Screaming Catfish

Nobody’s Opinion: Have you ever heard a catfish scream? It’s one of the most annoying sounds ever invented by Mother Nature. To really get the feel of it, you have to catch one first.

My own mother, when we lived in Florida, bless her heart, used to love to go fishing for salt-water catfish. It was her only pleasure in the world it seems, and every Sunday after church she would drag us (being my father, brother and I) out into the middle of the ocean, so she could fish.

Her reasoning was if her husband was going to spend money all day playing golf, at least ONE day a week, he had to do something with the “family.” And that something with the family was to spend the whole day out in the middle of the ocean watching mom catch catfish.

My father suffered along with this ultimatum because, well, golf in Naples, Florida, even in the 1960’s was not exactly cheap, and he played every day. It was one of the many “compromises” made in the never-ending, even if very small, war between the sexes.

Women can be quite creative when it comes to payback.

So every single Sunday we would get in my grandfather little boat and head out into the ocean, which took about an hour. Once we anchored, it sometimes took only five minutes for my mother to get a bite. And the ONLY fish that ever bit her line were catfish, as if she had some kind of divine intervention fishing line to God.

God would look down and go, “This woman needs to catch catfish to make her world happy. So let it be written, so let it be done.”

The rest of us just had to suffer through the day---bored, sun-burnt, thirsty, and hot. None of us would ever catch a thing. We might get a small nibble, but in the end, they were either minnows, or branches off a nearby mangrove root.

This of course drove my father completely nuts because he would have to untangle everybody’s line, which would sometimes take up to an hour.

Then the moment would come. My mother would get a “bite.” The part where she pulled it in was very boring---if you’ve seen one pole bend, you’ve pretty much have seen all a pole can do.

BUT once the catfish was inside the boat, the show began.

Of course, my father had to bait my mother’s hook, and once she had the fish firmly on the line, HE would have to reel the cat-fish in the boat, then grab them, and take the hook out of its mouth. This process sometimes took fifteen minutes.

Like a queen, my mother’s servant would not let her suffer the indignity of actually having to handle the fish herself. Oh no, my mother sat there quietly and watched my father work.

And once a catfish, no matter how big, is out of the water, it’s not a pretty sight. That’s when the scene of, “If you think, Mr. Human that I’m going down to dying right here on this stinking boat without a fight, then THINK AGAIN!” started.

And if it just happened to be a female catfish and pregnant, its entire load of white little baby eggs would flop right there on the floor at my father’s feet.

Fortunately this was before Nemo became a household word, or I might have grown up to be a full-blown liberal.

Every time my mother pulled in a catfish, I might as well have been the catfish’s mother; it was to me, that unbearable to watch.

As a young girl, I could NOT for the life of me see any fun in watching a creature struggling in pain, with a horrible hook in its mouth, screaming at the top of it’s lungs at the thought of death. I wondered if my mother was not a bit insane for enjoying this sadistic pastime. Why couldn’t we have all just gone bowling?

A cat-fish will honk, flop around viciously, honk some more, and then finally, actually scream. I still remember that horrible screaming and the huge mouth gasping as if for breath, with the hook hanging in its lip. Never mind the ugly whiskers, the bulging eyes would look at you while you were trying to get the hook out of its mouth, which of course would make getting the hook out, almost impossible.

The catfish would make so much noise; we couldn’t WAIT for father to throw him (or her) back in. (Which he always did.)

Thank God.

By the end of the day, after my mother had her fill of experiencing this moment of insanity at least eight to ten times, or when it was clear that we had been through enough torture, we could finally head home with the smell of shrimp bait reeking from our clothes.

Now, what does this have to do with anything?

Yesterday, completely by chance, I came upon an article in the January 1994 issue of Current History called The Global Imperative: Building a Democratic World Order, written by a man named Larry Diamond…a man still working at the Hoover Institute.

And God it seemed looked down on the catfish catching mother’s child and said “This woman needs some answers to make her happy. So let it be written, so let it be done.”

I found it in an old Tupperware underneath about one hundred pounds of complete junk, which I had to move to make way for a service man.

It was the original blueprint for the New World Order. Not from some conspiracy theory “nut” on the late night talk show expressing hangings at the Bohemian Grove, not from some left-wing movie about Skull and Bones, but from an intellectual professor at the very distinguished Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

It was from the very people that guide the White House.

Word for word, it was exactly what our government has been following, ever since Reagan was replaced.

This was the blueprint to take over the world with our “democratic” order. Done by our most prolific scholars to be followed by our “leaders.”

The only trouble is, while both political parties have adopted Mr. Diamond’s foreign policy suggestions, there is nothing democratic about it.

In the end he concludes: “We are present at the creation of a new world order: if we hold fast to our democratic principles, then a truly new world order is within the next generation. If we shrink from the challenges of global leadership and vision, the world we inherit will be new only in the weapons that people and nations employ to brutalize and destroy one another.”

My catfish eyes were bulging.

Actually, I just happened to fish it out. If you, like me, want to understand this “globalization” stuff that is the policy of all our leaders, then go to your nearest ocean library of magazines and try to catch it yourself.

And if this is what I think it is, then I for one suggest we all scream like catfishes and hope we can make them throw the whole thing back where it belongs.

I plan myself to honk, flop, scream, and maybe even have a few hundred catfish liberty eggs, until I annoy the fishermen of the New World Order enough to drop these undemocratic ideas deep into the bowels of Davy Jones “idea’s that are not completely unfair” locker.

Nobody’s Perfect; Mr. Diamonds says, “A world that values order, law, peace, decency, and human rights can no longer treat sovereignty as an absolute right.”

True enough, as in the case of Iran. But what happens when we are looked from a World Criminal Court as the ones to lose our Sovereignty?

Even some liberals will admit…this would be suicide.

Nobody Knows; This think tank has suggested an international military, as a necessity to spread democracy around the world. The elites have come up with a plan to control us all, and there is nothing in any of this New World Order that gives the people of the world, whether in the United States, or elsewhere in any other country, a say at all in it.

There ARE no elections for these rulers.

Nobody Cares; Even though it sounds like I hated every minute of my mom’s Sunday’s ritualistic torture of the family, I am grateful for every single memory of watching my parents work together, as man and wife.

It was a memory lovingly preserved.