Elmo Love Bernie

A fifty-four year old woman required treatment by teams of surgeons over a period of seven hours for injuries inflicted by a confused chimpanzee living on lobster and ice cream in Connecticut. If the victim survives, she will require years of treatment to repair the disfiguring injuries suffered after offering the chimpanzee an Elmo doll as a present. There is a temptation to speculate that the chimpanzee was not a fan of the Muppets, but unfortunately the consequences and implications of this event transcend humor, to the detriment of a New York Post cartoonist.
http://enews.earthlink.net/article/nat?guid=20090219/499cf560_3ca6_15526200902191164606112

Selma Hayek inspired international outrage by breast-feeding a starving baby. The baby has no doctors. The baby has no medical care. The baby has nothing to eat. Selma Hayek did the only thing a decent human being could do.

The chimpanzee died of gunshot wounds from police faced with the task of controlling an unpredictable animal the size of a large man with twice the strength. A controversial political cartoon subsequently appeared in the New York Post portraying police shooting a chimpanzee and commenting that the chimpanzee could have produced stimulus/bailout legislation more competently than Congressional legislators, suggesting a connection to the sad event of the Chimpanzee Rampage.

In a rather ironic political twist, civil rights activists compared the chimpanzee to President Obama, and complained about discrimination by the cartoonist. The cartoon tastelessly exploits an unfortunate tragedy in an unoriginal way that has been treated more effectively and humorously, by Oliphant during the Reagan administration, for instance, but the racial discrimination is in the eye of the beholder. The baby, on the other hand, will be lucky to live as long as the chimpanzee.

There is a moral in these events, confused as morals usually are, something about expending resources to establish and maintain impossible relationships doomed from the start, while the most basic needs of others go unanswered. Can I excuse myself any more than the nation or humanity? No I cannot. I have adopted defensive habits of moderation that regard punishment as the only reward for good deeds. Witness Selma Hayek. I have retreated into the noncommittal middleground of Martin Luther King’s frustration, yet I cannot help reacting, like touching something unpleasant in the dark, to the unregulated opportunism and unfocused excess of economic and administrative cowboy culture that has encouraged disregard for just responsibility and produced an environment characterized by the vast and historic scope of self-indulgence represented by the superficially benign but ominously paradoxical images of the Dick Cheneys and Bernie Madoffs and their spiritual kin.

As far as I can tell, nobody offered the baby an Elmo doll.

Here's thinking for you.

Iffy