A Hunting Lesson

Ah, Camille! I’ve been a sort of fan of Camille Paglia for awhile now (see Kansas City Star review), but I must say — diplomatically — that her thought processes often mystify me.

From her Salon column (answering letters, the easiest cheat in journalism, as I can attest to as a columnist for several magazines and newspapers over the years):

Thank you very much for this important clarification. When Wyoming joined the Union in 1890, it was allowed to keep women’s suffrage. As late as 1915, the state legislatures of Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey (in the supposedly more cultured Northeast) rejected women’s right to vote. But the Western states had been far more open-minded. Washington state granted women’s suffrage in 1910, California in 1911, Montana and Nevada in 1914. Frontier men obviously found it easier to accept feisty frontier women as their equals! [emphasis added]

Yeah, except that Wyoming wasn’t “allowed” to keep women’s suffrage:

Congress asked them to strip it out of the proposed state constitution.

Wyoming said: No suffrage, no statehood.

Congress backed down.

Wyoming wasn’t “allowed,” and it is a fundamental distortion to frame it this way. And, yes, Paglia is right about Western states, but I’ve dealt with this at length elsewhere ["The Wyoming Women You DIDN'T See," 10 March 2008 and "The Feminist Mistake" 6 June 2008, among others.] And, a little less breathy Helen Gurley Brownesque prose would be a relief, Camille.

But here is her bizarre framing, which I understand the basis of, but reject her take on it:

Yes, both Todd and Sarah Palin, whom most people in the U.S. and abroad had never even heard of until six weeks ago, have emerged as powerful new symbols of a revived contemporary feminism. That the macho Todd, with his champion athleticism and working-class cred, can so amiably cradle babies and care for children is a huge step forward in American sexual symbolism.

[...]And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

First, let’s filter out the ambient noise: Paglia mentions that she’s Eye-talian about 50,000 times in her four-page column. Allow me a non-politically keereckt joke of my own coinage.

Q: What is the difference between Blacks, Jews, Gays and Dyslexics?

A: A Black doesn’t make it a point to tell you they’re Black in the first three minutes you’ve met them.

Which sort of explains the inherently racist insanity of Paglia’s Native American statements. Character doesn’t automatically proceed from ethnicity, else all Blacks would tap dance, and eat watermelon, and all Jews would have hooked noses and obsess about money, as would all Native American women “billow” uh, “extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness.”

How an educated person could fall into such egregious over-generalizations is beyond me. Hasn’t she been paying ANY attention over the last, say HALF CENTURY?

As for Todd Palin, well, my dad was decades ahead of him, and I grew up with that model. Which brings us to our “new model.”

My dad had a Korean War surplus 30.06 (“thirty aught six”) hunting rifle. It was bolt action and held six rounds — five in the clip and one in the breech. If you looked closely at the trigger plate, you noticed that it didn’t correctly cover the rectangular hole routed into the stock. Clearly there had used to have been a different plate attached that docked square, preloaded ammo clips. The surplus house or somebody salong the line had de-militarized (“peacified”?) it into a “hunting” rifle.

Dad never got around to putting a cushioning pad on the butt of the stock, and he never bought a scope.

Five years, five shots, five deer.

Being a typical red-bloooded American boy, I asked him during the third year why we didn’t have any ‘trophy’ heads.

It was natural, since so many of my friends’ fathers had hunting trophies prominently displayed in their homes. It WAS Wyoming, after. A few even had stuffed Jackalopes — invented by Douglas Herrick in Douglas, Wyoming, and stolen by yuppies from out of state for their stupid yuppie stores in New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Utah, etc. etc. etc. (The current Wikipedia page is a perfect example of the theft — until I edit the page. Herrick died in 2003).

Across the street from LaBonte park, where we played little league baseball, there was an unwired telephone pole covered with antlers from bottom to top and a sign, “Taxidermy.” Our cub scout den once were given a tour through it, and we were shown just how you make a Jackalope trophy.

So, naturally, I asked: “Why don’t we have any trophies, dad?”

“Spoils the meat” he said, pointing out that he invariably ruined the “trophy” with a head shot.

He was the sort of man who knew how to wait for his shot, and didn’t need a dead animal on his wall to show what an ‘outdoorsman’ he was. He was a Forest Service Engineer and spent his summers in the woods. And, while he was, obviously, a great hunter, he hated killing unless it was absolutely necessary. (I cannot ever see the scene in “To Kill A Mockingbird” where Atticus Finch shoots the rabid dog without thinking of my father — the ethos is the same.)

They were starving college students with two pre-school boys, and needed the meat. They scraped together enough for a locker-style freezer, and we watched it fill in the fall and empty out through the winter and into the summer.

And the minute that he could afford to buy meat, he never hunted again.

We asked him why he didn’t enter Wyoming’s famous One Shot Antelope Hunt*. He looked at my brother and I with an expression of what I’d call mild shock or nausea. “What if I only wound the animal?” my dad asked. “You’ve got a responsibility to finish it off. You can’t just let it die in pain.” But what I really came to understand was that the idea of a “competition” to kill those magnificent animals nauseated him: it was the antithesis of everything that he believed in as a hunter.

[* According to Christian Berg in his Lehigh Valley Wild blog:

The One Shot Hunt started in 1940 as a duel between Wyoming and Colorado. The event held in Lander has since grown into a premierevent that attracts hunters worldwide. Past participants include Hollywood cowboy Roy Rogers and Air Force Gen. Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to break the sound barrier.

Each member of the three-person hunting team is allowed one shot to kill an antelope. The team that kills the most antelope in the shortest time wins.]

The last year he hunted, he and his friend Earl brought us along, my mother, my brother and I. We borrowed an Airstream trailer from a friend, and I don’t know what he said when he returned it, but it must have been a little awkward.

There were four bullet holes in that silver bullet trailer.

I was there when they were added to the interior decor.

There was a crack, and my mother realized what it was. “ON THE FLOOR!” she yelled. (Not screamed, although she was not what you’d call calm.) A few seconds later, the second round tore through the trailer. Several minutes later, we finally emerged.

No trace of the “sportsmen” was ever found.

And, as I was reminded a couple weeks ago, I live in a West where dumbasses with guns routinely shoot deer SIGNS. “Sportsmen” who weren’t ever taught what I was taught: A gun is death. So, don’t ever pick up a gun if death isn’t on the menu, and never forget, while you’re handing a gun, that it’s about DEATH.

The same kind of moron who shoots deer signs is undoubtedly the kind of moron who put two 30.06 rounds through a silver Airstream trailer with a mother and two boys inside. (I will never find out who that was, but if I could, I would explain their gun handling to them with the butt-end of their rifle.)

The West is filled with dangerous, phony “sportsmen.” And “sportswomen.”

Unlike New Yorker Paglia, I am not impressed with Sarah Palin as a “sportswoman.” Just shooting things, and even target-shooting things does not make you a hunter in any ethical or spiritual sense. As all those deer signs with bullet holes attest, ofttimes it just marks you as an asshole.

We have this long debate about “hunters” and “sportsmen” that is typically black/white, but that’s a con. There are very few actual HUNTERS in the West. Mostly, in my experience, they’re “sportsmen” like Ted Nugent, albeit a little more restrained, and less orgasmic when describing the spiritual “rush” they felt when they pointlessly murdered some poor animal even though they didn’t need the food.

Killing anything is an ugly business, and a real hunter knows that. In the cathedral that is the forest — my father’s only true religion — senseless killing and destruction are damning profanities.

The secret of my dad’s success was that he would always stalk and wait and wait until he had the perfect shot. Then, with just that gunsight, he’d take a perfect head shot, and we had meat for the winter.

Buffalo were nearly extinct at that time

In second grade, a local Laramie woman treated the skin, and made me a winter coat. So, yeah, I know what it’s like to wear a deerskin coat, and eat venison all through the cold Wyoming winters. And endless sticks of “summer sausage” that a local meat processing plant made of the remains we couldn’t dress and freeze. The garage used to have the most amazing, awful ‘gamy” smell, because before we dressed the animal, the carcass would hang from the rafters. That was normal. His mother, after his father had died when my dad was 17, made her living as the local butcher in the IGA store.

And there was a “frontier” ethos there that isn’t much acknowledged, of which “sport” hunting isn’t looked at with much in the way of respect. “Sport” hunters were the kind of assholes who put those bullet holes in that trailer that I was IN when they decided to shoot anything that moved.

Sport hunters were the sorts who spoiled the meat so they could put the head of their “trophy” on the wall.

You understand?

When killing was necessary to eat, killing was compassionate and efficient, and there was no squeamishness there. Every part of the animal was used.

When killing wasn’t necessary, there was no killing. And no respect for those who killed for “sport.” Now, we were too polite to mention it, but I was raised not to respect that phony “sportsman” bullshit, and I fear that our frontier ethos is dying out everywhere. Not that it was ever widespread.

But my dad was taught to hunt by his grandfather, who had come West as a buffalo hunter for the railroad (he told his grandson that he’d taught a young Buffalo Bill how to shoot buffalo, but I have no way of determining the credibility of the statement; certainly it’s possible), and the internal evidence suggests that all that pointless killing left a deep mark on him, which he passed on to my dad.

So, I probably have quite a different take on the Palins’ “Frontier” ethos than someone raised by New York Italians  — as Paglia reminds us fifteen to thirty thousand times while she answers her mail (SEE JOKE, above).

As someone whose first seven years were spent among Italian-American immigrants (I never met an elderly person who spoke English until we moved from Endicott to rural Oxford, New York, when I was in first grade) …

When they first married, my mother worked the four to eleven shift in the Emergency Room at the hospital, so dad was stuck with feeding, bathing and bedding us. At first, the only thing he knew how to cook was hamburger gravy, and our despairing moan of HAMburger GRA-vy! became a catch-phrase ever after. But he learned to make kickass spaghetti and chili (he and I were Tabasco Sauce® addicts), and when our “second” family was born, starting when I was eleven, we all changed diapers, heated formula and baby food, cleaned up baby barf and learned all the other necessary maternal arts.

And dad taught us — in that hyper-macho world of Wyoming — that a ‘real man’ was strong enough not to give a shit what phony macho-males thought about our doing “female” work. (He was a hell of a gardener, too, having grown up on a Kansas farm. That same deep appreciation of life infused his dealings with plants as well. Mom complained that he never brought her flowers, never understanding that it was impossible for him to understand how killing those beautiful plants was an act of love. )

So, I understand Todd Palin, in that sense.

When I got the contract for Christina’s Craving, I was Mr. Mom, getting up at 6 AM to work on the manuscript until Bryan woke up — like clockwork at 9 AM, when I would change him, feed him, clothe him, and do the domestic thing until he took his nap at about 2 PM, and I’d work for awhile on the book until he woke up, at which point, I’d clean and start getting dinner ready.

Unlike my dad, I learned how to cook, by the simple expedient of getting a job in the kitchen of The Compound restaurant in Santa Fe, a “Five Star” and “Esquire” restaurant, and they taught me well. (Still the best minimum wage job I’ve ever had). I mostly cooked Chinese when my son was in diapers, although I did a mean corned beef and cabbage in my pressure cooker. (Do they even exist anymore? I lost mine in the divorce and have not been able to get one ever after.)

And, for some reason, no one ever accused ME of lacking in manliness.

But that was a different age. I knew a lot of guys who were full partners in the raising of the kids, without having given up their careers or masculinity. That was the early 1980s.

So you can imagine my surprise that Camille Paglia has suddenly discovered this, and that it seems like some shocking new phase of “feminism.”

It’s been happening out West for decades, Camille. In my case, for generations.

But I’m not at all convinced that these aren’t “sportsmen” — these moose slaughterers, these whirly-bird wolf warriors. In my experience, real hunters don’t bray about their hunting. Which is why Ted Nugent is such an obscene parody of an “outdoorsman,” and why it’s so depressing that I live in a nation of dumbasses who think THAT’s the way you do it.

My father’s grandfather, the buffalo hunter, would undoubtedly disagree, but then, he became a marshal of Ellsworth, Kansas, as its wild days were dying down, and from which he retired, — unshot and unscathed — in his golden years, and was, by all accounts, a quiet man. A real Westerner, not a Sears Westerner.*

(* ‘Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?’ — F. Zappa)

I’m not willing to hold them up as some newfangled model of male/female relations.

And, while I am not surprised at Paglia’s dumbass stereotypes about Native Americans — or, as Russell Means eloquently makes the case for, American Indians — because I have known Indians all my life, from Arapahoe and Blackfoot in Wyoming to the Pueblo Indians and Navajo in New Mexico, to Oklahoma Kiowa and Commanche, Arizona Hopi and Apache, etc. etc. etc.

And, while I DO KNOW that I live in a country where most Americans have never MET an American Indian, let alone known any as friends, I am still appalled that Paglia would be so clueless as to singularly stereotype one gender of the Five Hundred Nations — even if it’s a “flattering” stereotype.

Worse, it’s based on having some fraction of Indian blood.*

[* You might be interested in what the American Indian take on this is. There's an old Western joke. The "dude" comes up and says "I'm part Indian, you know." "Really?" comes the reply. "Cherokee, right?" The "dude" invariably says, "Yes! How did you know?" The reply: "Oh, you LOOK like a Cherokee!" but usually the laughter is reserved for the secret punch line: EVERYBODY in America claims to be part Cherokee. A very few are. The rest are just self-mythologizing. It's either endemic or pandemic, according to your tolerance for harmless bullshit.]

A colloquially and archaically Eastern view of the West, sad to say.

But, trust me, this whole fantasy about the Palins as “frontier” society is just that — a fantasy. An Eastern “dude” fantasy as creepily fake as Ned Buntline’s old dime novels.

So, what MEANING can we draw from Paglia’s hailin’ of Palin as the New Feminist Saint?

Well, mostly that Camille Paglia’s notion of “feminism” is almost entirely defined as reactionary. Look: I’ve had my beefs with the institutionalized sexism of Gloria Steinem, e.g. “The Sick Transit of Gloria.” Then again, so has just about every feminist who’s ever come down the line. That’s not important.

But I don’t define myself in negation to her stance: Some of it I agree with, and say so publicly. Some of her stance, I think, is what comes out of the south end of a north-bound horse — which I say so publicly as well. But I don’t veer off into crazy fantasies about lifestyles I know nothing about in my rabid desire to attack the “Feminist Establishment.”

And I don’t kill unless it’s to feed my family, and is the only way to do so.

We saw literally hundreds of antelope when we were back in Wyoming a couple weeks ago.

And I never once had the slightest desire to shoot one.

I like ‘em just the way they are. And, right now, I don’t need the meat.

My dad taught me that, along with how to change diapers and make kickass chili.

Courage.

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