Actually, some folks who got the news, the particularly enlightened and civilized ones, are glad they won’t have to know that Kenneth Lay is going through these agonies. They may even reflect that if they’d known him personally, they would have known a wonderful father, husband and friend. Isn’t that what people always say about people like Ken Lay? And shouldn’t people always try to think the best of everyone?

Yes, they should, but so many people may well have responded to the news of Lay’s untimely death by feeling cheated, by saying that death wasn’t good enough for him, by sensing a frustrated craving for revenge burning in their backbrains like a fire in a tire dump.

Is it possible that a micron below the surface of our liberal and enlightened beliefs lurks savagery? Was the French Enlightenment wrong about our essential goodness, and were the medieval churchmen right about our innate depravity?

We should consider these things in days to come, so that Ken Lay may not have died in vain.

Meanwhile, for those who are baffled by the strange and vicious outrage that greeted news of Lay’s passing, at least among some people, there is a story, an old story, a very old joke in fact, that seeks to explain it.

It gets told with many variations, of which the following is one:

Three anthropologists are taken captive by a cruel and remote tribe.

Their chief comes to their hut and informs the anthropologists that they have a choice: death or chi-chi.

... contd.