Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon has initiated a remarkable thread on canned hunting, under the irresistible tagline, “That dead deer really liked me; couldn’t you see her smiling?” (I picked it up at Making Light as Pretend Tough. Good fun in its own right and I must say I am impressed by the intensity of the response—at the moment, 54 comments at Making Light and 50 at Pandagon. Some of this reads like just unseemly pile-on—attacking canned hunting is a little bit like, well, a little bit like dynamiting whales in a barrel.
But there seems to be a more pervasive theme there, that you might call “Boughten friendship.”[1] Amanda says:
Men who go on canned hunts … remind me of nothing so much as guys who go to strip clubs and convince themselves that the stripper really liked him and he could totally get with her if he wasn’t paying her.
(Amanda might enjoy—or perhaps she has already read—“One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding,” a grim comedy about a white college boy and a black prostitute, and a $100 bill.)
But I think you can generalize here. We all, or most of us, tend to think well of ourselves: we can’t imagine that others do not do the same. I suspect that Confederate plantation owners really believed that their slaves looked up to them with with gratitude and affection. I’ve been reading stuff lately about the peace settlement in the
And most of all, I guess it reminds me of my favorite passage in Tolstoi’s War and Peace (I riff from memory here), where young Count Rostov, having disported himself in the ballrooms and dining-halls of the great metropolis, goes for the first time into battle.
“My God,” he gasps, “they’re shooting at me, whom everyone loves.”
[1] Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
--Robert Frost
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