Archive
03/18/09 - (1)
Chimpanzees
OK, so, in a disastrously downturned economy, I can see states, cities, municipalities, and townships Doing what they can to raise user fees without raising taxes — Surcharges on responses to fires, on burials, trash removal, Extricating victims from car wrecks, emptying septic tanks, Enrollment in little-league soccer, baseball. Poll taxes, anyone? But a private citizen filing a fifty-million-dollar suit Against the "negligent" and "reckless" owner of a primate... Well, isn't this, perhaps, taking things a bit too far?
Granted, Travis the chimpanzee was in an agitated condition (And whether he was or wasn't given Xanax is up in the air), February 16 last, when he, Sandra Herold's two-hundred-pound "pet," Tore off both of Charla Nash's hands, her nose, lips, and eyelids, In a twelve-minute rage of pure aboriginal barbarity, And, granted, her critical condition may eventuate in blindness, Leave her brain-damaged...a fifty-million-dollar lawsuit Somehow seems more than just a tad excessive retribution to exact, For owning "a wild animal with violent propensities," doesn't it?
Then again, what would I know, being just a mealy, reclusive poet, Sheltered from the realities of the chimp-eat-chimp world? Everything I've ever learned about divinity, ethics, violence, revenge, I've gleaned from the likes of Milton, Burns, and Shakespeare... Oh, you know, justifying God's ways to man, Man's inhumanity to man, a pound of flesh, etc., etc. And after all, hasn't man been mauling his fellow man Ever since he descended from the sub-Saharan rain-forest canopies, Began locomoting bipedally, calling his enemies "dumb apes"?
03/18/09 - (1)
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