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CounterPunch
September
24, 2002
A Deer in the
Headlines
or
Hunting with George
by BEN TRIPP
I was ten years old in a red plaid jacket and
a blaze orange hat, it was deer season in New Hampshire, and
some goddamned fool from New York fired a .30/30 round at me
with his brand new lever-action Marlin 336. The bullet punched
a hole in a birch tree ten yards behind me. It was the first
time I ever called an adult man a stupid motherfucker, and the
last time I got away with it. I asked him, "Do I look like
a deer?" and he said, "No, but you moved, so I pulled
the trigger." George W. Bush Jr. is about to make a similar
mistake.
Looking back on the incident, I understand
what my hunter meant (this does not imply that I sympathize).
He was free from domestic concerns, stalking around with a gun
for the express purpose of killing something, totally focused
on his mission, 'blood crazy' as we called it. All day he wandered
in the snow and trees. He saw a deer, shot, missed. Saw another
deer, shot, missed. Damn things are hard to hit. He saw something
easier to shoot, and he shot at it. There was no hesitation,
no recognition that the thing in his crosshairs was a garishly
dressed juvenile biped. If he hadn't been a piss-poor shot,
my head would probably be hanging on his rec room wall, complete
with blaze orange hat.
George W. Bush Jr. is slipping into the
same trance-like state my would-be hunter experienced, prompting
the following tortuously extended analogy. Bush is avoiding
domestic concerns, for one thing. And just like my hunter, Bush
spent a long time hunting something else Osama Bin Laden-
and missed his shot. Bush believes his Daddy missed too, a while
back, and that it ended his Presidency; Junior doesn't understand
the complex issues that prompted Senior's catch-and-release during
the Gulf War, or that it was neglected domestic concerns that
finally brought Daddy down. Junior has found something else
to aim at, an easy target- the one Daddy missed! Just like my
hunter, he can't come up with a good excuse for firing the shot.
Just like my hunter, he's going to squeeze the trigger anyway.
Bush is blood crazy, and after the killing is over, when people
ask him why the war happened, he'll shrug and say, "Saddam
moved, so I pulled the trigger". Better to shoot something
than nothing at all.
But the United States isn't a lone hunter
(yes it is, but forget I said that). America needs facts to
base its military actions upon, undeniable proof that the target
has antlers.
First fact:
Saddam Hussein is a bad man. Everybody
says so. Dick "Vice President" Cheney deeply regrets
doing $73 million worth of business with him, and for Cheney
to regret doing business with anyone, the guy has to be appalling.
He regrets it so much he denies the business ever happened,
which is another kind of tunnel vision, called "prevarication".
Other dead giveaways are Saddam's dictator moustache and the
way everybody in Iraq except him is oppressed.
Second fact:
At one time, Iraq possessed biological
and nuclear weapons capabilities. We know this because we sold
him the materials. These were not for use in animal husbandry
projects, as Saddam suggested at the time, but for exterminating
Iranians, Kurds and other persons who didn't send him a card
on his birthday. All of these weapons capabilities were dismantled
and destroyed the last time we had a war with Iraq (Operation
Desert Storm) with painstaking follow-up inspections (Operation
Scott Ritter). My dentist should be so thorough, because I still
get that ache in my back molar when I eat tinfoil.
That's it! There are no more facts.
That is to say, there are lots more facts ( the largest organism
on earth is a specimen of Armillaria ostoyae, or honey
mushroom, which covers 2,200 acres of land in eastern Oregon)
but none concerning Iraq as a war-worthy threat, and it would
be a shame to kill all those Iraqis again without at least three
facts to justify doing so (a trifecta), especially as they so
obviously didn't enjoy getting slaughtered the first time. There
are plenty of conjectural reasons to attack, like if somebody
gave Saddam a nuclear weapon he would then have one, or if he
invaded Kuwait he could get a nice place on the Gulf with southern
exposure. But these are not facts, they're possibilities. Most
Americans are willing to support the war if there's a good reason
for it and no draft. So far, that reason hasn't materialized-
although bet you me they do have a tidy conscription program
all worked out, in the same locked drawer they kept the USA Patriot
Act in before 9/11. We have Iraq in our gunsights, our finger
is on the trigger, and we don't know why. Maybe that nigh-fatal
afternoon in the woods changed my heart. I know it sure changed
my underwear. But I insist on a damn good reason before we
take the shot.
If we go to war with these people, understand
our purpose is to kill them, at least the ones who don't stay
indoors and read a book or do crafts while our tanks roll past
their hovels. And if we can't convincingly identify why we're
doing it, as my hunter couldn't, golly! that would make us a
nation of murdering thugs. Just the sort of thing shooting me
would have made that hunter. Not that Iraq is the same thing
as a 10-year-old kid. I was a pain in the ass, but not as bad
as Saddam. Still, evil as he may be, he's not a threat to us--
any more than I was a threat to deer hunters. Saddam might be
a threat at some point in the future, and he might have been
a threat in the past, but these are just excuses for slaughtering
his people now. Excuses are not facts. War is a serious business,
and requires a pretty sturdy rationale if you don't want to end
up compared to Hitler by all those liberal academics of the future.
If that hunter who took a shot at me
had only been a little quicker to explain himself, he might not
have starred in an incoherent satirical essay a quarter-century
later. But all he did was shoot; he had no explanation. His
brain was off and his reflexes were on. George W. Bush is fixated
on killing Saddam Hussein with such absolute intent that he really
is just like that hunter. And God forbid Bush should squeeze
the trigger and miss Saddam Hussein. Because if he does, he'll
go after someone else. If George W. was the hunter on that snowy
day in my misspent youth, he might have missed the deer, and
he might have missed me.
But unlike my hunter, who saw the error
of his ways and went straight home, Bush will damn sure keep
shooting until somebody is dead.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter. He can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
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September
21 / 22, 2002
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