Meerkat Madness

I see another one of the meerkats on Meerkat Manor died. Mozart, I guess, was the rodent's name, and not long after the demise of Flower, who was apparently the mob's leader.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I watch the show from time to time and find it fairly interesting if extremely contrived, especially when the narrator presumes to tell us what Some Random Meerkat is thinking. How would he know? I suspect that if you could read the mind of a meerkat, it would sound something like this: "Food! Food! Sex! Sex! Danger! Danger! Food! Food! Sex! Sex! Danger! Danger!" (and, truth be told, that's what MY mind sounds like most of the time too). But aside from the relentless anthropomorphizing that goes on, it's an interesting and fun show except for those parts where the meerkats eat sundry enormous insects. I can live without that. Especially foul tasting sundry enormous insects. I figure that if a millipede is going to go to the effort of secreting a foul-tasting oil, you should honor the millipede's industriousness by leaving it the hell alone and eating the cameraman's pastrami sandwich instead.

Every time a meerkat dies, the viewing community is consumed with grief and soon the Internet abounds with tributes and memorials. Viewers post poems, tracts, illiterate scrawls and God knows what else as they try to articulate their grief because a meerkat got bitten on the head by a cobra. And fair enough - it's not for me to say how someone should express their grief. When my first cat died, I wore a rubber band around my wrist for a few days without really knowing why I was doing it.

But here's my question. Hundreds of people die every day for reasons that are as random and meaningless as the cobra-bitten and jackal-mauled meerkats on the TV show, but nobody seems to be all that concerned about them. Not even me. Don't mistake this for a sermon, because I have the same problem. A meerkat croaks on the TV show, and I think Oh, that's sad! A hundred people are blown to bloody smithereens in a car bomb attack in Iraq and I think Gosh, what a mess. The problem isn't that the death of a scruffy, flea-infested meerkat on the TV shouldn't be sad. The problem is that the deaths of a hundred human beings with their own hopes and aspirations should be sad.

But somehow it doesn't seem to work out that way. How many stupid wars would we fight if we felt the loss of each human being as keenly as we feel the loss of a dusty, bug-eating rodent on a TV show? And how do we get to that point, the point where human beings are as precious as meerkats and penguins? I wish I knew.