’s a knife, however fast it opens.
Nonetheless, illegal switchblades be. (For that matter, depending on the cop and/or judge involved, an unconverted button-lock knife might well be deemed illegal, too, for its fast-opening property.) And the Frost guy, after alluding to the button-lock’s switchblade conversion ability, was going to sell me twelve of them.
An observation without any qualitative judgment involved: If I wanted a gun in this state, I would need to go through a complicated training and permitting process, some form of background check, and a waiting period. But to get more than 170 edged weapons I am encouraged to buy in a hasty manner with resale in mind, my only background check is running my credit card and my waiting period is how long the UPS truck takes to get here.
An observation with qualitative judgment involved: I could use a stolen credit card and a dead-drop address, and outfit a literal army.
Another qualitative judgment: Those knives with the green wooden handles are really awesome-looking.
Besides, these were all fleeting concerns in my mind. I had to concentrate on the next offering: Heatwave Megasteel—219 pieces.
* * * * * *
Meanwhile,
impulsive acquisition of another sort was unfolding in
This year and last, young Willy has seized unattended gloves from local back yards, brought them home, and deposited them on the doorstep. Willy’s willfulness was documented in a smoothly crafted July 20 story by Associated Press reporter Jim Fitzgerald.
As Fitzgerald reported, Willy has seized a large quantity of gloves; his family’s collection at the time of the story included nine pairs and five single gloves. All were hung on a line for neighbors to retrieve. Willy reportedly expresses no interest in the gloves after they are brought home.
In addition, during the winter, he seizes socks from the laundry, though he apparently merely leaves those scattered around the house, not deposited in a specific spot.
Fitzgerald’s story has all the elements of the journalism equivalent of a hit novelty song: a dryly humorous style, nice details (like the family’s dog being named Peanut Chew), great quotes and funny surprises (including the ending kicker—Willy’s owner doesn’t use gardening gloves). Indeed, it’s still among the most e-mailed stories on the Boston Globe’s Web site nearly a week later, and did a rapid version of the typical AP story creep onto the likes of CNN.com and Yahoo! News.
And yet, the story has one gaping, obvious flaw: Fitzgerald never asks why Willy is doing this.
In this way, the story epitomizes everything wrong with journalism.
Granted, this is supposed to be a throwaway, “News of the Weird”-type entertainment piece designed for the “Duh! Yuk-yuk-yuk!” crowd. Its appearance on “most e-mailed” lists only reinforces that impression, particularly among journalists who are typically nauseated by such data, which show that people really get excited about inane garbage to the detriment of significant stories.
This is, of course, true. But it’s not the entire truth. Indeed, I think the madding crowd is often smarter that it seems, and that journalists make a grave error in prejudging stories as insignificant. “Most e-mailed” lists remind me a lot of lists of the year’s top-grossing movies; the latter often include incredibly, discouragingly inane titles—and yet, they’re unfailingly more interesting than the list of films nominated for the same year’s top Academy Awards. In both cases, the vast mass of people have no agenda except their own curiosity, which, stunted as it may be, is still of great humanistic significance. We media-makers ignore it at our, and the public’s, peril.
It could be said that Fitzgerald does a fine job of satisfying public curiosity—we learned about the crazy cat, and people (including me) clearly loved the tale. But it’s also clear that people are interested because they’re curious about their mysterious friends, the cats, and their generic behavior of bringing home prey, of which Willy’s glove-grabbing seems to be a pathological derivation. If we don’t ask why here and now, when will we?
Journalism has become fearfully bereft of “whys,” up to and including, “Why would Saddam Hussein want to support, in his own country, a destabilizing, radical Islamic terrorist organization that has called for his ouster?” (Or more specifically, asking why before irrevocably damaging, quagmire wars rather than safely afterward.)
But it’s
only a little cat story, you say? I say the why is unasked for the same reason
at all levels of journalism. Journalism is now so thoroughly
entertainment-based, it operates like magic shows pre-Penn & Teller—it
thinks all the money is in doing the trick, and none in explaining how it’s
done. It’s about feeding curiosity but not satisfying it; amusing an audience,
but not educating it. Overbroad criticism? Perhaps. But you don’t see me whining weakly that I was
“misled” about
In short, there’s money in the cat bringing home gloves, and no money in why, or so common wisdom goes. To the mainstream, it is unthinkable that “News of the Weird” material might be incredibly significant—in this case, enough to improve our knowledge of some of our most regular, and yet mysterious, companions. I’d go so far as to say such knowledge would be more significant than that day’s update on Israel-Lebanon fighting, or whatever “significant” news filled the top slot.
I will acknowledge, however, that such knowledge is scarce among animal researchers for similar reasons. Some of the most common cat behaviors (like many human ones) have gone virtually unstudied because there’s no money in it—no pharmaceutical dollars to be made, no federal grants to be given (and, it seems the assumption goes, no prestige to be won). The bringing back of prey is one of them. (Indeed, flipping through about 20 cat books at the library, I found far more references to such nonsense as homeopathy and ESP than to this actual, common behavior.) And this in turn involves prejudgments of significance among pet-owners themselves—pets are little anthropomorphized slaves who most people, whatever their curiosity level, don’t really want to understand on the animals’ own terms.
All that being said, there are in fact several fruitful theories about why cats fetch prey and what Willy might be up to—as I found when I decided to put my money where my mouth is and take a crack at the subject myself. It took me about four hours of e-mails, phone conversations and library-visiting to gather the gestalt. Fitzgerald could’ve gotten a decent answer by spending 30 minutes finding and consulting any one of my sources. It really is that easy.
Everyone seems to agree that Willy’s behavior is a displacement of normal behavior—the bringing home of prey—onto an unusual object, and that Willy keeps doing it because he gets positive reinforcement for it, obviously through the media-worthy attention for the cuteness of his habit, and possibly because of something he finds inherently pleasant about gloves.
The fundamental mystery within the mystery, then, is why cats bring home prey in the first place.
A popular explanation, prominently pushed by behaviorist Desmond Morris in his 1986 book “Catwatching,” is that cats that bring prey (variously alive, half-dead or deceased) to your doorstep because they are taking on the role of a mother cat and regarding you, the family, as kittens. Mother cats will bring back prey to feed her kittens, and also to teach them how to hunt it. This is attractive in explaining why, for example, one of our cats when I was a kid brought back a live snake and released it in the house. Morris underlined something particularly convincing about this explanation—negative reinforcement, in the form of our disgust at such “presents,” usually doesn’t alter the behavior. Thus, it seems hardwired and underlying.
In this explanation, the bringing home of normal prey would itself be a kind of displacement, with the humans taking the roles of kittens.
A problem with this explanation, of course, is that Willy is a he.
However, this is not an obstacle, I was told by Dr. Nicholas Dodman, director of the animal behavior program at Tufts University’s Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and author of “The Cat Who Cried for Help: Attitudes, Emotions, And the Psychology of Cats.”
Dodman said male cats will sometimes return prey to the nesting site. “There’s no such thing as a truly sex-specific behavior,” he noted. “Everybody’s programmed for everybody else’s behavior.” Mammal embryos start out female, with some differentiating later into males; thus, “The male position is like a veneer on female behavior.” So, while avoiding sophomoric puns, we can say Willy still fits in here.
Essayist Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson in his book “The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey into the Feline Heart” notes the mother-kitten theory, but bats it down, saying he believes the behavior is rooted in cats wanting to keep prey safe in the lair, away from other predators.
As this idea occurred to me as well, I asked Dodman about it. “They don’t just kill the thing and just drop it on the floor and eat it,” Dodman confirmed, explaining that cats indeed like to find a safe place to eat. “You don’t want to be dining in a field full of predators.” But, he added, they don’t necessarily bring the prey home or to a typical central location—they just go to ground in an acceptable hidey-hole. This would more of a “removal” or “translocation” behavior than Willy’s retrieval, Dodman said—but for Willy, the central location may be where he’s comfortable going. Dodman also said some cats are known to bring their toys to their food bowl and drop them in.
While Fitzgerald’s story offered no “why,” it did imply one. In a case of classic bad journalism, it allowed its sources to allude to a conventional-wisdom explanation without actually investigating the idea itself. Willy’s owner is quoted as referring to the more common practice of “bringing home dead birds,” and a family friend is quoted as saying that Willy’s behavior is “like he was giving me a gift.” Fitzgerald himself then describes the gloves as “gift-worthy.”
As it happens, gift-giving is indeed another possible explanation. Dr. Jean Duddy of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’ Angell Animal Medical Center-Boston said such prey is given “literally as a gift to their master. I used to laugh and tell people it’s how cats pay rent.”
She notes that indoor cats will often use toys or other objects in a similar way—“kill” them, then bring them to “whomever he wants to please.” She said one of her cats places toy mice in the shoes or purses of favored guests. “It’s a form of gift, a form of acceptance,” she said.
Obviously, cats would not do this altruistically, but rather in return for attention or some other form of pleasure.
A similar behavior, Duddy said, is playing fetch. Young cats in particular sometimes will retrieve a toy thrown by their owners, for the obvious benefits of play and attention. Duddy wondered whether Willy had played fetch regularly. Dodman also noted fetch-playing behavior, saying in general, “Lots of cats get things and bring them back to a central area.”
As you can see, there are several possibilities. It’s important to note that they are all essentially extrapolations and well-educated guesses based on feral cat behavior and general behavioral psychology—not the results of specific experimentation on domestic cats. And as Dodman notes, “You never really know unless you speak cat, which no one can.” Any one answer, or set of answers, could explain Willy’s behavior.
I find the general paradigm of behavioral displacement convincing enough, whatever the specific source. And that’s the key to guessing why Willy likes gloves.
Whatever theory one chooses, it would appear from the widespread nature of the prey-retrieving behavior that it is largely instinctual, Dodman said. Therefore, it will always be under there somewhere, wanting to be expressed, and “can be expressed differently with inappropriate objects…If it’s thwarted, the cat will displace the behavior onto some other object.”
For example, a cat that isn’t allowed to kill live animals as it evolved to do will instead hunt inanimate objects.
Stories of cats retrieving unusual items are pretty common. Dodman said he once saw an English TV program about a similar case—a cat that would jump the neighbors’ fence to seize plush children’s toys. “All the children were crying and the cat was purring,” Dodman said.
Masson wrote that one of his cats brought home plant leaves—“benign hunting trophies.” And she brought them to a regular area: “Her corner of the house, or at least her cache, the place she likes to use for herself, is slowly filling with all the leaves she brings in, a look of triumph on her small face as she deposits them on the floor and looks about fearfully to see if there is anyone around who might challenge her right to the kill.” Masson then muses further: “I cannot tell whether this is her idea of a joke or if she is serious…[A]re these conscious displacements on her part? Could she possibly know that they are replacing the real kill? Is she just teasing us or even herself? It is a mysterious activity.”
What’s not mysterious is Masson’s explanation that he prevents the cats from killing live animals.
Dodman said there’s even a breed with an apparent genetic predisposition for seizing and hoarding flashy objects—the short-legged “Munchkin” dwarf variety purposefully bred by those insane neo-eugenicists in the pet-farming world. (I apologize to little people, as the eugenicists surely won’t.) “They have a particular penchant for apprehending jewelry,” Dodman said. “They’re like magpies.”
The Munchkin hoarding, Dodman said, could be compared to obsessive-compulsive disorder in humans—and like that disorder, is a pathological form of normal behavior. In this case, that’s the retrieval of prey.
Munchkins aside, most cats can displace onto a wide variety of objects. “There’s no specific class of things cats are interested in,” Dodman said. Instead, he hypothesized, the chosen items just need to fit within certain parameters—“rodent-sized” and light enough to lift.
Noting that dogs infamously displace their chewing onto shoes, Dodman said, “Why don’t cats carry shoes? They can’t.” But cats—including Willy—often go for socks, which are plentiful and easily carried. “It’s like manna from heaven,” Dodman said.
Duddy noted that Willy’s behavior isn’t that uncommon—it’s that he fixates on one type of object. “He just has a very large fetish,” she said with a laugh.
So, why gloves? First, let’s focus on why Willy probably keeps fetching them—positive reinforcement. Dodman noted that not only are Willy’s owners likely reinforcing his behavior, they probably could have taught him to do it from scratch if they wanted.
“If everyone squeals in delight and claps and is giving it a treat for being so clever, the cat might cotton on” that it should keep bringing home gloves, Dodman said.
And that positive reinforcement essentially could be the answer for the choice of gloves. If Willy almost randomly seized a glove one day and brought it home—say, simply because it generally fits the parameters of substitute prey—and then got lots of welcome attention for it, he learned to keep fetching gloves.
Dr. John C. Wright, a psychologist and animal behaviorist at Mercer University and co-author of “Is Your Cat Crazy?: Solutions from the Casebook of a Cat Therapist,” told me this would be a case of “stimulus generalization”—in other words, Willy keeps snatching the gloves because he wants to keep getting the same response.
While agreeing that positive reinforcement from Willy’s owners is keeping him going, Duddy noted there might be positive reinforcement from gloves themselves. “Possibly he had a very pleasant experience with one,” such as being petted by someone wearing gloves, she said.
“Cats love anything in the garden anyway,” especially digging in soil, she added.
Wright noted that the gloves might have some kind of soil odor on them that “reminded the cat of something edible.” Dodman expanded on this idea, noting that cats are highly olfactory, living in a world of scents. “Maybe the leather of a gardening glove, like a pelt, might have a faint animal smell,” he said, also noting regarding Willy’s other predilection that “socks are bathed in [human] pheromones.” (Most of the above explanations cover Willy’s sock fixation as well, though it appears in any case he uses those more as sheer toys.)
“There may be some olfactory significance,” he said.
While describing that TV program about the toy-stealing cat, Dodman mentioned another bit of behavior that I found interesting: “All the reporters were saying, ‘It’s amusing—but why?’”
Asking why—it must be a trait more common in the English breed.
1 Knives are now getting this
attention in
2 See tips at www.knives4wholesale.com/crlapaucoknp.html.
Significant sources not cited in the text or footnotes
include: www.frostcutlery.com; www.shopathometv.com; and www.themartialist.com/pecom/bokermagnumBO007.htm
(button-lock information). Dr. Dodman phone interview conducted July 25, 2006.
Dr. Duddy phone interview conducted July 26, 2006. Dr. Wright interviewed via
e-mail. Posted