TIGER

The news is a buzz about the at the San Francesco Zoo tiger attack. Judging by the questions posed by the bright young things on daytime TV, "journalists" are chosen directly from the graduating classes of modeling schools. How else to explain the painfully other worldly nature of their questions. Questions asked seem to be premised on the notion that the public has no experience of cats. Given a tiger out of his cage in a target rich environment, Isn't what happened precisely what one would expect?

It was impossible to escape the feeling that the story was just too gory and sensational to stop covering, even after the basic outline of what happened was painfully obvious. Some of the journo-babes tried to make an an animal story into a commentary on man's inhumanity to animals by suggesting that the victims had "taunted" the tiger. Perhaps they thought the animals on the zoo are on an honor system contingent on the good behavior of the visitors? A long suffering animal trainer winced at the question and explained as patiently as possible that the predators at the zoo barely notice the visitors. Another budding journalist seemed to think that the tiger 's crouching over the victim had "captured" the victim. Tigers don't capture prey, they kill and eat it. Indeed this particular trainer suggested that the tiger in question seemed to kill people out of an innate hatred of humans. Still, the modeling agency journalists couldn't accept the idea that there is a certain amount of malice in nature.

The larger point here is that today's news consists of the coverage of sad, curious or disgusting happenings beyond the point of exhaustion by unworldly nitwits for the purpose of stimulating cheap emotion.