Grizzly Man: The Death of an Idiot
oregonmag.com
March, 2006 -- It was on the evening of February 25th. One of the Dish network channels aired it. The L.A. Film Criitics and Robert Redford’s Sundance festival raved, as did Ebert and whoever replaced Gene Siskel. Two thumbs way up, they said about this piece of videographic crap. Remember that word. Crap. We’ll get beyond the metaphor later.
Timothy Treadwell, not his real name, was a surfer dude doin’ drugs and tellin’ folks he was an orphan from Australia. He said he wished he had been a homosexual so his sex life would have been less complicated. They can have sex anywhere, without emotional involvement. But he wasn’t, so went to Alaska. There, he had sex with women stupid enough to join him in his tent in the Katmai Wilderness, until one day a bear ate him and her. In the meantime he hid in the bushes while taping bear hunters. Bear hunters who knew he was there (Alaska is the world's largest small town) did creepy Freddy Krueger things like draw happy faces on the rocks in Timothy's neighborhood. Ugly, eh? But, mostly, he taped himself, pretending to be alone.
Did he think himself to be Jeremiah Johnson, perhaps? Or, not a mountain man but rather a philosopher of natural history?
Watching this widely acclaimed video abortion (now or soon playing in theatres redolent of hemp), I kept waiting for the reference to Thoreau. In time, of course, it came. They even mentioned Muir. In the meantime, we watched this amazingly silly juvenile shifting from baby talk to 12 foot tall Alaskan Brown bears to diatribes against the civilization which built the airplane which delivered him to the Katmai and invented the video camera he used to create his cinematic masturbations, his hippy wilderness fantasies.
I am an old man, now, but was a young man during the days I often visited Alaska. The sixties types were not well received in Alaska, then. The Inuits don't even like them, today. Ask an Inuit what he thinks of the hippies who are blocking oil drilling in ANWAR. Inuits, what you call eskimos, still hunt these northern reaches. They made jewelry out of the teeth and claws of the animals they harvested, back then. Perhaps they still do.
Then you have the hippies. In my physical prime I watched them hang beads around their necks not as records of the hunt, but in rejection of the greatest civilization ever to exist. They receeded into clouds of dope smoke, and enslaved entire nations by rejecting the flag, the military and this nation’s classic values. You may credit the millions of dead in Cambodia to them, the millions imprisoned and executed in post-war Vietnam, as well. The political prisons in North Korea, the executions of journalists on Cuban beaches, the slaughters and slavery in the Sudan -- it has all been part of the same package, the result of the same stupidity which was not invented but rather inflated by the sixties.
Timothy Treadwell, not his real name, missed the era I wish I had missed. But the green community got him. It hung out on the fringes of the L.A. beaches and bubbled in San Francisco. In the woods and mountains of northern California, and all over the states of the Pacific NW, it festers to this day. The home of environmental terrorists and other communists, the dye in the shirt of the Left Coast is green, not red. That is the local color of the socialist flag. It infected Timothy, eventually sending him to visit the bears for an unlucky thirteen summers. It caused him to make a film which was a fake and it got a stupid girl killed. For this is the beloved of Hollywood and the simpletons of Sundance who crap on the very nation, productivity, inventiveness and .basic values which form the structure without which their world would collapse.
Awards for Timothy are in order. Awards for the California surfer dude who went to Alaska and with his various women formed a non-profit organization whose funds helped him take one of them, Amie Huguenard, to Katmai where, along with him, she was eaten and turned into fresh and steaming bear crap.
It is not our suggestion here at Oregon Magazine that Timothy Treadwell should be prevented from volunteering himself as bear food, and so after a digestive interval, bear crap. If, like Socrates, he arranges that his debts be paid following his demise, his body and soul are his own to do with as he pleases, even if it is an affront to the Christian deity in which some of us believe. It is not our place to deny him the freedom we believe that deity gave to this, and every other fool on Earth.
Rather it is our criticism that fools like him often lead others into death. And, he is a symbol for the American Left, a pack of idiots who, without the rise of the internet, talk radio and the alternative media, would still control the political instruments of this nation, and so still be leading America straight down through their fantasies to Hell.
Good mothers don't let their children grow up to be hippies. If you live on the Left Coast, and have pre-school children, run for the midlands. Hie thee to a place where hippies are treated abusively, and cannot lay their blankets of socialist love over the children in the schools.
Whatever you do, don't let your daughter go camping with a hippie. You don't get cute grandkids from a pile of bear crap.
(LL)
© 2006 Oregon Magazine |
