(posted by tobias)
The Onion, always clever and often cuttingly topical, have outdone themselves this time… Without further ado:
Hey, Wasn’t There Some Sort Of National Tragedy A Few Months Back?
Wait a minute. I could swear that I was recently shocked and outraged about something that felt really significant. But now I can’t for the life of me recall what it was. A senseless horror that staggered the imagination in the scope of its brutality? Something so terrible, a grieving nation was never going to be the same?
Did I dream that? I must’ve dreamt that. Because if something like that had actually happened just a few months ago, I’m sure we’d all still be hearing about it and talking about it every day…
You’d think the details of something on that level would be burned into my mind forever—burned into the whole collective consciousness of the country, for that matter. Maybe after 9/11, and Katrina, and the war, and everything else that’s been happening for the last however-many years, the collective consciousness just doesn’t have any room left for new tragedies to be burned into it…
It’s the wolf-pack media.
It moves from one sheep to the next.
Tragedy strikes when the shephard fires a rifle into the air.
The wolves look in the direction of the shot or they run to hide.
Either way, they pay attention to the event.
At least until they get hungary again for sheep.