Have you ever woken up one morning, looked around and thought to yourself, "I don't know where I am or when I am"? Of course, the previous question is predicated on the premise that one has not spent too much time with Jack Daniels or Buddy Weiser the previous night.
Your faithful correspondent has found himself waking up in the state described above (not the hangover state, but the cold sober falling asleep and awakening) more and more these days.
Let us take, for instance the latest Twitter, Facebook and media outrage de jour: the bad hunter dentist and the lion Cecil. From what yours has read, the dentist was a bad hunter because 1.) with his bow and arrow he was not able to kill off the lion and had to shoot the thing. And 2.) because, while he was on "safari" he really had to have the lion basically chased into his range instead of going into the lion's territory. He was, in a sense, hunting in Africa at a place, as illegal as it may have been, that was pretty much similar to places in the U.S. where deer are raised and penned in fenced off area and then are "hunted" by from lairs set up by the owners of the property. The "hunters" are not so much hunting as they are target shooting.
Be it known that yours has never been a hunter. The only animal he ever killed, to his knowledge, was an English sparrow off a telephone line with a BB gun. He felt bad for that for several days and went back to shooting green army men figurines. But this writer has never been against hunting of animals. The late Baron, when a boy and young man, because of financial circumstances, was forced to hunt for food for his family; squirrel, quail, possum, deer and rabbit. He was proud of his marksmanship and his skill. During World War Two his specialty was hunting and fighting men. After the War he'd had enough of hunting and put his rifle away to be a self protection device. When your faithful correspondent, after hearing many tales of the Baron's prowess as a Nimrod, asked the Baron, "Why don't you hunt anymore?" he replied, "I got tired of killing things. I got a soft heart after the War." But he never was against hunting.
This writer remembers when on a Saturday or Sunday night on broadcast television (before cable television) that the Nibs would watch "adventure" programs. Some of the programs would feature travels to then exotic lands like China, Tibet, India and Polynesia, as well as Iceland and Malta. Others featured hunting and fishing. It was normal to watch television on a weekend and see a man hunt a lion, a leopard, a wolf, and elephant or a rhino (this writer could never understand hunting a rhino because rhinos, while looking fierce, are actually pretty harmless. Hippos kill more people than lions and/or leopards annually, and no one really hunts hippos, though they should to save human life). It was just part of life. Hunting was just something did and it was accepted.
One read accounts of Theodore Roosevelt's safari in Africa and saw photographs of TR posing with his kill. One read Hemingway's hunting stories. It was no big deal. TR was the manly president who was also a conservationist. Hemingway was the manly writer and was very popular during his time and for many years afterwards. Fitzgerald, compared to Hemingway, looked like a courtier of Louis XIV; a city boy in a nation of country boys.
Now the city boys have taken over. In fact, the sissy boys have, in a sense, have taken over. The media and much of the loud Internet really don't understand hunting culture. Consider the fact that if one went to a news stand and looked at the magazine rack among the magazines directed to the male audience would be magazines such as Sports Afield, Field and Stream, Hunting and Deer Hunting. Now one would be hard pressed to find these magazines on the news stand because they've been replaced by "lad's mags", workout magazines and "adventure" magazine such as "Outside" (which seems to be eco-friendly adventures).
Does this writer advocate the senseless slaughter of wild animals for fun or proving one is a man? Of course not. Neither did the 19th century writer H. Rider Haggard who wrote, among other novels, King Solomon's Mines. In the novel the narrator describes the killing of many elephants for their ivory. After the description he states, "We got sick of the killing" despite the fact that ivory was money and the protagonist just throws down his rifle and walks away while the native bearers strip the elephants of their ivory.
What we have in this whole Cecil the Lion thing versus the Evil Dentist is a change in the culture; a change in the American culture. Now anything that is not human that has hair or fur or feathers are sacrosanct and every wild animal is Bambi and every man with a gun or bow and arrow is evil. Davy Crockett killed a bear with a knife and was a hero back in the day. Now guy manages to kill a lion is suddenly the Antichrist.
If most people pitching a bitch about the dentist/bad hunter saw how their beef, pork and chicken were processed they'd gag, at the least. But they don't and they prefer it that way because they want to be able to eat a nice sirloin or pork tenderloin while thinking that a bad shot dentist is a creep because he wanted a trophy head of a lion while they're chowing down on Ol' Bossy or Babe because they're hungry for some meat.
And the whole controversy is idiocy simply because those making the most noise about a guy killing a lion haven't said a word about ISIS killing Christians and Yezidhis for no other reason than because those people are not Muslims. The complaining class complain about the dentist paying $50,000 to kill a lion, but they don't complain about Christian and Yezidhi girls and women being sold to ISIS fighters for as little as $20.00. To the liberal complaining crowd the life of one horny lion is more important than the lives of people who are just trying to live their lives peacefully
In other words, the life of one old lion is more important than the killings and rapes of many Christians, Yezidhis and innocent Muslims according to the media and the Internet.
Ain't life grand?
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