The Inky Fades In The Stretch

As opposed to more detailed reporting and analysis on such stories as the Davos summit, delays assisting the legions of victims of violence in Darfur called “unacceptable” by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (no, that Kofi guy is out of the picture now), restarting of nuclear talks with North Korea, the release of a new report on global climate change (not good news), or the issue of adoption by gays in Great Britain, the Philadelphia Inquirer opted this morning for five pages of coverage devoted to a dead horse.

Now I am not unsympathetic to the story of Barbaro the racehorse and how cruel it was for the animal to suffer its injury in the Preakness this year, but let’s face it, people; extraordinary measures were taken to keep him breathing that, if the sum had been allocated to humans, could have provided care for people who needed it more desperately, mainly kids.

And no, I don’t think it’s a contradiction to support doing whatever needed to be done to keep Thomas Eakins’ The Gross Clinic in Philadelphia and the millions that that entailed versus stating that Barbaro should have been put down long ago, thus saving money and resources, to say nothing of pain and suffering on the part of the animal.

The whole episode with The Gross Clinic was corporate extortion pure and simple; Jefferson’s board could have set up a foundation to raise money and partnered with wealthy patrons in the arts to both find a new home for Eakins’ masterwork and obtain the funds they needed for renovation and expansion. This could have taken place in a much more realistic timeframe than the one in which the painting’s buyers had to work with due to Jefferson’s conditions of the painting’s original sale to the Walton family.

Barbaro’s tragedy, on the other hand, was cruel fate. Keeping this animal alive was partly an exercise in massaging our own hurt feelings over the vicissitudes of life.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly happy over the fact that, at the expense of people who have no health insurance in this country, we instead used our precious medical resources for the purpose of rescuing a thoroughbred race horse any way possible in the name of generating stud fees.

(I meant to link to this Adam Hanft post earlier, by the way.)