Snakes and other adventures in media

I may be horribly old-fashioned, and I do realize that there are good many people who will roll their eyes at the idea that I might be old-fashioned and say, no, you are not old-fashioned, stupid, you are completely behind the times and would you please hurry up and catch up with the Zeitgeist before you embarrass yourself completely, but I cannot fathom why anyone would think that watching an anaconda swallow a grown man is in any way entertaining.  But it seems that someone does, because I have seen a commercial for this…actually, I am not sure what to call it.  I do not know if this qualifies as a reality show, a wildlife documentary, or a cooking show. I realize that the advent of cable and satellite television, and the subsequent need for ever more content to fill the hours, has led inevitably to a diminution in the quality of the programming available for broadcast, but frankly, watching a giant snake swallow a grown man is more than a little ridiculous.  This is not entertainment; it barely qualifies as bread and circuses.

First, a spoiler alert: our intrepid hero, who has gone boldly where no man has gone before, survives his encounter with the anaconda. I know this because our intrepid hero is in all the ads for this program and appears to narrate the program as well, two bits of showmanship that more or less preclude the snake’s having digested him. That’s a dead giveaway there, if you ask me. There is no suspense involved in watching a snake swallow a man if you already know that the man survives the encounter, only a vaguely annoyed feeling with yourself for watching such rubbish in the first place. If you must feel annoyed with yourself, you may as well watch the further adventures of the Kardashian sisters; whatever else you can say about them, they are certainly better looking than a giant anaconda.

Second, what is the point of this particular exercise, other than to deny a snake its dinner?  If we must learn about the digestive processes of snakes, wouldn’t it be easier to have the snake swallow a camera the same way I do when my GI guy insists that I have a colonoscopy. Snakes have no trouble swallowing anything; their jaws uncouple, as we all learned in eighth grade biology, so that they can swallow animals bigger than their own heads.  It’s what they do.  Therefore, it should not be wildly difficult to induce an anaconda to gulp down a camera, even if there isn’t a grown man attached to it.  But why do it in the first place?  I am clearly missing something here.

Finally, swallowing is not interesting. Everyone does it every day. Our intrepid hero would be better off if he skipped being an appetizer and did something constructive like campaigning to end such violent spectacles as bullfighting, high school football, and the Miss America pageant, and replacing them with wholesome entertainment like giraffe swatting, wherein teams of drunken dwarves armed with fly swatters and equipped with pogo sticks try to swat the most flies away from the heads of giraffes running around a track before the time clock or the whiskey run out. Now, that is something I would pay good money to see and I would pay it knowing that no one was about to offend my sensibilities.

DUMBO, RIP: For the past few months, wild rumors have been flying around the Disney Studios in Hollywood, despite the best efforts of the studio to squelch them, but finally it seems that the truth is about to come out. The Indian Police will announce tomorrow that the rogue elephant that their officers shot and killed in a raid on a village near the Burmese border was, in fact, Dumbo, the star of the eponymous Disney motion picture classic. At first, the studio denied any and all knowledge of Dumbo’s passing, but many Hollywood insiders now feel that Disney knew about their erstwhile star’s final and ultimately fatal rampage and tried to cover the matter up.

Dumbo, the orphaned son of an elephant shot by Burmese police in the early 20th century, rocketed to stardom as a child on the basis of his huge ears and his unusual ability to fly, a skill not usually associated with elephants outside your local bar and grill. The young pachyderm’s rise to fame and fortune was instantaneous; he was one of Hollywood’s bare handful of overnight stars; and his well-documented fall from fame and fortune into an abyss of drugs, drink, and debauchery filled thousands of inches of newspaper column space and shocked a nation. Dumbo went from being one of the most admired to one of the most despised stars in Hollywood in the early 1950’s, although he blamed all of his misfortunes on the Communists manipulating Walt Disney and the studio. His drunken antics, hidden carefully from the public by the Disney publicity machine, reached public notice in 1954, when he over flew the White House and tried to urinate on Mamie Eisenhower as the First Lady played hostess at a state dinner for the Prime Minister of Sweden. Dumbo tried to dismiss the incident as a childish prank, but Disney did not renew his contract afterwards, and the young star could no longer find work in films in the United States. He tried to work in France and in then Italy, where he carved out a small niche for himself in spaghetti Westerns, but even there, his insatiable demands taxed even the indulgent Italian film industry to the limit.

Humiliation followed humiliation: a failed marriage, a custody fight in which his now ex-wife exposed for the first time the full extent of his sexual indiscretions, and then the revelation that he had once given money to a known Communist for a bag of peanuts ended any chance of his return to American films. In the end, circumstances reduced Dumbo to the fourth elephant in the elephant line in a tenth rate circus touring Mexico and Central America.

Dumbo disappeared for a few years; there were reports that he was homeless in New York, while others thought that he might still be in Latin America; and then he turned up in India, where he started, as a member of an ashram. He’d gone there in the 60’s with the Beatles, trying, as he put it in one of the last interviews he gave, to get his head together and get his life back on track.

For a while, it seemed to work. There was talk at Disney of inviting Dumbo back for a sequel to the film that made him a star, but that idea eventually fell through. The old demons that haunted Dumbo from his youth reappeared and he turned to drink, raiding villages along the coast for rice beer with a gang of younger bull elephants who went out of their way to egg the now aging star on to ever more outrageous behavior, behavior that led, in the end, to a drunken rampage on a hot summer’s night and a policeman’s bullet. In a strange coincidence, on the day of his death an Indian court threw out Dumbo’s lawsuit against the estate of George Orwell for the wrongful death of Dumbo’s father, citing the fact that, while Burma at the time of the star’s father’s death, was a part of Britain’s Indian empire, along with what are now the states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, Burma no longer was a part of India, and so the court had no standing to hear a case that occurred in a foreign country. Dumbo was nearly 70 at the time of his death, and he left no survivors, his only son having died in an automobile accident in 1969.

HEY YOU....yes, I mean you. Stop reading this dreary rubbish and read this instead. Go on, go read it, and don't be surprised the next time one of these media types go off the deep end.