The monsters we deserve
Recently, a video clip has been circulating the web that purportedly shows a rabbit born earless due to the radiation at Fukushima. BoingBoing has a convincing take-down of the claims of the video: earless rabbits are a fairly common mutation, mother rabbits sometimes chew off their ears of their young due to stress, and no one even knows where the video was filmed.
More interesting than the video is the fact that we want to it to be real. Radioactivity should have immediate, visible consequences. Bodily harm should be made manifest, and any disturbances in the natural order need to be seen to be believed. After the nuclear bomb explodes, we all head to the ocean to watch Godzilla pop out of the waves.
The earless rabbit is an example of the pathetic fallacy, a form of personification that attributes human sentiment, morality, or motives to random natural occurrences. Nature, is this case, holds a mirror up to human actions. The rain cries with you, the sun shines when you smile. While the bunny is cute, other monsters of technology are usually bloodthirsty, unpredictable and nearly indestructible.
On our need for immediate tangible feedback, a subset of our paradoxical need for reality to match our constructed (read: not real) narratives of it.
