A Terrible Photograph

This is Melissa Bachman. She is a professional big game hunter. She recently went to South Africa to hunt at the Maroi Conservatory. She posted this picture on her Twitter account with the caption, “An incredible day of hunting in South Africa. Stalked inside 60 yards on this beautiful male lion…what a hunt!” The photograph has gone viral, the indignation of the animal rights people has been intense, and she has since shut down her Twitter account.

For the most part, the arguments of animal rights groups always have creeped me out a little. Like all ideologues, their rhetoric seems overheated to the point of farce. The “cockroach has feelings and deserves due process” sort of claptrap makes them sound fundamentally insane, so they are easy to dismiss. I also have no use for anti-hunting zealots. If it weren’t for deer hunters in Virginia, no one could drive in the country at night without plowing into one. I understand the historic and cultural significance of hunting in rural America, especially here in the south and I have no problem with it. But, for me, there is something overwhelmingly terrible about this photograph.

The first time I ever went hunting with my Dad, I was probably 8 years old. We lived in Alabama and a bunch of men from our church had invited him to go deer hunting. I came along as an observer only, since wisely, nobody in Nicholsville, Alabama trusted me with firearms. I remember nearly freezing to death, and I also remember what I felt like when I heard the shots echoing through the trees. It startled me out of my boredom. When we all gathered around the dead buck, I remember vividly how beautiful he was, how powerful his frame. And then I saw his eyes, large, glistening and wide open. This eight year old felt like bursting into tears. It was then that I knew that I could never be a hunter.

Which brings me to this picture. Listen, I have no problem with mowing down any and all of the squirrels that plague my tomato plants all summer, and if I was being attacked by a lion with deadly intent I would not hesitate to kill. But, how on earth could this woman have peered through her scope at this magnificent beast and pulled that trigger? The male lion is perhaps the noblest creature on this planet, an awesome combination of strength, speed and beauty unmatched in the universe. He is called the King of the jungle for good reason. To kill one just for sport and a photo-op seems like an expensive and perverse kind of pleasure. My reaction to the picture was immediate and unanimous. I felt an overwhelming sadness and a sense of great loss. I suppose that makes me a pathetic softie.

Guilty as charged.

Thanksgiving With Dad

Like many families, ours has a policy of alternating holidays. Some years we celebrate Thanksgiving with Pam’s side of the family and Christmas with mine. Then, the next year it flips. This year Thanksgiving will be a Dunnevant affair. Patrick will be home; Jon will be here, all five of us together, which in and of itself, makes for a special day. But in addition to my five, there will be twenty others, and this year we will all be gathering at the smallest house in the clan.

Dad doesn’t travel well anymore. His safety and comfort dictate that Thanksgiving will have to be at his place. To accommodate twenty five people for a sit down dinner will require a herculean effort and a space utilization plan which will be the envy of NASA. There are only three usable rooms, and all three are filled with bulky furniture, ill-designed for hosting twenty five of anything, much less people. There is a porch, and a large yard, and if the weather is nice, I plan on spending a lot of time outside. If it’s pouring down rain, well…we will discover what Noah must have felt like. But, you have to understand, my Dad is worth it.

Lately, it’s been a struggle for him. Next month he will turn 89. He is increasingly unsteady, falls a lot, and has difficulty with almost every activity of daily living you can think of. On Thursday nights and some Sundays, I’ve been helping him with his shower. Each week he struggles along without complaint, ever gracious, ever thankful for every single thing we do for him.

Sometimes it’s hard to watch. Sometimes anger stirs inside of me when I see how hard his life has become. The anger always surprises me. My Dad has lived an amazing life full of great accomplishment. In the twilight of his life he is surrounded by a loving family, and a world full of friends and admirers. His great faith and gentle spirit are the stuff of legend to those who know him. And yet, when I watch him struggle with his failing body, when I watch the tedious effort it requires for him to do even the most simple task, I fight against the anger.

So, this year for Thanksgiving, twenty-five of us with cram ourselves into his tiny house because we are thankful for him. He will eat everything on his plate. His grandchildren and great grandchildren will hug him, and he will smile and laugh at the little ones. We will miss Mom, but none of us will miss her as much as Dad will. Still, there will be no complaining, no whining from my father, and it will be this amazing strength, this resignation, this acceptance of life as it is rather than how he wishes it to be, that will force me to let go of my anger.

I hope one day to become half the man that my father is.

Horrible. Just horrible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qF9lV31 

Before you watch this video, I should warn you that it is quite disturbing on quite a few levels, not the least of which is its brutality. But I urge you to watch it through to the end.

For me, this video stirs a certain rage. Perhaps it’s my since of justice, my sympathies for the defenseless victims. When I was growing up, this behavior wasn’t called a “game”, but rather a “sucker punch”, and anyone guilty of delivering one was called a coward. Today, apparently, this is a thing, roving bands of teenagers randomly picking an unsuspecting, unprepared stranger and targeting him for a blindsided attack. The kids interviewed in this video are in many ways more disturbing than the scenes of brutality. When asked what the point of it all was, they say, “for the fun of it…”

My discovery of this video comes on the heels of news that the Virginia State football team has been banned from postseason play because of a fight that broke out in a bathroom during a celebration luncheon prior to the championship matchup between Virginia State and Winston-Salem. The two teams had both had tremendous seasons, both 9-1 and playing for a spot in the NCAA Division II playoffs. Winston-Salem QB Rudy Johnson made the mistake of going to the bathroom alone. A group of six Virginia State players followed him inside and viciously beat him. The championship game was cancelled, and one of the attackers is in custody.

We are constantly lectured by our political leaders that we need to have a conversation about race in America. But, these two stories are perfect examples of why that conversation will never happen. How do you ask difficult questions about this sort of behavior without being accused of racism? How is it possible to watch this video and then listen to people excuse it with airy nonchalance and academic gibberish about root causes or institutional racism?

My mind and my heart tell me that all African-Americans don’t approve of this behavior. As a thinking, informed person, I also know that there are perhaps millions of white teenagers both capable and guilty of similar behavior. As a Christian, I know that all we like sheep have gone astray, and there is none righteous. No community of people has a monopoly on either vice or virtue. But, honestly, I watch this video and I read story after story after story of unhinged, pointless and sadistic violence that seemingly runs rampant in African American communities, and part of me thinks having a conversation about race is both pointless and hopeless. The chasm is too wide and too deep.

I watch the smiling teenagers flippantly describing their new game and I shudder. Where is the humanity? What of empathy? Is there not even the slightest scintilla of compassion for that poor teacher carrying his briefcase after a long days work, walking along minding his own business? The reaction of this band of cowards to his fall is to laugh and swagger on their way. Man’s inhumanity to man is an awful thing to watch.

At this point, I have to fight against bitterness. I must guard against creeping hatred, fight off easy and thoughtless judgment, and remember that all of us possess an inhumane impulse. But God Almighty, some days it’s hard to do.

Ron Ford. The Saga Continues.

Toronto, this is your mayor.

THIS is your mayor on crack.

It was another bad week for hissonor. As if a video of him smoking crack wasn’t bad enough, this week came revelations of excessive drinking on the job, cavorting with prostitutes, smoking pot in his office, and driving while intoxicated. When confronted with an accusation by a former female employee that he had asked her to perform oral sex on him, the mayor let fly a string of obscenities which roughly translated amounted to a declaration that he was getting plenty of oral sex at home as a happily married man. It has become clear that Ron Ford is breaking new ground in the field of high profile public breakdowns.

The problem for the good people of Toronto is that the government of that great city has no remedy for someone like Mr. Ford. Because they lack anything approximating our impeachment clause, the city government is powerless to remove him from office unless he is convicted of a crime. So, this week they began stripping him of his powers piecemeal. Ford is vowing not only to stay in office, but declared his intention to run for reelection in 2014, championing himself as the “people’s mayor.”

Back in 1998 during the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinski debacle, the President’s defenders constantly repeated the mantra that what someone does in their “private life” doesn’t have anything to do with their job. Those attacking Clinton for his dalliance with an intern were just a bunch of judgmental prudes who needed to get over their 1950’s morality. Fifteen years later, Ron Ford is seeing Clinton’s intern, and raising him a prostitute, a fifth of Canadian Mist, and two crack pipes. I guess it’s safe to say that 1950’s morality is officially dead and buried.

On a related note, a Canadian television station, the Sun News Network has announced plans to give Mayor Ford and his brother Doug a new television show called Ford Nation. My prediction is that it will get monster ratings. Must see TV.

Too Stupid For the Job?

It is becoming difficult to watch the continuing dysfunction in Washington DC. Each new day brings with it some fresh manifestation of either incompetence, ignorance or tomfoolery, or in some cases, like the President’s press conference yesterday, all three. At some point you have to start asking some hard questions, like…what the hell is wrong with our government?

This is a non-partisan question. Readers of this space know my Libertarian leanings and the low opinion I have of the Democratic Party. But, I have displayed an equal distaste for the Republican alternative. The place we find ourselves in as a nation has many fathers, so what follows is not an indictment of merely the current President and his party, but rather the entire governing class. Trust me when I say, Democrats and Republicans in Washington have much more in common with each other than either of them have with us.

As an observer of politics for the past 40 years of my life, I have seen my share of incompetence, so in a sense, the presence of bumbling idiots in government isn’t exactly a news flash. But the level of such bumbling has risen exponentially over the past 10 years or so, sort of like the much hyped, global warming caused rising of the sea levels. Only this increase is actually measurable. Any fair-minded observer who has been paying attention can’t help but wonder if anyone in politics knows what they’re doing. From Colin Powell’s UN speech offering “proof” of weapons of mass destruction, all the way to President Obama’s “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” fiasco, one is left with the creeping suspicion that the people at the highest levels of our government just aren’t that sharp. I have a theory.

In the 35 years after our Civil War, or the period from roughly 1870 through 1910, Americans turned against government. After all, it was the hot-blooded rhetoric of politics that had helped plunge the country into war in the first place. After the loss of nearly 600,000 Americans, the country was in no mood for it anymore. It was time to heal and time to make some money. Accordingly, the best and brightest began to go into business. Soon the industrial revolution gave rise to a new breed of man, the captain of industry.  Men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt rose to the top of the heep. At the same time, Americans were left with a long list of third stringers as Presidents. This was the era that gave us such notable chief executives as Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, and Grover Cleveland. These weren’t exactly intellectual heavyweights and consequently are largely forgotten by history. Since the juice of the country had flowed away from Washington, these men were known largely for doing nothing, and for a country that had barely survived a bloody civil war, “doing nothing” sounded pretty good.

What about today? Where are the best and brightest? Not in Washington DC. Any list of influential, transformative thinkers and doers begins with names like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. At the top of anyone’s list of high achieving Americans would be names like Howard Schultz, Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey, not rubes like John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Silicon Valley is populated by hordes of extremely bright and highly motivated men and women making giant technological strides, while their contemporaries in Washington are writing unworkable, 3000 page laws that nobody reads or understands.

The big difference between the lightweights of the late 19^th century and our lightweights is the fact that guys like Chester Arthur and James Garfield KNEW that they were lightweights. Our political leaders today from both Parties all think they are geniuses, and it is this hubris that is driving the country over a cliff. From perhaps the most unaccomplished, inexperienced, thinnest credentialed President in history all the way down to a plucky Alaskan governor thought smart and worthy enough to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency by a major American political party, the overwhelming conclusion that must be drawn is that our representatives just aren’t smart enough for the job.

Now, if only they knew that.

What does a 142 million dollar painting look like?

I love art. Beautiful paintings, sculptures, great books, and fine music add immeasurably to life. Sometimes, just being in the presence of something artistic makes the world seem less dangerous somehow. Art has the power to transform us, to reorient our perspective. So, I love art. Yet, sometimes, I don’t get art.

 Yesterday a painting by Francis Bacon sold at auction for $142,000,000. No, this was not a sketch found in an attic belonging to the great English philosopher. This was a three part painting by a dead Irish artist known primarily for being openly and proudly gay at a time when most gay people were neither. The painting was in three frames and depicted a man sitting in what looks like some sort of wired cubicle at various angles. The man’s features are blurred and abstract. It turns out that the subject of the painting was Lucian Freud, a famous and influential painter in his own right, with whom Mr. Bacon had an ongoing relationship. These details are irrelevant. What boggles my mind is the price tag that this particular painting brought. One hundred and forty two million dollars is a lot of money. You could buy 300 Lamborghinis with that kind of money. You could sponsor 350,000 starving South American kids for a year with that kind of money. But some anonymous person thought to spend 142 million on this instead:

 

Now, don’t misunderstand me here. My beef isn’t with the price itself. The proper price for anything is simply what someone is willing to pay, so in this case, since someone was willing to fork it over, this painting was, in fact, worth 142 million. My problem is with the painting itself. This is the part of art that I don’t get. I mean, look at it, just stare at the thing for a few minutes. My eyes see a blurry, disjointed sketch set against a backdrop of nothing. The subject’s face looks like paint that got smeared by a raindrop. But there are a thousand art critics who will extol its brilliance from the rooftops. It’s a bit like the concert I attended this past weekend. The music was divinely performed and beautiful beyond description, except for the headline piece, a brooding discordant thing which featured intentionally sharp, grating chords tied together in a somber funeral dirge pace. My son rolled his eyes at me when I shared this opinion, embarrassed by my Philistine sensitivities. Guilty as charged, I suppose. Life is already full enough of discord and disharmony, why rip it out of music too?

I’m told that Mr. Bacon’s painting fetched the highest price for a painting in history. That’s great news for the art business, but I’m not sure what it says about art. But, what do I know?  

My Words Come Back to Haunt Me

This past weekend I attended a wedding shower for a young couple. After dinner we were to split up into groups of men and women to dispense advice to the bride and groom. When it was my turn, the gist of my comments were about how important it is to listen to your wife. This morning, with clear algorithmic malice, my Facebook feed offered the following piece of evidence highlighting my hypocrisy....

Why Men Don’t Listen to Their Wives—November 12, 2013

Last Friday, I informed my wife that I would be getting the leaves up in the yard. Henrico County picks up leaves in my neighborhood only twice this fall, and one of those days would be the following Monday. Since we would be in New Jersey for the weekend, it had to be done on Friday. Our conversation went something like this:

Pam: Wait, you’re going to bag up the leaves on the day before you have to drive 5 hours to New Jersey??

Me: ..er, well…yeah.

Pam: With that shoulder? The last thing you need is to screw up your shoulder or throw out your back right before making that kind of drive!

Pam and I have had variations on this conversation at least a hundred times over the nearly thirty years of our marriage. I make a simple declaration of my intentions to do A or B. Pam replies with a couple of paragraph-long warnings about all of the horrible things that might happen because I plan on doing A or B. I proceed to do A or B anyway. Many times, she is proven right by events. But it doesn’t matter, because although I listen to my wife, I often choose not to hear her. Why is this? I have a theory.

All of my life, I have been accused of doing the sorts of things that women seem to think are dangerous. When I was a kid, I was the tree climber, the bull chaser (a story for another time), and the kid who would throw rocks at hornet’s nests in the tops of trees. So, the first influential woman in my life, my mother, would be the one yelling things like, “Douglas, you better put your old shoes on before you walk through that trash fire,” or “Don’t shoot that BB gun in the house,” and “If you fall off that roof and break your leg, don’t come running to me!”  Then, as I became a teenager, it would be various girlfriends who would say, “Doug, are you sure that recruiting the football team to lift Mr. Jefferson’s MG on top of the breezeway roof is such a good idea?” Now, as a grown man, it’s mostly Pam looking incredulously at me as I’m walking out of the door to play golf. “You’re going to play golf today, the hottest day of the year, seriously? 100 degrees in the shade today and you decide to play golf?”

What all of them are essentially saying is, “Be careful. You might hurt yourself.” And, that is why I don’t listen. The possibility that I might hurt myself is half the fun of the thing. This is what women don’t understand. Asking a man to be careful might seem like prudent advice, but to a man it sounds like, “don’t have any fun.” If men throughout history listened to this type of womanly advice, we would all still be living in mud huts, eating berries and roots.

The fact that Pam has, more often than not, been prescient in her warnings isn’t the issue. The reliability of our wives’ instincts are not the point. The reason men don’t listen is because, we don’t want to be reminded about the calendar. We don’t want to be reminded that we aren’t twenty-two anymore. We are fully aware that back then a badly turned ankle meant Bayer aspirin and a bag of ice, while today it means x-rays, crutches, pain-killers and three weeks of rehab. We know all of that.

But to acknowledge it would mean admitting that we aren’t real men anymore. We would rather take the risk, or better yet, deny there even is any risk. Doing so helps us to hang on to our sense of worth, our dignity, and the last vestiges of our self respect.

So, we look at our wives as they warn us about the latest harebrained scheme we have cooked up, and we nod in agreement. All the while, we hear nothing, just like the parents in Peanuts television specials, “Wa, wawa, wawa, wa.” We would rather be daring than careful. Besides, if a leisure activity does not carry with it at least the possibility of putting ones eye out, is it really worth doing in the first place?