Lessons on hunting and truth-telling

Lessons on hunting and truth-telling

By John Brenkman, a professor at the City University of New York and director of the U.S.-Europe Seminar at Baruch College
Published February 17, 2006 Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune

It took four full days, but Dick Cheney finally acknowledged the simple truth that there is but one person responsible for a shooting: the one who pulls the trigger. If a gun goes off while being cleaned, if a man is shot in premeditated cold blood, if a frightened policeman or soldier fells an innocent bystander--the responsibility belongs in every instance to the one holding the gun. Our courts and our morality make important distinctions among accident, negligence, depraved indifference, premeditation, justified homicide, and so on. Collateral damage and friendly fire are wartime additions. But all across the spectrum of legal and moral discriminations, responsibility belongs to the shooter. So, too, for hunters. So, too, for vice presidents of the United States.

What then happened last weekend that the vice president of the United States could shoot a hunting companion, delay telling the public, delay telling the president and for a time allow others to blame the victim and even his hunting dog?

Cheney's Fox News Channel interview has been headlined as a taking of "full responsibility," but that doesn't quite cut it. For even though he says, "Well ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger," he continues to defend his decision to let the public be first informed by his host, the ranch owner and Republican lobbyist Katharine Armstrong. He claims this was for the sake of accuracy: She is a hunter, was an eyewitness, and could find a reporter who knew the difference between a rifle and a shotgun. Accuracy is just what Armstrong did not represent. She's the one who said it was Harry M. Whittington's own fault that he got shot. From one side of his mouth, the vice president says he himself is to blame, and from the other side of his mouth says Armstrong is accuracy incarnate. If that seems contradictory, he adds a new culprit: the setting sun made it hard to see the orange-clad Whittington, though not the quail.

As I walked through the streets of Manhattan the other evening, with the day's many Cheney jokes and Elmer Fudd witticisms ringing in my ears, I realized I was feeling sadder and sadder about this whole affair. It all had something to do with my long-dead grandfather and Max Weber.

I found myself thinking of my mother's father, who grew up a century ago in central Illinois, in the woods near Chillicothe, a destitute miner's son who eventually became a hardworking sharecropper. He hunted. As a boy I was unhappy at not being allowed to learn to hunt or even go with him when he was shooting pheasant. I loved, though, to listen to his stories. My grandfather had a nasty scar on his back from a shotgun blast in a hunting accident well before I was born. The unshapely scar lent a mystique, akin to the rapier-thin scars that used to distinguish aristocrats' cheeks, to this burly man. Along with the stories, my grandfather passed down a lesson: Never shoot without knowing what is in your line of fire--no matter how greedily, like the modern sportsman, you covet the trophy or how badly, like some destitute miner's son, you need the food. Although I never hunted, the lesson stuck. For it is not just about hunting. It is an emblem for taking responsibility for any action that has the potential to do harm.

Beyond the coincidence that my grandfather was learning to hunt about the time the great German social thinker Max Weber was writing his most important works, the two men had little in common--except perhaps for their ethic of responsibility. This was Weber's term for what must guide politicians' actions in a democracy. The aptitude for a career in politics, he claimed, amalgamates a passion for a cause, responsibility for one's decisions and actions, and a sense of proportion. Passion, responsibility, proportion. These qualities are, however, perpetually vulnerable to two essential tools of political power: deception and violence. Whoever holds or vies for political power, Weber warned, "lets himself in for the diabolical forces lurking in all violence."

Leaving aside the media's antagonism toward the secretive Cheney and the Democrats' relish in a White House scandal, the quail affair does touch on a genuine problem in our body politic. The Bush-Cheney years have seen a repudiation of the ethic of responsibility. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, yet no one is to blame for going to war under false pretenses; the occupation was botched and tragic, but no one in charge of planning it is fired; tens of thousands of civilians are killed, but the White House refuses for years to assess the "collateral damage"; the White House ignores dire hurricane warnings but still feigns ignorance.

This is why the accidental shooting in Texas, combined with Cheney's instinctive avoidance of the truth, so well expresses what has gone wrong in the Bush administration, just as my grandfather's admonition always to know what is in your line of fire expresses the true nature of responsibility.