Yesterday's A-Hed piece deals with the Washington Zoo's need to ship all its resident pandas back to China. It seems China has dibs on all pandas in the world, even those born outside of China. This means the United States is deporting U.S. panda citizens without an uproar, leaving the zoo without one of it main attractions.
This repatriation is happening in the still of the night. No news media crush like when Elián González was sent back to Cuba from Miami to live with his father. No armed intrusions. In a country that is quick to take
The WSJ took the road to start their piece with a pun: "It's Panda-monium..." Cute, but a piss poor headline.
Years ago Lynne Truss, a British grammarian scored a bestseller on grammar and punctuation with a book titled Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The book's title was a clever take on how the absence of a comma can alter the meaning of a sentence. Punctuation counts.
The cover of the book showed a panda climbing a ladder painting over the comma in the title. There is another panda on the ground walking away from the ladder holding a smoking handgun. Thus, a title without the comma could be descriptive of the animal's proclivity of eating bamboo shoots and having satisfied their hunger, paddling away from the site of their meal, in short leaving, to a sentence with a comma that might appear on a police report of an upright panda gunman who after downing bamboo stalks in a gastro-pub, pulls out a weapon, fires and departs.
As glaring as this missed opportunity is, the rest of the text is filled with the usual tongue-in-cheek puns.
We start with the headline of course. That sets the light-hearted tone. Not all that long ago Rupert baby wanted to do away with the A-Hed feature. I don't know why. It's what helps define the paper, like the "Pepper...and Salt" cartoon. I heard the staff and readers reacted strongly against the elimination action, and the A-Hed piece continues. There's even a book of a collection of the pieces, "Floating Above the Page." (I have it.)
D.C. IS in Panda-monium
As China Takes Back Beloved Bears
The U.S. capital grapples with the coming
departure of the giant Beltway insiders.
Up to standards. President Nixon's wife Pat commented that when the pandas arrived in Washington in the '70s that it was "pandamonium" "Beltway insiders" plays on their captivity.
The piece's writer Andrew Duehren tells us: "The breakdown in the U.S.-China relations is bamboozling many in the city." Bamboozle and the food of choice for pandas, bamboo, get it? Sure you do.
There apparently has been a nine-day "Panda-Palooza" to attract attention to their departure. Someone flew in from California to say good-bye. A ten-year-old boy from Brooklyn was there with his parents to say au revoir to what he's been watching daily on the "Panda-Cam" before he heads off to school.
"Pandas first arrived at the National Zoo during a fuzzier period in the great power relations." Andrew has captured the spirit of the A-Hed piece.
"At LiLLiES, a restaurant a few blocks away that panders to panda fans..." A double play, on a panda 's name and the verb to pander. Andrew is writing on all cylinders at this point..
"As the U.S. and China relationship has grown more tense, panda politics have also become more black and white." Andy, you're killing it now.
A congresswoman Nancy Mace (R. S.C.) has legislation to keep U,S. born panda cubs in America. The pandas are a money maker for the zoo, driving attendance and the sale of souvenirs. Plans are underway to gain replacements. They've been paying China $1 million a year to since 2000 "rent' the pandas. I'm sure the American public has not been aware of that till now.
A Twitter page photo of Andrew Duehren (@aduehren) shows a very youthful looking reporter who may not have ever heard of Elián González or Lynne Truss's book.
He's forgiven.
http://www.onofframp.blogspot.com
No comments:
Post a Comment