Some really helpful officials (NOT)

On Christmas day, 2007, a tiger named Tatiana escaped from her enclosure in the San Francisco Zoo. What happened just before and just after her escape remains a subject of debate. Although the wall that Tatiana had to scale was only about 12 feet high, there is no record of any tiger leaping out of an enclosure like that before. It seems likely that, as zoo personnel have suggested, Tatiana was being taunted by a person or persons who provided some means - perhaps a pair of legs dangling over the wall - for her to get a toehold and escape.

After scrambling out of her "grotto," Tatiana mauled three young men, Carlos Sousa, 17, and his two friends, Amritpal (Paul) and Kulbir Dhaliwal, 19 and 23, brothers. Sousa died. The Dhaliwals survived. Tatiana was shot to death while standing over the soon-to-be-made-a-corpse of one of them.

By that time, the tiger had been loose for about half an hour, while the brothers tried to summon help on their cell phone. In case you're wondering how the people on the other end will regard you if you ever make a 911 call, consider the tone of this conversation (source: San Jose Mercury News):

"A very agitated male is claiming he was bitten by an animal." Prove it, you bastard. "They do not see any animal missing. Male is bleeding from the head." That's not enough proof. "Zoo dispatch now say there are 2 males who the zoo thinks they are 800 [code for 'crazy'] and making something up but one is in fact bleeding from the back of the head." "Who the zoo thinks they are 800": we're from Mars; that's how we talk.

Seven minutes later comes the reassuring report that although zoo officials aren't letting police inside, they themselves are "dealing with it." Deal with it, dude. OK?

Some of the rest of the conversation is even more predictable, given its source. Have you ever called any public official about an urgent problem? You have? I'm sorry. And what was that person's primary concern? Right: he or she wanted to make sure that you calmed down. And so, on Christmas day at the zoo, the 911 dialogue went like this (source: San Francisco Chronicle):

"OK, calm down, all right," the dispatcher replied.

"It's a matter of life and death," Dhaliwal said.

"If the paramedics get hurt they cannot help your brother, so you need to calm down and . . . "

"Send more paramedics then!" Dhaliwal said. Not a bad idea.

The dispatcher replied, "You are going to be the best help for your brother right now, so you need to calm down and help him until we can get there, sir, all right?"

The next time you're calling an ambulance, or reporting a burglary, or being chased by a tiger, this is precisely the irritated and patronizing tone that you can expect to hear: Sir, all right?

Finally, after the cops arrived and the Dhaliwals were rescued, a refreshingly human emotion was expressed. "Have cat, shot cat," a policeman remarked. It was almost as good as Perry's account of the Battle of Lake Erie: "We have met the enemy, and they are ours."

But this no-nonsense style did not persist. A fire department flak provided a fashionably verbose (not to mention partially inaccurate) summary: "The tiger went into a cafe at the zoo and attacked a patron. That person ended up dying at the scene . . . [Police] shot the tiger, and the tiger is deceased." Note that human "patrons" end up dead, while animals are reported as deceased. One pictures, in the former instance, the gerbil that your kids forgot to feed; one imagines, in the latter instance, a flower-decked casket at the Hubbard Memorial Funeral Home and Mortuary, with Tatiana lying in state, her paws crossed reverently across her chest. The tiger didn't end up dying; she passed on to a better life.

Things also seemed to have worked out well for the zoo. The director, a moron named Manuel Mollinedo, proclaimed himself "extremely satisfied that our zoo staff acted appropriately. . . . I'm very proud of the way that our zoo staff operated that evening." Perhaps Mr. Mollinedo didn't remember the fact that "our staff" had started by overestimating the height of Tatiana's enclosure, believing, or at least saying, that it was several feet higher than it was; and that this staff responded to the tiger's escape by keeping rescue workers off the premises, while making its own chaotic attempts to figure out how many tigers were roaming free. Then there was the zoo cafe worker who apparently refused to let the Dhaliwals into the restaurant when they sought refuge from the tiger. But oh well. Who cares? All was "appropriate."

According to Mollinedo, "Some of our staff did heroic things, and I hope that eventually they can be recognized for the way they handled some very difficult situations where they actually put their lives on the line." Hey, that's great; tell us more. But according to the Associated Press, Mollinedo "did not detail their actions, citing a continuing police investigation." In other words, to paraphrase King Lear:

We have done such things, -
What they are, yet I know not: but they have been
The wonders of the earth.

I don't need to tell you that Tatiana was memorialized by animal lovers and animal rights agitators with the predictable candles, bonfires, and other votive trash that the English-speaking peoples now use to express a grief that lies too deep for tears.

And the tiger victim, Carlos Sousa? He was eulogized on a memorial website (what else?) with his own MySpace rap (what else?): "Hey What's Up!? My Name is Carlos, Im portugeese and brazilian. I'm 16, I love my life, but its gonna get better. I want to be DJ someday. I Hang with the family, and my true homies play basketball and go out to the movies and party harder then a rock star, only sumdayz wen i have my days off of work. I'm just a laid back guy looking for some cool new friends! So if anyone wants to talk, just say wat it doo doo!!"

Obviously, this was an outstanding young person. Granted, both Carlos and his true homies had been smoking weed and drinking vodka before they went to pay their call on Tatiana at the SF Zoo. Nevertheless, his father stepped up to the plate and pitched cliches like a professional: "My son Carlos was a very good boy."

Not so, perhaps, his friends the Dhaliwals. There had been certain legal problems with them (as with Carlos), including a 140-m.p.h. police chase involving one of the brothers, an episode for which he got (you guessed it) a life-changing term in . . . probation. Then there was the little matter of the Dhaliwals' refusal to reveal what happened at the zoo, or even to communicate for some time with their dead buddy's parents. But Carlos' mom forgave them; and when she did, she had a fund of orthodox words to bestow in absolution. According to the San Jose Mercury, she intoned, "Other people can say my kid's a bad kid, too . . . Kids are kids." A is A.

She went farther. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, she "said in an interview that Paul Dhaliwal had told her, 'We didn't do nothing. We were just normal kids in the zoo.' She added, 'That's what happened - just dancing, talking, laughing like normal kids.' " Yes, in America, what you do when you're a normal 19- or 23-year-old "kid" is to get wasted and hang out at the zoo on Christmas day, "dancing."

Besides dancing, the Dhaliwals spent the holiday season hiring a high-priced lawyer, Mark Geragos, and made ready to sue the zoo. But then - what do you know?! - it emerged that one of the Dhaliwals had actually deigned to talk with Carlos' dad, and had admitted that the three buddies had been, well, sorta gittin' in dah tigah's face - "standing on the railing," "yelling," and "waving their hands."

This yelling and waving and talking and dancing probably happens rather frequently, wherever "normal kids" get their chance to play Dr. Doolittle with the zoo animals, but no tigers have ever gotten sufficiently riled up about it to make a successful lunge at the idiots who annoy them. So the San Francisco police suggested that (to put it somewhat more bluntly than they were willing to do) the trio got what they deserved. The Chronicle quoted a police report as saying that "as a result of this investigation, [police believe] that the tiger may have been taunted/agitated by its eventual victims . . . This behavior may be consistent with a tiger that has been agitated and/or taunted."

I suppose it was the police department's barely repressed emotional agitation that resulted in the understated language of its report: "may have been," "may be consistent," "taunted/agitated." In any event, the tiger wasn't the only thing that escaped from the zoo on Christmas day. A lot of weasel words also got out of their enclosures. What the hell does "taunted/agitated" mean? Did the errant youths merely taunt the tiger, or did they manage to "agitate" her as well? And what kind of word is "agitated"? It's the kind of word you use when you want to diminish something: "A very agitated male is claiming he was bitten by an animal." Oh, he was just agitated.

Of course, the cops didn't want to diminish the righteousness of Tatiana's indignation; they want to get the goods on the Dhaliwals. But contrary to what many cultural theorists believe, even established authority often surrenders to the language of its time - pure, dumb, stupid language. Agitated isn't the right word for the cops' purpose. Try tormented, and drop the stupid slash ( / ) mark.

Then there's that word "consistent," which appears every 30 seconds in any TV story about cops and courts and lawyers: "The findings of the autopsy were consistent with death by blow-gun . . . " But what does consistency amount to? A lot of things are consistent with a lot of things. The existence of this column is consistent with my owning a Dell computer, but that doesn't mean that Dell was the weapon I actually used. Consistency is not a cause-effect relationship, although it often plays one on TV.

Looking at this tiger thing as a whole: did you ever see a sequence of events, outside of an election campaign, that reflected worse on the American language, as currently employed?

I'm sorry, very sorry, to say this, but Mark Geragos, one of the nation's (circus) star attorneys, emerged with more verbal honor than most of the other dramatis personae. That may not be saying much. He made his usual share of ridiculous statements. He claimed there was no evidence his clients had taunted the tiger. He claimed that Tatiana's enclosure "couldn't hold a house cat." Right. Just try urging your house cat over a 12-foot wall. And naturally he charged that his clients were the victims of a "smear campaign."

But the great thing is that after the weasely "taunted/agitated" report came out, Geragos said relatively little about the case. No dancin', no laughin', no tauntin' the tiger. No wat it doo doo. Mainly silence, the absence of speech, the silence of an animal when it's biding its time. He knew that the zoo would issue some face-saving statement and await negotiations on the legal settlement that will make the Dhaliwals rich.

Finally, the statement came. "The zoo firmly believes that something highly unusual happened that provoked Tatiana out of her enclosure. This has been a tragedy for everyone involved but we continue our investigation to determine what happened on that day."

Sure. I hope you do. And I hope, somehow, you manage to nail the Dhaliwals. But in the meantime, you might try to define what was "tragic" about "that day," for anyone except the tiger. Tatiana, at least, fell in the line of duty. As for the others . . . This wasn't "Oedipus," and Carlos Sousa wasn't the King of Thebes. Neither was Manuel Mollinedo, if the zoo's leading bureaucrat is what's implied by "everyone." A major sign of decay in American civilization is ignorance of the fact that "tragedy" isn't the only word for something bad that happened. Another word is "farce."

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