Friday Cat Blogging
A Kevin Drum tribute.
I was less personally connected to Kevin Drum than some of the other writers who’ve memorialized him, because I was not a blogging early adopter. I was a physics student in college when all the real nerds were coding their nerd websites by hand or writing nerdy things on LiveJournal or Blogger or whichever platform. It’s not a stretch to say I’ve been playing catchup ever since.
But once I’d hoofed it to the back of the pack, Kevin treated me like I belonged. That is, like someone whose reporting or ideas or analysis deserved as much consideration as he’d offer his fellow OG bloggers like
or or Mickey Kaus (long story). We exchanged a few emails many years ago, all apparently lost to various inbox purges. I searched for them this week, and they were gone.So I felt obliged—more and better than obliged, really—when
reached out and asked if I had any cats or other pets, and would I post pictures of them as a tribute to Kevin and his signature Friday Cat Blogging. I can’t draw on refreshed memories, but I can do this.Meet Pasta Batman, the most well-meaning creature on the planet, Cleo the diva white cat who shouts all the time, and her flavor-inspector, Marcel the dog. All rescues.
I inherited the cats when my now-wife and I started dating almost 13 years ago, so they’re getting up there in years. We adopted Marcel together in 2014, so he’s no spring chicken either. But they still spark joy.
Pasta Batman (or Pasta or PBM for short) is a domestic calico. We discovered recently that Cleo, for all her trashy behavior, is a fairly exotic breed called Turkish Angora. Marcel is a pitbull-husky mix—very smart, but pound-for-pound the strongest dog I’ve ever handled, and he likes to pull things.
If you’re meeting these critters for the first time, it’s because I was born without the pet-obsession gene and/or because I lack the Younger Millennial/Gen-Z cameraphone reflex. Even these pictures are a few months old. To the extent I knew Kevin (who was neither Millennial nor Gen-Z) it always tickled me that he loved cats enough to photograph them on a strict schedule. It was a sentimental quality from someone whose writing was studiously unsentimental. Just the facts and charts and inferences, ma’am.
More than one of Kevin’s true blogging peers has described his death as a gut punch, the length and seriousness of his illness notwithstanding. They write as people who knew him more fully than I did, and I assume that makes their grief more personal. But, to coin a term, I don’t think Kevin was much of a parasocial butterfly. I get the sense that even Kevin’s fellow trailblazers spent little if any time with him in the flesh, and didn’t email or text or chat virtually with him often. I think their (and our) main connection to him was in our admiration, from a distance, of his fine example.
He was an innovator in a small niche at a particular moment when technological and political forces aligned. We’re fond of him because he helped pave our way, not because he was a buddy to raise a glass with or an ear for our personal problems. If he’d remained healthy—if he’d decided to retire, shut down the blog, and live out a long life in paradise—we would have wished him well. Then our connections would have dried up. Then our memories would have faded.
The gut punch (at least for me) isn’t the personal loss so much as the collective one, and the brutal reminder of the frailty of all this. It hit me like I imagine it hit younger tech developers when Steve Jobs died; or like how aspiring musicians in California or New York must have felt when they heard the news, from way up in the Seattle suburbs, about Kurt Cobain. The cultural significance of early aughts political blogging is much, much smaller than Apple and way less cool than grunge. But he was like that, for what we do.
When it was still called Twitter, you could log on in the midst of national mourning over the untimely death of an icon, and your feed would be thick with nostalgia. “I remember the first time I saw…” When I started reading Kevin’s writing, a lifetime and a second ago, I was 22 years old. Thanks to his obituaries, I realize I’m just a bit younger now than he was then. To be maudlin for just one more sentence, it’s like approaching a milestone I didn’t know was nearby, until someone ripped it from the ground and threw it at me.
For my own selfish reasons, but more importantly for our collective intelligence and decency, I wish he’d lived.
Thank you, Brian. I was fortunate to occasionally play disc/frisbee golf with Kevin. My teeniest claim to Drum fame is a number of years ago we were discussing the PBS NewsHour Shields & Brooks discussion a couple days earlier (I pray there’s a Drum & Shields weekly show in Heaven now maybe😁), I asked him his opinion of David Brooks, and the next week in his Mother Jones column it started with “I was talking with a friend about David Brooks…” OMG! Anyway sadly there’s a Drum-sized hole in our lives now. I find myself still crying when I think about the loss. I’m so sorry for Marian his wife.
I picked up on Drum during his days as Political Animal for Washington Monthly, mid-aughts or so. I liked him because half the time I didn't like what he was saying. He wasn't a typical leftie blogger. Too often he wasn't very leftie at all. Not surprising since his point of view back then was Clintonesque New Democrat DLC. By the time he settled in at Mother Jones, he'd become a reliable centrist poster, evidence-based, and hard to find holes in his arguments. He was a reliable curator of the daily news. If he didn't write about something I thought deserved more attention, I wondered why he missed it. But when he brought up topics I hadn't discovered, I felt like I had gained access to information about what was really going on, what was important. He didn't speculate. He laid out facts and described their portent. He was, defacto I think, the dean of leftie bloggers for the past 20 years or so (despite being pretty squarely a centrist). Every day, several times a day, like it or not, right there. The best blogger of the early 21st century.