Laughing in the Face of Tragedy

I am still rather new to this blogging business (the
Dowbrigade has yet to celebrate its centennial edition), and so I take
it as a rite of passage that today I got my first "highly offended" comment.

Actually, it warmed the cockles of my heart just to get a comment at
all. For all of the thousands of page reads I have I have accumulated
a total of four comments so far, 3 of them from an extremely suspicious
individual who seems to be writing from the library of an institutional
setting in the midwest.

Anyway, the you-should-be-ashamed
comment concerned
a story I did back in July, during the early days of the Dowbrigade.

 
It was about a Massachusetts
English teacher who was killed in a collision with a moose. A friend
of the deceased objected – not to the text, which was accurate, heartfelt
and suitably somber – but rather to the illustration, which featured
personal favorite, Bullwinkle J. Moose.

i feel compelled to respond: Aaron, please excuse me, I meant no disrespect.  As
an English teacher and an animal lover, I felt deeply the double nature
of this tragedy, and my selection of a sympathetic cartoon moose reflected,
in addition to my reluctance to use an image of a real moose which was
not the actual moose in question, was due to my desire to graphically
communicate the difficulty of the search for meaning in the superficial
absurdity
of everyday events.

It reminded me of what happened to the fiancee of one of my college
roommates.  He was a Russian major who spent most of his time writing
dark, brooding humor for the Harvard Lampoon.  She was a bright
young registered nurse who decided to take a tour of the Americas after
getting her license.  She got as far as the Mexico City Zoo, where
she got too close to the elephant, trying to feed it peanuts, perhaps,
and was seized by the beast’s massive trunk, raised above its head, and
dashed against a concrete wall some 30 feet away. She died. The
last thing I would ever do is sensationalize a horrific tragedy like
that. 

So thank you for your offended comment which will hopefully be the
first of many, and the first milestone on the inevitable road to infamy
and disrepute.  I
look forward to reaching future additional anticipated milestones like
my first multi-comment article, my first real flame war, my first cease and
desist letter, my first real supoena…..So much to look forward to.