The hunting and the snark -- Sarah Palin shoots caribou. I'm unimpressed.
By Alexandra Petri
(The Palin Family, Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images)Oscar Wilde called "the English country gentleman galloping after a fox -- the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable." I am not calling Sarah Palin "unspeakable," or the apparently "tiny" -- according to Piper Palin -- caribou she shot "uneatable," but who knows what Wilde would have done had he been in my position.
I apologize for writing about Sarah Palin again. But Sarah Palin's Alaska is like a serialized TLC version of The Ring. If you watch it, it consumes you from within unless you pass it on to others.
Besides, this week Sarah Palin shot a caribou. I don't know much about the size of caribou, other than what I've learned from playing Buck Hunter, but Piper Palin seems unimpressed, and Piper would know. I like Piper. She is a straight shooter, unlike, apparently, her mother -- who claims that it was some sort of problem with the sights.
But hunting is a peculiar pastime. It's the true oldest profession, the one thing that binds cavemen, English gentry, and the protagonists of the TLC series Bama Belles. Hunting is a Lifestyle Sport, a pursuit that comes with its own noun. You don't hunt. You are a Hunter. Only a few other activities fall into this category -- there are Runners and Cyclists, Swimmers and Tree-Huggers. But play basketball in your spare time, and you aren't a basketball player. What you probably are is President Obama.
Hunting reminds you of your place on the great scale of being. If you aren't the Hunter, you're the Hunted, unless you're The Camera Crew or The Guy Who Got Out Of His Car To Relieve Himself And Wound Up In The Middle Of This.
Personally, I know little about hunting. I blame this on having read "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers at a young age and getting the notion that hunting was supposed to involve naturalism and squalor and wistfulness and some confusing anecdotes about deaf-mutes. To me, dressing an elk means putting it in a sweater. I once went skeet shooting and barely managed to wound the skeet. Have you ever been charged at by a wounded skeet, half-mad and blind with pain? It's an experience.
The closest I've come to the full flavor of the hunt is the day I spent wandering around Manhattan without a cell phone. I have to assume this is fundamentally the same: at the end of the day I was sweaty and uncomfortable, my feet ached, and I had strong opinions about the Second Amendment. I also had to wrestle an elk to death, but that was just because I wound up at a trendy restaurant on the Lower East Side that specialized in "DIY raw food."
Still, watching Sarah Palin and a woman she described as the authentic Mama Grizzly, out in the wilderness supporting themselves with their rifles, I began to worry. The real Mama Grizzly lived alone in a place where her nearest neighbors were 120 miles to the northeast. This woman had been bitten by a bear! She had sewn her own head back together! It was only when Sarah Palin's plane floated up into the sky that she began to cry and cry. "When Sarah, Chuck, and Becker leave, I won't be seeing anybody for nine months," she said. "It's very hard to see your friends leave." Sarah Palin was the only person she'd seen in nine months? Who did she think she was, the mainstream media?
Still, as I watched Sarah dress the tiny caribou, I began to be terrified. (Piper: "It reeks! What is that, Grandpa?" Grandpa: "That's a tiny caribou. Your mom shot a tiny one.") Had I gone soft?
If someone left me out in the wild for three days, I would be completely unable to defend myself. My only hope would be that a caribou had recently gone through a bad breakup that left it emotionally vulnerable, and that I could maybe get close enough to fatally depress it with my general demeanor. Something similar seemed to have happened to Sarah Palin's caribou, which just stood there as she fired off round after round. "There's another shot!" it seemed to think. "Ah, life! I suppose I could move to the left. Ah, death! She couldn't hit an elephant at this distance! Sunrise, sunset!"
It's not that I don't hunt. I'm not a vegetarian -- which, according to a bumper sticker glimpsed on the series, is an old Indian word for bad hunter. I have been job-hunting, bargain-hunting, and apartment-hunting. I played Oregon Trail for years and shot a lot of pixelated squirrels, moose, and bears, but I could never carry more than 200 pounds of food back to the wagon. Sometimes I have difficulty finding words in the dictionary because they wade through streams of silent consonants to throw me off their tracks. That's got to count for something! And apartments can be very dangerous if you only manage to wound them.
Does this make me any less a Mama Grizzly? Probably.
Still, being a writer is something like being a hunter. It's a solitary craft with its own attached noun. Flaubert used to sit at his desk for hours staking out "le mot juste"; the right phrase can be as elusive and deadly as a white wolf. And sometimes you can sit there for hours tramping through the muck and all you manage to hunt down is an undersized caribou.
And Sarah Palin is a challenging quarry. Do you rain epithets at her and hope she startles and heads for cover? Or do you bide your time and then, when the moment comes, go for the jugular? I can't tell. And no one else seems to be able to either.
Maybe we've found the most dangerous game. And next week she's camping with Kate Gosselin.
By Alexandra Petri | December 6, 2010; 12:53 PM ET
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