Writer takes aim at Cheney, media

In an essay on Vice President Cheney's hunting accident for the online edition of Time magazine, novelist and literary critic Walter Kirn suggested "Cheney's gross negligence ... still needs more exploring." But he saved his heaviest ammunition for the national press corps' coverage of "a story that hinges on a chaotic Texas quail shoot." Kirn, who grew up in Minnesota and now works in New York, said big-city reporters just don't get it right when they stray out into the rest of the country:

What's made this awkward reporting not merely annoying but socially and politically divisive is that it insults the intelligence of some people who already feel insulted in other ways by the very same class of urban journalists. Outside of DC, LA and NYC, the only time folks get to meet a correspondent from a major television network or a writer from a leading newspaper is when a storm has just destroyed their neighborhood. And when the big shots do vist the outland, they always dress wrong, covered in either condescending denim or some haughty blend of wool and silk. Then they call the tornado that struck the place a "cyclone," even though the place is Minnesota and Minnesotans don't use that word.

That sounds about right. I remember once when the national press descended on an East Tennessee manhunt, local reporters (I was one of them) tried to convince them they shouldn't call the countryside a "rattlesnake-infested wilderness." Copperhead-infested, maybe, because parts of it in fact were pretty snaky. But we didn't have rattlesnakes in that part of the state.

I don't hunt, but I suspect Kirn's also got it right when he adds:

For me and for lots of westerners I've spoken to, the greatest failure of the accident coverage has been its inability to convey, let alone fathom in the first place, just what goes on when people are chasing birds out in the middle of nowhere, in the brush, with dogs and other hunters on every side and adrenaline pumping through everybody's veins. It's a jittery, fluid situation. The coveys erupt without warning and they don't fly straight, meaning hunters don't only have to be prepared to raise their barrels at any instant, they need an awareness of the potential arcs through which they can safely swing them before they fire. Or hold their fire, as the case may be.

And what of Cheney? A hunter himself, Kirn says quail hunting is dangerous, but "it's a civilized level of danger that's usually manageable through good equipment, experienced companions, and traditional codes of conduct." Cheney may have been negligent or unlucky, or both. But Kirn says his problem with the Vice President's hunting accident goes beyond that:

[Hunting] is like war, ... but it's also unlike war, mostly because the quarry poses no threat. In a time of actual war — and when one of the hunters helps to run that war — the playfulness of the sport may seem distasteful. To shoot at feathered things while obliging other folks to shoot at much larger creatures that shoot back doesn't seem right somehow, or wise. At some poetic level it tempts the gods, and the gods are always armed. For Cheney, that's the painful, humbling part. For the public, it's the engrossing, mythic part. The press may be mauling the story and prolonging it, but the accident's strange allegorical allure is beyond its power to affect.