by Lindy West
Into that relatively innocent media landscape waddled Lil Bub, and the internet lost its collective mind.
Bub’s infirmity drew us to her as much as her cuteness; she was frail, our furry Beth March, with Beth’s pure heart and unfortunate destiny to be the fulcrum for others’ growth. We were doing Bub a favor by loving her, weren’t we? Her face was ours to get over, to find cute in spite of itself, because we were so open-minded, so brave. But she was also just a cat, and that was our justification for fixing our gaze shamelessly on Bub’s differentness.
In the most uncharitable reading of Lil Bub fever (a microcosm of the viral internet machine at large), we, her audience, do not come off well. We are ravenous, exploitative, selfish. You can ogle a cat. You can objectify a cat.
But then, Bub is cute, and she is a cat, and cats are not human beings, and it rarely does anyone any favors to draw equivalencies between real oppression and things that are not. So I don’t know.
Maybe the only thing to do, when you are one speck in an ungovernable community of nearly eight billion people on this planet, is to always keep an eye trained on the deep why of things: Why do I like this? Where is this impulse coming from? Am I telling the truth to myself about myself?
People love to watch viral videos in which one kindly fisherman saves one sea turtle from a snarl of trash; they are less passionate about electing politicians who will dismantle policies that entrench corporate power and allow companies to pump poison into the oceans and skies in order to shore up the immoral wealth of billionaires and further destabilize the lives of the poor who will remain locked in toil until the planet boils us all to death as Jeff Bezos waves good-bye from his private rocket. Strange!
Bub is a benign example of our propensity to flatten our objets d’entertainment into mascots, trading cards, so we can consume them without the complications of flesh and blood and history (remember 2011’s Homeless Man with the Golden Voice?), but that doesn’t make the discussion irrelevant. It’s imperative to remember that our most catastrophic impulses often start small, banal. Virality is compartmentalization, turning the complexities of life into decontextualized snapshots. It is a fun way to pass the time. It is a terrible way to run a society.
Is Bub happier being a famous cat? Or would she be just as happy eating jellied steer anus out of an old yogurt container and never, not once, seeing the inside of BuzzFeed HQ? Bub’s answers—“probably not” and “probably,” probably—are, for the purposes of this essay, less significant than ours: “Who fucking cares?”
The problem isn’t that people have latent biases that manifest in unexpected ways; it’s that we, as a society, are fundamentally allergic to examining those biases and holding ourselves accountable.
Bub opened the gates to a flood of feline misfits: Maru, who loves boxes; Honey Bee, who has no eyes; Kylo, who looks like Adam Driver; Lazarus, with the cleft palate; the late Colonel Meow, eulogized by TMZ under the violently disrespectful headline “Colonel Meow: Death Caused by Heart CAT-ASTROPHY”; and, of course, Grumpy Cat (RIP).
Grumpy Cat harrumphed into the public eye on September 22, 2012, when her owner’s brother, Bryan Bundesen, posted a photo on Reddit with the caption “Meet grumpy cat.” It was a media landscape not much more sophisticated than the one that had welcomed Lil Bub, but with one major difference: we already knew that a cat could be famous. And this cat got very famous. When she died in 2019, the New York Times ran a news story. The Today show ran a segment and displayed a Grumpy Cat meme: “I AM NOW IN HEAVEN. I HATE IT.”
Grumpy Cat, like Lil Bub, was small, with facial deformities that gave her the look of a permanent frown. She was very adorable. She was also instantly meme-able, affording her a virality far beyond “look at this funny cat.” Image macros featuring Grumpy Cat’s scowl with captions such as “I HAD FUN ONCE; IT WAS AWFUL” and simply “NO.” They were inescapable on social media within what felt like hours. Merchandising and endorsement deals would quickly follow—T-shirts, mugs, plush toys, comic books, Halloween costumes, a bottled iced coffee called Grumppuccino, a contract with Friskies—bolstered by a large-scale PR campaign orchestrated by celebrity cat manager Ben Lashes.
Abruptly, in the midst of the flurry to Monetize! This! Cat!, the internet threw a wrench into the works, as it so often does. Someone noticed that this cat’s owners called it Tard.
I want to quickly mention that what follows is my own personal conspiracy theory and I don’t know shit. But also, unrelatedly, I am very smart.
The abbreviation “tard” is easily recognizable to anyone who has spent time online or the playground or the Thanksgiving table with their shittiest uncle within the last thirty years or so. Tard, on the face of it, is short for “r*tard” or “r*tarded,” unless you believe that Grumpy Cat was named after the sixth most upvoted definition on Urban Dictionary: “A word used in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath; tired. ‘Granma’s just “tard.–Ma.” Every other definition is a variation on the first: “Adjective used to describe one so r*tarded, they do not deserve the ‘re.’” (Housekeeping note: The R word is a slur, and I will be censoring it throughout. If you don’t think it’s a slur, and you think this is silly, consider that it costs you nothing to err on the side of care.)
I remember the rise of “tard,” back when we were still pretending that it was okay to use the R word as long as we were “just joking” and referring to someone neurotypical. (“You don’t call r*tarded people r*tards,” Michael Scott said on the NBC sitcom The Office in 2006, then watched by millions of people, to no major blow-back, “you call your friends r*tards when they’re being r*tarded.”) “Tard” on its own was the epithet with a little youthful flair; as a suffix it allowed anyone to add some ableism to their political agenda or Twitter beef (“libtard,” “fucktard”).
Come on. We know what it means. Come on. We are adults and our brains are oxygenated and we live in the world. We have all been here this whole time! Come on! We know!
The deduction seemed obvious to many people: Grumpy Cat was named Tard because she was a special needs cat. Her face was different. She had a flat affect and some trouble with her legs. Tard means r*tarded.
When the anti-Tard backlash, predictably, body slammed the Grumpy Cat money machine, the damage control was swift. Her owner, Tabatha Bundesen—presumably coached by celebrity cat manager Ben Lashes—released a statement explaining that, funny story, big misunderstanding, she’d let her young daughter name the cat, and the child chose, of all strange things, “Tardar Sauce,” because she thought this cat’s orangish fur resembled Red Lobster’s signature orangish tartar sauce. And because children don’t know how to spell “tartar” and Tabatha, I guess, got the name in writing from her toddler (?) and didn’t bother to correct her, Tardar Sauce it was! And I guess nobody in their family or circle of friends had ever heard the word “tard” used as a slur, so the nickname raised no red flags whatsoever! Just think—if the kid had been better at spelling, the cat’s nickname would have been Tart! And the whole goof would have been avoided! Because this story is very true! I guess!
Come on!!!
But brazenly retrofitting a celebrity cat with a backstory to dodge charges of ableism and keep that Friskies money flowing—if that is, indeed, what happened—isn’t even the most irritating part of this whole situation. The most irritating part is how uncritically people believed the story. Or, maybe, pretended to believe it. The public ate it up. People wanted to be able to look at pictures of Grumpy Cat’s cute, grumpy face so passionately that they chose to believe a very odd and suspiciously convenient tale we’d all just watched be conjured in real time.
The website Mental Floss regurgitated Grumpy Cat’s origin story wholesale in 2019:
Crystal came up with Grumpy Cat’s real name—Tardar Sauce—which was inspired by two things: Grumpy’s original orangish coloring (“She thought Grumpy looked like Tartar sauce,” Tabatha said) and the fact that, at the time, Tabatha was waitressing at Red Lobster and had just made C
rystal try the stuff. “She was like, ‘Ew, no!’ and I said ‘Honey, you have to try it! It goes with fish!’” So it was fresh in her mind when the kitten was born.
I’m sorry. I just cannot buy this.
Similarly, Grumpy Cat’s Wikipedia entry lists her name as Tardar Sauce without question, but there’s some refreshing dissent on the Talk page (caveat that I do not know any of these anonymous users but I am extrapolating my opinion of their moral characters based on how hard they agree with me):
“Am I the only one to believe that the name of the cat ‘Tard’ is a retcon because the reality would be politically incorrect? Who names their cat ‘Tartar Sauce’??” asks a keen-eyed anonymous user.
“The cat’s name is ‘Tardar Sauce.’ It seems reasonable to call her ‘Tard’ for short,” responds a credulous Grumpy Cat shill.
“I agree with the OP, I believe it’s a retcon. It’s not ‘tardar sauce,’ it’s ‘tartar sauce.’ The word ‘Tard,’ however, is an actual slang for mental ret*rdation. There’s no proof, but I’ve always felt something was fishy about the name and the explanation of it,” says a genius.
The most gullible man in the world adds, “Sorry, but the spelling is with a ‘d,’ not a ‘t.’ People give all kinds of unusual names and spellings of those unusual names to their animals.”
And Geoff, a true king, brings it home: “Dude, of course it’s a revision of history. They named the cat ‘Tard,’ because omg lol, the cat looks mentally r*tarded, then it became famous, and then they were like ‘Oh crap, we now have a famous cat with a really offensive name. Quick, come up with some semi-plausible modification to the name and a story about how she got that name!’ Honestly, I wish more people would call out the owners for the name: it’s not cool.”
YES, GEOFF. YES. GEOFF 2020.
Wikipedia might need “reliable sources” to add a detail to the main page, but I don’t. It is my 100 percent certain, deeply held opinion that THIS FUCKING CAT’S NAME IS R*TARD AND THESE PEOPLE, WITH COLLUSION FROM CELEBRITY CAT MANAGER BEN LASHES, COVERED IT UP FOR THE MEGABUCKS.
Americans are addicted to plausible deniability. If we can’t even think critically about something as relatively insignificant as an internet cat or admit that a person might give a pet an offensive name or apologize honestly for small, careless slights, how are we ever going to reckon with the fact that our country was built by slaves on land stolen from people on whom we perpetrated a genocide? What the fuck are we going to do?
Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history.
In October 2017, BuzzFeed News published a truly astonishing exposé on the so-called alt-right, the youth-driven, archconservative online movement that is at least partly responsible for Donald Trump’s rise to power and has been an indispensable siege engine in his war on truth. An unnamed entity sent BuzzFeed a cache of emails from the former Breitbart editor and alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos—Steve Bannon’s protégé—revealing that Yiannopoulos had been working intimately with white nationalist leaders to normalize radical far-right ideology, particularly among disaffected white youth.
Yiannopoulos has experienced something of a fall from grace—both mainstream and fringe—since 2017. After videos surfaced in which Yiannopoulos appeared to endorse sexual relationships between thirteen-year-old boys and adult men (“they can be hugely positive experiences,” he said), Simon & Schuster canceled the publication of his memoir and he was forced to resign from Breitbart. But back in 2015 and 2016, when the leaked emails were written, Yiannopoulos was the most popular writer at a right-wing website during a right-wing groundswell, a celebrated figure who held the ear of a future adviser to the president of the United States.
In a bizarre personal twist, one of the leaked emails exposed a connection between Yiannopoulos and an ostensibly feminist writer named Mitchell Sunderland, then employed at Broadly, Vice Media’s women’s section. “Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, with a link to one of my articles. That email corroborated two things that feminist writers have been insisting, fruitlessly, for years: one, that the abuse we endure daily on social media isn’t just a natural, inevitable by-product of the internet but a coordinated, politically motivated silencing campaign; and two, that even left-wing media failed to take us seriously when we insisted that Yiannopoulos was more than a clown. It was easier (and far more satisfying if you were already of the opinion that feminists are annoying) to believe that we were just hysterical.
The alt-right has always thrived on obfuscation and disinformation. A few of its founding factions include a misogynist hate movement that insists it’s a good-faith crusade for journalistic ethics and free speech, multiple white supremacist hate movements that insist they’re simply passionate about “Western culture,” and the disfigured (or perhaps unmasked) remains of the Republican Party, which has long hidden its ruthless determination to enrich the richest at the expense of the poorest behind lies about “small government” and “personal responsibility.”
How did such a conglomerate of transparent bigots achieve enough mainstream credibility to win the White House? Well, because they said, over and over, that they weren’t bigots—the “nu-uh” defense.
And people believed them or pretended to because it was easier, because the alternative meant admitting some complicity in four centuries of American horrors. But my taxes are too high. But Michael Brown was no angel. But I’m not racist. But I like the cat.
The alt-right insisted it was not racist even as its swastika-clad minions marched on Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 and the president it helped elect relentlessly demonized Muslims and Mexican immigrants and trafficked in vile stereotypes about the lives of black Americans. The alt-right insisted it was not sexist even as its online foot soldiers harassed feminist writers into hiding and its president bragged about committing sexual assault. Plausible deniability was the alt-right’s Trojan horse, and the media ate it up, running puff pieces that cast Yiannopoulos as an outrageous cad and interviewing neo-Nazis to get “their side” of the story.
The BuzzFeed emails laid waste to it all. There was no longer any remotely justifiable reason to suggest that Yiannopoulos’s popularity among neo-Nazis could merely be a coincidence or, by extension, that white male supremacy is not the defining principle of Trumpism. Yiannopoulos, working under the orders of the man who would become the president’s chief strategist, was soliciting ideological guidance from overt white supremacists, including Andrew Auernheimer, known as weev, of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. Yiannopoulos’s contacts also advised him on how to more effectively mask his propaganda—to delight and whip up his base without alienating the center. (Remember when we thought the center could be alienated? Cute!)
None of this is new, of course, except for the scale of it. Trump sailed into the political sphere in 2011 on a gale of dog whistles, exploiting Americans’ antiblack hostility without ever quite calling Barack Obama a racial slur. He just wasn’t sure about Obama’s citizenship, he said. He just wanted proof, he said, and didn’t the American people deserve it? He was just a reality TV star asking in TV interviews and on Twitter for the president of the United States to show his papers.
Of course, to anyone with even the remotest grasp of nuance, context, US history, or good faith, Trump’s racism has always been glaring, as has Yiannopoulos’s. But as long as Trump insists, again and again, that he’s the “least racist person,” that’s plausible deniability enough for millions of Americans. Even that BuzzFeed exposé, explicitly demonstrating a direct chain of communication from organized white nationalists to President Trump, changed nothing. After a frenzied few days on Twitter, the discourse moved on with a shrug, because real change takes work and blood. On the one hand, there’s what we can plainly see in front of us with our own eyes. On the other hand, he says he’s not racist!
When faced
with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years.
White Americans hunger for plausible deniability and swaddle themselves in it and always have—for the sublime relief of deferred responsibility, the soft violence of willful ignorance, the barbaric fiction of rugged individualism. The worst among us have deployed it to seduce and herd the vast, complacent center: It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. You earned everything you have. Benefiting from genocide is fine if it was a long time ago. The scientists will figure out climate change. The cat’s name is Tardar Sauce.
We have to kick this addiction if we’re going to give our children any kind of future.
In August 2016, a Nightline producer asked if I’d be willing to appear in a segment about internet trolling alongside Yiannopoulos, and I reluctantly agreed, on the condition that I could discuss online harassment’s dire political ramifications—which, in just a few months, would help put Trump in the White House. “Milo and his followers are defending the status quo,” I wrote in an email. “They are explicitly attacking women and people of color in order to squash social justice movements. They are anti-Semitic, transphobic, misogynist white supremacists, no matter how much Milo couches it in his naughty scoundrel schtick.” I had no idea, at the time, how right I was about to be.
When the piece aired, the text under my face—the chyron—read “Trolling Victim.” Any political analysis I’d provided was cut in favor of a cursory description of mean things trolls have said to me. That’s the story they wanted—the simple story, the easy story, the story audiences like. Trolls mean! Women cry! Just like all the other “trolling victims,” I was a spectacle, entertainment for the masses as much as I’d been entertainment for the trolls. The truth, as ever, would have been a buzzkill.
The cat isn’t the problem. Even the cat’s name isn’t the problem, though the name is terrible. The name is just people needing to grow. The problem is the story about the name (if the Tardar Sauce backstory is indeed a fabrication) and the public’s eagerness to believe it; the problem is people weaseling out of the growth. We are addicted to not being inconvenienced by reality, even in the most mundane circumstances. We just want to have everything.
