There they go again. Louisiana shortchanged again! Louisiana once again vilified by Beltway pecksniffs. “If Louisiana is the Sportsman’s Paradise as its license plates boasts,” writes The Fund For Animal in their recent Cavalcade of Cruelty, “it’s also an animal’s hell.”
Yes folks, an “animal’s hell.” You see, employing the Fund For Animals’ logic, if us bloodthirsty, beer-crazed Cajuns don’t blast Bambi and Thumper and Donald and convert them to our Jambalaya, Gumbo, and Sauce Piquante, they’d live happily ever after like in a Disney cartoon.
The Fund For Animals (a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy) compile an annual survey called “Body Count” where they rate states in a “Cavalcade of Cruelty” based on the number of animals assassinated by hunters, as reported by wildlife agencies. And this year: “Louisiana LEADS ALL THE STATES in the Outdoor Cavalcade Of Cruelty with 7,376,541 animals killed by hunters.”
At last! We’re number one in SOMETHING! And the honor shines more brightly when we consider the state’s puny population. But I said we were shortchanged. Here’s why: the 7,376,541 number should be higher – way higher.
Neighboring Mississippi, a sorry eleventh in the Cavalcade with 4,667,091 animals wacked-out by its hunters, is actually getting credit for Cajun blood-lust. Yes, it sells 25,000 non-resident licenses a year to Louisiana hunters. And we mow-em-down mercilessly while over in the Magnolia state. So we want the credit for that slaughter too!
Ditto in Alabama, a shameful twelfth in the Cavalcade with 3,800,269 animals “terminated with extreme prejudice” by its hunters. Thousands of Louisianians hunt in Alabama. So probably a quarter of their carnage is ours!
And our Texan neighbors? Well, Texas, with three times our population, is a sorry fourth. Those big-hatted boot-scooters massacred a mere 5,737,584 animals. For shame. For shame, my Texan friends. Let’s get with the program. I know you guys CAN DO IT! Break out those motivational videos you always send your co-workers over here. Hire one of those motivational speakers with the pompadour and shiny suit you always bring to sales meetings to annoy and sedate us. You CAN do it! Next year I wanna see you guys “AT THE TOP!” A free week-end for the winner and his (her) spouse in New Orleans! Go For it!
And again, that Texas figure includes the carnage by Louisianians when we go over there, before we cross into Boys Town – oops! Never mind. Anyway, we want the credit.
So listen up, Fund For Animals: Next year try to get the figures right. Next year we in Louisiana wanna be so far up that “Cavalcade Of Cruelty” nobody will even THINK of touching us. We want the competition to look down the barrel of a lead like the Saints in the third quarter. Okay? But it’s nice to see that most of Dixie made it into “The Dirty Dozen,” what the Fund calls the top twelve in the Cavalcade.
And speaking of “profiling.” Louisiana hunters in these neighboring states have been putting up with it for years. The cops in New York and Philly have nothing on the game wardens in Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. The latter see a Louisiana license plate or hear a Cajun accent and that’s it. They’re pulling us over. Always hassling us because the deer we shoot never have any of those “antler” things on their heads. Picky, picky, picky. All these damn details.
Can’t eat antlers. We’ve tried. And you don’t see us whining like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton about how this profiling constitutes ” discrimination” and a “violation of our rights” and all that claptrap. Hell, no. You see us learning the back roads to avoid the road-blocks
I loved the Fund For Animals (Or was it PETA’s ?) Anti-Fur campaign. The posters showed Cindy Crawford, Kim Bassinger, and assorted airheads nude but strategically covered. “I’d rather go nude than wear fur,” read the caption
Come again? I scratched my head when I saw it. This is anti-fur?! Aren’t they implying that the more fur on the market the more likely they are to go nude? Am I right here? And this is how they propose to STOP trapping?
Methinks these gals have been spending too much time around the fellows who do their hair and photography. Listen up, Cindy, most trappers are male. Most fur coats are bought by husbands and boyfriends. Outside of New York and Los Angeles males of the human species are EXTREMELY FOND of gazing at the unclad female form. When this form looks like yours, this fondness can manifest itself in a form of delirium. So if you want to stop these gents from trapping animals and buying the end product, you do not promise to reward them for the opposite…. Geezum!
PETA was even planning a demonstration last year at America’s oldest fishing rodeo, Louisiana’s Grand Isle Tarpon Rodeo. But, alas, they wimped out at the last minute. We were devastated. The fun we had planned. Oh well.
Okay so in per-capita income, educational levels, health-care, infant mortality – the indices used by prigs, nags, and pecksniffs – Louisiana always look like crap. So what? What the hell do the fussbuckets who look at that kind of stuff know about fun? What the hell do those things have to do with “Quality of Life?” Remember, that’s the same crowd always rhapsodizing about the “health-care” and “education” in Fidel Castro’s Shangri-la. They confuse education with indoctrination. Health-care with health. A cardinal belief of the Pinko creed is that in the 1950s Cuba was a ghastly hellhole of political repression, violence, backwardness,and poverty. Only millionaires and mafiosi and tourists did well.
Then kindly explain why in those days Cuba experienced net immigration. Not only where there no balseros (rafters) back then; people went in the other direction. Cuba had a higher standard of living in those days than southern European countries. It’s infant-mortality rate was equal to Germany’s and Holland’s – on top of France.
Yes, people flocked – from neighboring Caribbean nations, from Europe, and yes, even from the US – TO Cuba and not for child sex like nowadays. They went to LIVE there. And anyone who wanted to leave the island could do so. Go. Fine. Bye. Good riddance.
Ever notice how “right-wing dictators” never put travel restrictions on their citizens? They know their economy is better off without the type of chronic whiners and unemployable malcontents who typically oppose them. And ever notice how the few enemies of such regimes who do seek exile – Fidel Castro and the Ortega brothers of Nicaragua for instance – are generally vermin utterly useless in a market economy? Check it out. You’ll see. Chilean exiles from Pinochet are a perfect case in point.
Put that in your Pinko pipe and smoke it.
And speaking of Ernest Hemingway…. He came to mind while I was wrestling with a hundred pound Amberjack 100 ft. under the Gulf last week with 500 lbs. of air left in my scuba tank. The fish had a spear through it’s flank but was plenty lively, trying it’s damndest to drown me. So I was reaching for my ice-pick (standard gear for Cajun Divers. Better penetration than with a dive-knife) for the coup de grace, while tightening my grip on his gills.
I had the brute in a vice grip….white knuckles, bulging biceps, my teeth chomping down on the regulator mouthpiece about to bite it off. The fish’s face inches from mine…had him like the big Kraut had the poor kid in “Saving Pvt. Ryan,” as they wrestled on the floor, grimacing and snarling at each other, right before he stabbed him…. Point is – his ass was MINE!
So Hemingway in Death In The Afternoon came suddenly to mind: “A great killer must love to kill….he must have a spiritual enjoyment of the moment of killing. When a man is still in rebellion against death he has pleasure in taking to himself one of the Godlike attributes – that of giving death.”
That fat, pinko drunkard knew just how I felt. Amazing. To think there was a time when the guy who wrote those bloodthirsty lines, a guy who posed smiling with his rifle resting on blood-dripping lions and leopards, a guy who machine-gunned sharks for the sheer hell of it, a guy who had a fifty-caliber machine gun mounted on his Yacht – to think such a notorious “gun-nut” was once the hit of fashionable literary circles and the toast of café society.
How times change. But his politics more than compensated for his firearms fetish. He was always safely, predictably, and fashionably, Red. Beet Red, the surest career-move for a writer then as now. Tom Wolfe coined Radical Chic in the 1960s. But limousine leftism was much more in vogue in the 1930s – “the Red Decade,” the “Low Dishonest Decade” as a few reactionary mavericks called it.
Hemingway whooped it up for the Reds in Spain, the Reds in Cuba. Then Pappa got a brand new bag alright; the fat bastard got singed by the very flames he helped ignite. His Finca Vigia outside Havana was confiscated by his heroes. Actually he was lucky. If his protagonists in For Whom The Bell Tolls had won in Spain a generation earlier, Hemingway would have never seen another bullfight and all his Spanish drinking buddies would have wound up with a bullet through the nape of the neck. Many did anyway. Jose Robles for instance.
The Red cause in Spain sucked in the literary elite from all points of the compass. Dos Passos, Auden, Spender, Orwell, Hellman, Malraux. ”Everybody was there but Shakespeare” according to another literary volunteer for the people’s cause.
The honest ones occasionally left the hotels and the guided tours, got a whiff of Bolshevism, gagged, and turned violently against it, Dos Passos and Spender particularly. And unlike the rest of the literati, Orwell actually enlisted in the Republican forces and fought, long, hard and bravely. He was wounded and barely escaped into France after learning that the Commies had him marked for a bullet in the neck and an unmarked grave, the fate of hundreds of his Anarchist chums.
But despite his Bohemian bluster, Hemingway was too much the go-getting Yankee careerist to let unpleasant objective facts interfere with his ambitions.
“Dos!” he told a disgusted John Dos Passos as he was crossing the French border out of the cauldron of murder and treachery known as Republican Spain,”If you write negatively about the Communists the reviewers will ruin you forever!”
Ernest was proved right. Passos’s literary career crashed and burned after his return. Never mind that he wrote the truth. He’d seen too many of his idealistic (but non-communist) acquaintances disappear into unmarked graves with a bullet hole in the neck, Russian style.
Orwell got back to England hell-bent on exposing the Commies and paid dearly. No one would publish him. Animal Farm and 1984 were rejected repeatedly by the major publishing houses. I grew damp on the forehead and hollow of stomach when I read how close those two masterpieces came to being buried forever by the very elements who constantly screech and blather about “freedom of expression.”
Pappa’s sometime friend John Dos Passos said Hemingway “had one of the shrewdest heads for unmasking political pretensions I’ve ever run into.”
That so? Here’s a few examples of that shrewdness: “Castro’s revolution,” Hemingway wrote in 1960 was “very pure and beautiful…. I’m encouraged by it….The Cuban people now have a decent chance for the first time.”
Shrewd indeed. What insight. With a head like that he belonged in the US State Department. And actually, he was employed by the US government for a while. During WWII in fact. Hemingway, that champion of the people’s cause, that pikeman in the holy crusade against fascism, wasn’t about to let the severe gas rationing of the time interfere with his fishing. Hell, no. So he convinced the U.S. government that he wasn’t so much fishing from his yacht, Pilar, off Cuba, as hunting Nazi submarines,
Oh, he might occasionally troll a few lines behind it but he was actually defending allied shipping against those marauding U-boats dispatched from afar by the wicked Hun. FDR saw to it that Hemingway got 160 gallons of gasoline a week and a .50 caliber machine gun mounted on his yacht. Hemingway missed the boat if you ask me. He did alright as a writer. He’d a made more in sales – tons more.
But I bet he had a blast with that machine gun. Picture that boatload of sloppy drunkards staggering around the decks of Pilar off Cuba. “Hey Manolo!” Ernest would shout from the bridge. “Is that a periscope over there?… Looks like one!…”
“Ah yes, Ernesto!” Manolo slurs after spilling half a bottle of red wine on his shirt. “Sure does….might be a school of dolphin though.”
“Can’t be to careful, Manolo!” He growls while jerking back the carrier…”just like them Krauts to disguise themselves as Dolphins – RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!!…”EEEEEE! HAAAH! Lookit em run!” Eat lead you Nazi swine! – RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!!
“Hey, I wanna turn, Ernesto! Come on! You’re hogging the gun!”
“I’m WHAT?!…WHAT!?” He sways and looks down crosseyed, his hands still on the gun…”What was…? – Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat – plink-plink-plink – poooft! poooft! bang! pow!!poooft! poooft!! plink!
“Hey WATCHIT! MAN – -WATCHIT!” Manolo and the crew jump overboard just ahead of the flames that erupt as ole Dead-Eye Ernesto splinters the deck and blasts the engine with a surprise burst. “COWARDS!” Pappa howls while shaking his fist at his chums bobbing in the waves. “Candy Asses!…What the hell am I doin out here with this buncha lily-livered Maricones! ”
Yes sir, over in Berlin, Admiral Doenitz must have sprouted six ulcers agonizing over this new and deadly threat to his submarine fleet.
There were hints that shortly before his suicide, Hemingway’s infatuation with Fidel had started to ebb. Was it when several thousand Cubans in his province were dragged from their homes in those proverbial jackbooted midnight raids that Hollywood and New York tell us only Nazis mount, tethered to stakes, and riddled by firing squads?
Hell, no. That was Hemingway’s “necessary murder,” the kind his heroes in For Whom the Bells Toll performed ritually. No, it started ebbing when old Ernesto found that this “pure and beautiful” revolution made it difficult for him to repair the pump on his Cuban estate’s swimming pool.
Naturally, that sort of thing will sour parlor Pinkos on a revolution every time.
Anyway, after boating the Amberjack, I was bushed. We repaired to our campsite on a nearby island (a glorified sand-bar, actually) for a siesta under the tarp. The breeze was heavenly, the gentle lapping of the waves fifty yards away a soothing lullaby…. I drifted off in seconds. with a Gulf breeze caressing my face and the soft serenade of the surf….Ummmm.
No beating a nap. Just ask us Cubans. Sadly, for many of us the traditional siesta was another of those things Fidel stole. A nap lets you actually feel the sleep..it lets you savor the slumber. It’s a lighter form of sleep, with more vivid dreams…with dreams you remember… zzzzzz….Ah yes…zzzzzzzz… So PETA made it out here after all………
“This is Matt Lauer reporting from Grand Isle, Louisiana. President Gore took a break from his impeachment proceeding today to declare a state of emergency near this ramshackle port in coastal Louisiana where PETA was staging a peaceful demonstration against a locally popular spearfishing event. PETA’s activists arrived in boats and followed the divers on their way to the oil platforms, trying to divert them off course while employing bullhorns to broadcast readings from the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi.
“This serves to enlighten the divers in the ways of vegetarianism and non-violence.” According to PETA spokesperson Paul McCartney. With his right eye swollen shut and 21 stitches in his mouth, the ex-Beatle’s appearance horrified his fans in the press. “These blokes certainly take spearfishing seriously,” Paul sputtered painfully into a spittle-flecked microphone held by a snuffling Cokie Roberts. “Nothing like this happened in California or Hawaii. Remember, friends, All You Need Is Love.”
Rocker Jackson Browne, sporting a neckbrace and holding an ice-pack to a plum-colored nose, was also among the celebrity-studded activists. He stood nearby, consoling a sobbing Woody Harrelson. “We came in the spirit of Gandhi,” blubbered Woody who nursed a grapefruit sized ear and several facial welts. “And were met by that of George Patton!” Mr. Harrelson then collapsed in sobs into the arms of his friend Alec Baldwin, who tottered at his side on crutches.
“Get up Goddamit!” K.D. Lang and chum Melissa Ethridge yanked Woody up by the collar and seized Alec roughly by the shoulders. “You’re lucky we ran those yahoos off! They’d a killed ya, ya freaking wussy!”
A heavily-bandaged Sting, stood near an ambulance, weeping openly and locking arms with Shirley McClaine, who clutched the filleted carcass of a Queen triggerfish to her breast. “This was my grandmother!” she wailed.
In a strange twist, songstress Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders who many feared was lost, or worse, was finally located. Ms. Hynde, long known for her chronic scowl and hard-edged lyrics, as well as her militant vegetarianism, turned up among the tents smiling dreamily while strumming “Do It To Me One More Time” by Capt’n & Tenile. Later she posed for cameras wolfing down a platter of a local favorite, Blackened Amberjack, while surrounded by several grinning divers. “These Louisiana boys sure know how to…um…cook!” Was her only comment.
Meanwhile at a local tavern, Warren Beatty and Leo DiCaprio attempted to disrupt a cockfight – this barbarity remains legal in this peculiar state – by stepping into the ring itself . “The roosters immediately pounced on us!” stammered a still shaken Leo. “And I don’t even eat chicken! And their owners incited them with blood -curdling whoops!”
Beatty’s and Di Caprio’s flailing arms and wild screams were scant protection against the birds’ sharp spurs and vicious beaks. Observers report that rather than attempting to help the frantic and terrified victims, the few beer-crazed spectators who hadn’t collapsed in hysterics quickly set several more roosters on the hapless celebrities whose screams “sounded like Yoko Ono sitting on a sea urchin” according to one howling and badly convulsed bar patron….
August 1, 2000
Humberto Fontova’s book entitled Helldiving – about cajun-style undersea lunacy – will be out this winter.
