An Evil Dude Being Evil

Hunting endangered elephants with bae >>>

My dad comes from that generation of guys who really like movie quotes. Most of my readers have dads from that generation, or are dads from that generation, because my Movie Quote Dad has had his Movie Quote Dad friends subscribe. (Thanks for reading, fellas!) Though the Movie Quote Guy enjoyed a brief revival in the 2000s following the release of Borat, The Hangover, and Anchorman, nobody quotes movies with the frequency and artfulness of late-Boomer/early-Gen X men. 

One of my dad’s most frequent quotes comes from the movie Diner, which is supposedly about college students, despite all of the actors looking like chain smokers in their early 40s. Coming home from the titular diner, Paul Reiser says to Mickey Rourke:

“You know what word I’m not comfortable with? Nuance. It’s not a real word. Like gesture. Gesture’ is a real word. With gesture you know where you stand. But nuance? I don’t know.”

Nuance is hard to pin down. Like pornography, you know it when you see it. Chazzy’s World is often about the nuance of things. I’m interested in complexity and catch-22s and turning black and white into shades of grey. But some things contain no nuance. There’s nothing to explain or interpret or analyze or start deconstructing with semiotics. They are what they say on the tin. Like the video of Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the NRA, trying and failing to kill an elephant. 

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The video was filmed in 2013 for Under Wild Skies, an NRA-sponsored television show, and obtained by The New Yorker. LaPierre and his wife are hunting endangered African bush elephants in Botswana. Wayne fires the first shot, downing a giant male with huge tusks. But the elephant is not dead. The guide tells Wayne that he has to fire another close-range shot to kill it. The guide forcibly holds Wayne’s rifle skyward until other people get out of the line of fire. Wayne fires again. He misses. The South African guide, in the world’s most sinister accent, instructs Wayne to sit down and shows him where to aim. Wayne misses again. The guide reminds LaPierre to reload. He fires again, and misses again. The elephant moans horrifically. The guide sounds frustrated, like a dad working on his car whose son keeps aiming the flashlight in the wrong spot. Another guide puts the elephant out of its misery, then congratulates Wayne on his kill.

Wayne’s wife, Susan, appears. Two massive elephants are staring at her. Presumably, they are curious. The guide asks Susan whether she would like to shoot it in the face or the side of the head. She opts for the face. She uses a tripod, like how a child might use the bridge for every shot in a game of pool. The elephant drops and the other runs away. Susan fires another security shot into its chest. She looks into the elephant’s eyes and says “Aww, he’s still there. You’re a big, old guy,” seemingly thinking it is still alive. She remarks on the elephant’s big feet and wrinkles. She cuts off the elephant’s tail, notes the thickness of its skin, and shouts “Victory!” 

There is no nuance here. I could go into the rest of the New Yorker article, about how LaPierre pretended to be an everyman while indulging a passion for Ermenegildo Zegna suits. I could be snarky about how they turned the elephants’ feet into footstools, which explains why Susan was so eager to inspect them. I could go general, and talk about how hunting endangered animals is the surest sign that something Satanic lives within a man, whether it’s LaPierre or Don Jr. or the Jimmy John’s guy. Or I could go narrow, and point out the expression on Wayne LaPierre’s face, common among the Carlsons and Shapiros and McConnells of the world: that of a small man pretending to be big and terrified he will be found out. I could even tell you that elephants mourn their dead and comfort each other and that orphaned babies who watched their parents get shot wake up in the middle of the night screaming. 

But there’s no need, because there’s no nuance. Watch the video, and you’ll know automatically that Wayne and the guides should have been gored by those beautiful tusks, impaled from their taints to their throats, shredded into Sloppy Joes and launched through the air, then trampled into red slush, with only Susan spared, so she can empathize with the second elephant who was able to flee. 

I often feel guilty about my diet. I eat meat, even though I know pigs are as smart and loving as dogs and that the cows whose labia and glans make up a Beefy 5-Layer Burrito™ enjoy listening to music. I eat fish, even though 95% of Chinook salmon and 97% of Bluefin tuna are gone and 300,000 dolphins and whales are killed as bycatch every year and deep-sea trawling will destroy the coral reefs before we can even explore them. Life involves death, and living a modern, globalized life entangles me with vast systems of death, mass death, ecological death. I feel guilty for lacking the willpower to opt out of that system. But at least I’ve never shot an elephant in the face.