I guess the silver lining is that Americans aren't clammoring for pictures of corpses of the drowned. Or, if they are, the media is smacking them down.

I know, I know, we're uninformed, we're spoonfed, we're hypnotized . . .

(clamoring . . .)

I didn't mean to sound all that judgemental -- it just struck me about my own reaction that I was drawn to the rhino picture, which I initially saw doing a Google search for images of the flood; then I later saw it used as the single image in the Wash Post's article. It was only upon reflecting that I thought of it as kinda weird.

Well, the zoo also had to shoot dead an elephant and a hippo, which were too big to be airlifted. That wouldn't have made a very pretty picture.

I'd guess it's the strangeness of the image -- not some misguided pathos -- that got it so much play. A rhino in a blindfold? Almost as surreal as a pink palace in a swamp (see the cover of today's NYTimes).