CSotD: One thing they aren’t is “nimrods”
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Today's Bizarro comes about week after I had one of those visits to the doctor where you have to take something and then sit around waiting for it to kick in, during which time I read a copy of "Field and Stream," which I hadn't read since my days as a kid in the barbershop.
I've said many times that the people I grew up with were, for the most part, both responsible gun owners and ethical hunters, and I know that's hard for a lot of people to understand if they haven't grown up in that milieu, but even I was surprised at how little in the magazine was about the actual taking of game, as opposed to articles on animal behavior and environmental matters.
It reminded me that the crucial friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell began when Grinnell was editing F&S and wrote a critique of Roosevelt's hunting book that brought an angry TR into his office.
Once Grinnell pointed out the errors, Roosevelt softened and the pair became critical allies in the new conservation movement that led to wildlife preserves and National Parks and, ultimately, to the public lands currently under attack by Congress in Washington and by Y'All Qaeda in Oregon.
Two major issues Roosevelt and Grinnell dealt with were commercial hunting, particularly of bison, and privatization of land, which they feared would turn outdoor sports including hunting and fishing into the exclusive provence of the elite. (Note, by the way, that, in those days, "camping" included living off the land. You would bring bacon, but having to rely on it was a failure.)
"Field and Stream" continues to be a voice of conservation, and what connected me to today's Bizarro was an article by the host of a popular hunting show, who said that, if all people watched his program for was to see him shoot deer, he'd consider it a waste; his purpose was to make people aware of the value and importance of public land, and to encourage them to get out into nature.
And, he went on, he was adamant about the critical importance of resisting the privatizers who want to sell off that land for exploitation, which, you may recall, was the topic of a David Horsey cartoon featured here just a few days ago, and is at the heart of the befuddled doofuses in Oregon who may find that they aren't making as many friends as they think they are.
I can't find the article now because a search for "Field and Stream" and "public land" turns up a haystack of articles in which the magazine champions keeping the land in public hands and away from the exploitation against which Roosevelt and Grinnell and others fought a century ago.
One of the things that did turn up in that search, however, was a scathing report on the privatization movement by a hunting organization in Missoula, a mere (for that part of the country) 475 miles from the standoff.
And, if you think that page suggests a lack of sympathy with privatization, you should check out the rest. It's quite well done, coming from a sector most city people would assume were diehard gun-totin' rightwingers.
So part of my laugh this morning was over the cartoon itself: I've been on that fishing trip. (Though it's usually on purpose: If you want to actually catch something, it's a little more active, if not action-packed.)
But a second laugh was because, unless he's changed in recent years, Bizarro's Dan Piraro is vegan and a bit militant on the topic. However, while I wouldn't expect him to like a show on fishing, he may have inadvertantly made a fish-friendly point here.
Environmental politics makes strange streambed fellows.
So it's funny to think of a TV show where you just watch a bobber, but check out this view of, and from, the folks who do the more active form of that sort of thing, and who would just as soon not see the frackers and miners take over their streams, or let the rich folks put up "No Trespassing" signs:
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