Good Form Dept. - Shot in the Face Etiquette from the New Yorker

GOOD FORM DEPT.
REGRETFULLY, DICK

Issue of 2006-02-27
Posted 2006-02-20

Some breaches of decorum are easier to rectify than others. Perhaps you have been invited to attend a memorial ceremony at Auschwitz and you arrive in a parka and hiking boots, only to find that most of the men are wearing dark suits. Solution: Buy an overcoat and, next time, call ahead to ask about attire. Or, say, you lose your temper and tell a senior member of the United States Senate to “go fuck yourself.” Solution: Issue a statement acknowledging your frank words and let the fuss subside without attracting further attention. Vice-President Dick Cheney carried himself successfully through both of these faux pas. But his accidental shooting of the Austin lawyer Harry M. Whittington presents a more delicate question of etiquette: What is the proper way to proceed after blasting six to two hundred pieces of birdshot into the chest, neck, and face of a personal acquaintance? Mylar balloons? African violets? A casserole?

On this point of protocol, even the experts are indistinct. “Coveys and Singles: The Handbook of Quail Hunting,” for instance, focusses on such subjects as apparel. “The quail hunter’s underwear can vary. . . ,” its author, Bob Gooch, writes. “Some hunters prefer fishnet-type underwear which permits the body heat to circulate more freely.” The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s skills manual details elaborate chivalric rites with regard to everything from field manners (“Don’t be a slob or a poacher!” “Never be rude or hog shots”) to the conveyance of quarry (“Be discreet and respectful of the animal as you transport it home. Never make the carcass and head the subject of public display”), but is less exacting when it comes to how to behave if what you’ve shot is, in fact, a human being. Only the following mores can be established: The ethical hunter’s first obligation is to determine responsiveness in the injured party. After shouting, “Are you all right?” he must check for hemorrhaging. Finally, he is expected to determine, “Is there blood-soaked clothing? Are there pools of blood on the ground?”

The literature offers few clues to how an errant marksman should negotiate what Dickens calls “the delicacy of his situation.” (In Chapter 7 of “The Pickwick Papers,” Mr. Tupman, during a rook shoot, “had saved the lives of innumerable unoffending birds by receiving a portion of the charge in his left arm.”) In Jimmy Carter’s “An Outdoor Journal,” his ode to the role of fresh air in forging gentlemanly virtue, he hints at the predicament of the friend-shooter, a sort of shadowy social limbo, fraught with shame and imputations of poor couth. According to Carter, “If anyone grew careless and endangered a neighbor by shooting too low, it was a serious matter indeed, warranting an angry shout of condemnation and a damaged reputation.” Grover Cleveland, in “Fishing and Shooting Sketches,” concurs. “The careless or bungling shooter,” he writes, must not be surprised if even his dog abandons him, “leaving the chagrined and disappointed hunter to return home alone—legs weary, gameless and ashamed.”

more
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060227ta_talk_collins

http://www.newyorker.com/


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:)

I was so amused. Awww.

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