THE DARK SIDE OF US POETS/TELEVISION VIEWERS/CHIMPS ETC.

The other day Gina wrote in an entry entitled "saw this yesterday on national geographic while avoiding the world and all I could think was I was trying to get away from the news":

In 1994 a small child in western Uganda was attacked and partially eaten by a wild chimpanzee. This was the first casualty in a spate of horrifying attacks which were found to be the work of one rogue chimp. Nicknamed "Saddam", he was no match for a posse of angry villagers who tracked and shot him, quelling the attacks for two years. Now another killer terrorizes the villages around neighboring Lake Kifruka. The Dark Side Of Chimps is the story of these chimps and what compells them to attack humans. Through the eyes of the local chimp tracker who studied the attacks, and the scientists who watched on in horror, we explore the dark nature of our closest relatives, chimpanzees. What we discover is that chimpanzees are xenophobic, aggressive and violent predators, even towards their own kind, killing not only for meat, but over territory and power.

Here was my reply (slightly revised):

It shows those fears and that violence run deep -- right down into the ancestral depths of our "animal" nature. Kind of undermines the Buddhist notion of a fundamental "Buddha nature", entailing such pristine qualities as wisdom, courage, clarity and positive elan vitale, that glows like an unextinguishable sun in those same profoundest depths of our being... On the other hand, it makes all the greater the necessity to cultivate that enlightenment through meditation, poetry, acts of goodness, whatever... (Spoken like the sometimes Buddhist practitioner that I am...)

All of which is to say that we have a choice between:

a) here, bend over while I preen the lice out of your fur, and

b) HOO HOO HOO HA HA HA HEE HEE HEE YAAAAOOOOW (GNASH GNASH GNASH)!!!