A Shot in the Dark Side

This week it's a good thing to be a late-night gag writer, like my friend Wayne, who's been penning jokes for the Tonight Show for two decades. After most weekends there's not a lot of material to mine, with Sundays being slow news days. But today there's a plethora of riches.

The Olympics, being a widely-viewed event, always provides risible matter, and after three days there's a running--or should I say stumbling--theme, from the overproduced yet underwhelming Opening Ceremonies to the flopping of several American favorites. As beautifully colorful as the ceremonies were on Friday night, the event did not begin for 45 minutes (an unforgiveable delay, seeing as the program was prerecorded). As we waited we were treated to shots of Bode Miller on practice ski runs and at home, pontificating dimly about nothing, fairly guaranteeing that the overhype would lead to an underperformance, which it did. Then the show began, a clumsy affair with Italians gamely trying to emulate the clever marching bands from Big Ten schools as they formed a ski jumper in flight. With no commentary from the announcers and dreadful execution, it took well into the leap for us viewers to decipher what they wre trying to portray. Then, after a weird cavalcade of dancing cows and Alpine grandmothers, and the tolerable march of the athletes, the event concluded with a performance by Luciano Pavorotti looking impossibly awful, hair and beard blackened unnaturally, and his face stiff and tightened, like a cadaver badly prepped for an open casket.

Then the American favorites started falling by the wayside, some literally, like Ohno, who tripped over a Chinese skate (clumsy Apolo!); some cosmically, like Michelle Kwan, who pulled a groin muscle (which is even worse for a skater as it is for a ballplayer), and called it quits. Bode Miller, for all his bravado, finished fifth in the Downhill (the worse for Nike), and another American female skiier fell so calamitously she had to be hospitalized. On the positive side, I did learn what a slider on the skeleton team was (skeleton being a sort of mini-luge).

Then moving from the sporting world, or segueing gracefully into political sports, there's the Republican self-immolation show. Last Friday saw a slew of recriminations from Heckuva Job Brownie and Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff over FEMA and Federal ineptitude concerning the Katrina response. And of course there's the interesting discrepancy between President Bush's claim to have never met uber-Lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Abramoff's insistence that they confabed a dozen times, including at three Hanukkah parties. I guess Bushie was spending all his time spinning the dresden, or is it the dryden? Or the dirndl? But when the Reps got tired of shooting themselves in the foot, they started shooting their friends in the face. That's right, Vice President Cheney, taking his cue apparently from his idol Aaron Burr, put some buckshot into his hunting partner on Saturday. Apparently the victim "got in the way," while Dick was trying to kill some innocent wildlife.

This is so fucked in so many ways it makes my head swirl. It does seem fittingly appalling that Cheney, he of "The Dark Side," who abjured military service unless other people's children had to go get killed, would finally get his chance to pull a trigger at a human target. Now I largely disapprove of hunting unless it is actually for food, which at least is a biological imperative one can justify, as opposed to killing for fun. There is a certain acceptable irony, then, in a hunter getting peppered with the same buckshot that he so generously sprays at unsuspecting fowl.
It would have been so much more satisfying if Cheney had been the victim, though, rather than the perpetrator. But Karma does not always work in exact ways, "My Name Is Earl" notwithstanding.

That the accident also illustrates the dangers and foolishness of sport hunting is a by-product of this incident, and something the NRA and its toadies in Congress will happily sweep under the rug. Nor will it help gun control advocates any more than the recent post office shootings or Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine." Pro-and-con attitudes are firmly embedded there. But as grist for the Daily Show and the Tonight Show and the editorial cartoonists, searching desperately for ways to sidestep the Muhammad cartoon storm, this is a godsend.