UPDATE: If I had to judge from the email I'm getting -- and I would be very sad if I did -- I'd have to say people don't seem to understand much of anything about why I wrote that post. People keep emailing me to inform me that the best way to lose weight is to eat less and get more exercise! And here's something someone wrote me about the Monday post over there (the one about Koko the talking gorilla): "You as a law professor at worst have encouraged this gorilla tit problem. At best ignored it." I'm not entirely sure what that means. I know it's a criticism of me, but it certainly made me laugh quite a lot.
AND: I had to change the link to a page in the Wayback Machine. MSNBC let the link die, so I'm going to reprint the entire thing here to assist in preserving it.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said that if a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him. But people taught a gorilla to speak and she said the very thing – if we are to believe this new lawsuit – that drunken guys say to women at Mardi Gras. If a gorilla could speak, we would understand her all too well!
Perhaps sensitivity to gorilla culture ought to have moved the women who worked with the renowned Koko to show her their nipples, but, America being what it is, they sued. Ah! Our litigious society! Should that be part of a job? Accommodating a gorilla? Make that, accommodating a celebrity gorilla! Well, there's no hope – exceedingly little hope – of convincing the gorilla that sexual harassment is wrong.
Being human, we love Wittgenstein's idea that the lion – or the gorilla -- would say something stunningly new. But the truth may be that the animal would just say "show me your t**s" – again and again. Oh, Koko! We once thought you were so profound. We believed we could make you human through language, but what have we done? Have we only reminded ourselves of our own lack of profundity?
Meanwhile, a lion seems to be roaming about in California. It's not a talking lion, and it's surely not a reading lion, but it is lurking somewhere in the vicinity of the Ronald Reagan Memorial Library.
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