Is it just me, or have you noticed how hunting & fishing (and control of animal populations in general) seem to be used as a powerful symbol of “the common man”, regardless of whether the person doing it has ever been outdoors before? It’s as if the mere act of picking up a rifle or (to a lesser extent,) a fishing line communicates “I’m just like you. I understand you. I know what you talk about at the kitchen table” whether the person doing it is Donald Trump or Dick Cheney. Mind you, if the actor is a woman, the symbol is twice as potent.
Certainly the NRA had something to do with that status. The powerful lobby gives a stamp of approval to any politician who can say they’ve been deer hunting. Take a moment to mentally count how many presidents and candidates for president you’ve seen photographed on a hunting trip. Of course there was a time when hunting meant providing for your family, and any American who couldn’t do it was seriously compromised. But there was also a time when planting a potato meant providing for your family, and when did you last see politicians line up to do that?
These public hunting trips are often woefully transparent efforts to gain status by display. Take Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s exciting performance at the “Deer Opener” in Minnesota last year. He wounded a buck, (which is a lot like shooting it except you don’t get to keep the antlers and it crawls off into the woods to suffer and die). He would have stayed to track it, like every responsible hunter known to man, but he had to be at an event in Iowa so he let his fellow hunters fail at the job instead.
Hunters who were with Pawlenty started following the blood trail, but Pawlenty had to leave for Iowa, where he was headlining a Republican Party fundraiser.
This is as fine an example of False Populism as I can imagine, as it displays a willingness to kill mammals for sport, familiarity and accuracy using a rifle, and true American Consumptionism (why bother to catch what you kill, another will come along). The fact that a true hunter would be mortally ashamed to leave a wounded deer and announce publicly that he “tried looking for it but it was too hard”, well that only matters to true hunters and honestly, how many are there of them anyway?
I mention this because it has become increasingly clear to me that killing beavers fits easily into this false “symbolic” populism. It is with effortless justification that most decisions to kill beavers are made, (“they’re a pest, they’re causing flooding, they’re more than there used to be, they’ll hurt salmon) And almost always the people who make those decisions are proud of them. They’re protecting the community.
It takes a massive shift in public opinion for that to change, and that’s what happened in Martinez. For a politician in Martinez to be a “man/woman of the people” they suddenly had to consider the possibility of letting the beavers stay. When I read about beavers being killed en masse in Georgia or Bakersfield, I realize what a huge accomplishment that was.
Really, Martinez, you were amazing.
