Afternoon furless ones, miss me? I have been following the traditional feline mourning rituals for my claw-brother, Jinx, the Handsome. He will be missed, long may he hunt. Now that the public grieving period is over I return to the doings of my campaign investment, Mayor Emanuel. It appears he has convinced you that more time doing something that is not working is effective and that less health clinics means he is serving more patients. Is it possible that your aldermen are even more witless than even I imagined? I find that incredible as I do not believe that most of them are worthy of your vaunted thumbs.

One of my favorite pastimes is listening to Mayor Emanuel engage in Newspeak and Doublethink with the entire City of Chicago as if you have the reasoning capacities of a low functioning alcoholic. Since it is working one begins to wonder if such is not so. This is especially true when he makes public policy pronouncements that violate every known law of logic. For example, most of you agree that your Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has only been a miracle for the men who have miraculously made political careers out of its inability to educate vast numbers of your kittens. Most of you would agree that whatever it is doing it is not doing it very well.

So when the Mayor says his plan to fix the schools starts with doing the same thing for longer this is an oxymoron large enough to have its own field of gravity and an idea that is too small to be out by itself. It is a logic crushing black hole of a concept that demands you believe two contradictory things so hard that this Santa, you disillusion so many of your children with, could pop into existence. It begs a question. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome then what do you call doing the same thing longer and thinking that makes a different outcome more likely? 

Audacity and legerdemain are words an educated feline would like to apply to Mayor Emanuel. Sadly I cannot because he is saying things so transparently illogical that it is reinforcing my belief that humans lack the capacity to reason their way out of a small room with an open door. Let us take a moment to reflect upon the world class Doublethink he recently engaged in, in public, on the closing of your mental health clinics. It was as if no one with the equivalent of an 8th grade education would be reporting on him and though I have been told such is not the case I have begun to suspect that deduction and critical thinking are not parts of your journalistic education or societal norms here in America. For that I, and the rest of “job creators” are truly grateful.

No one would argue that Chicago had enough mental health clinics to meet the needs of the city prior to Mayor closing a number of them. After all he even said that the city didn’t have the resources to run the inadequate number of clinics that the city already had. That in the same breath, without a shred of shame or a trace of evidence he says that he’s expanded access to adequate mental healthcare resources by giving an unknown number of patients CTA cards is breath taking. Perhaps this is because as all humans know that CTA cards entitle you to quality and accessible mental healthcare and eases staffing and funding woes.

Oh, I’m sorry my sarcasm went unchecked for a moment. Still if I may say n’est ce pas, please forgive me. I was trying to say that rational feline minds would conclude that shutting down clinics would at the very least add to overburdened workloads of mental health workers. Simple reasoning would lead us to believe that even those who reach these newly less accessible services will be getting fewer services by definition because of the waiting lists alone. Amazingly some of you are on the streets protesting as if you could not hold the clearly contradictory information that less clinics and staffing means more access and services in your mind… how feline of you. When the time comes we will have to select you as un-persons.

Finally I was barely able to contain myself when the Mayor sold you all on the most blatant of incongruent propositions. He convinced you that a city in hock up to the crown of its head will save money and not be cheated by taking out potentially predatory loans from a collection of corporate entities that have been forced to sign settlements for hundreds of millions for fraud and economic mismanagement of funds. I believe you are calling it an Infrastructure Trust… how droll. One would THINK the contradiction of such a thing would cause a body to lapse into a cognitive coma out of self-defense. But no, your Aldermen were unfazed when they voted for something they could not have possibly understood.

I could go on and on with a myriad of examples of how Mayor Emanuel says things that have the logical consistency of a cat amusing itself by getting you to shine a light on a wall but I won’t. After all if I point out all the ways you are being victimized by Doublethink, you will begin to believe you can resist and you need to learn that resistance is futile. I mean you are the people who know your school system is underfunded and instead of finding more funding you find ways to cut the funding you already have and expect it to educate your kittens more effectively. Priceless Doublethink, don’t ever stop being human, prey-things.

You know, I think Orwell would love Mayor Emanuel or be insulted by how hamheaded he is when he says these foolish and illogical things. Then again... maybe Orwell would just stare in wonder at how dumb... is that too harsh a word the collective citizenry of the entire city must be. Well... who can say, I certainly would not want to put words in a great man's mouth but i like to think that he would be alarmed. Well until we meet again, don’t hate the player, play the game better.