Several Thanksgivings ago an uncle of mine, an accomplished full Professor at a leading university, as well as an avid sportsman, made an interesting comment I’ve never forgotten. To paraphrase, Walt Disney’s 1942 classic, Bambi, was the beginning of the movement to end hunting in America.
In watching how Hollywood and the Left have gone forward from there, in some ways, I’ve come to see it as the, however unintended, subtle beginning of various lines of attack on capitalism and Western Civilization itself.
Speaking at an NRA event in May, Sarah Palin made a joke about Bambi’s mother being dinner.
“Some of these animal activists are just…crazy,” she said. “They think we’re killing Bambi’s mother. I love animals, but in Alaska, Bambi’s mother is dinner.”
A website called Vegetarian Star referenced Hollywood in their reporting. Perhaps anti-Palin, anti-hunting screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, who freaked out over a recent episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska in which she shot a caribou, is on the editorial board.
After all, they’re all shooting deer in Hollywood.
“I have bad news for those groups,” Palin said, according to the Charlotte Observer. “Bambi’s mother is dinner – even in L.A.”
“Where do those people think their venison comes from? The deer didn’t die of natural causes. It wasn’t road kill.”
Anthropomorphism, the assigning of human attributes to animals, or non-living things, dates back to the 1700s. Perhaps it’s become so appealing to the Leftists in Hollywood, not simply as a result of the growth in, and entertainment value of, animation, but because it gives expression to so many concepts that serve their political agenda quite well.
Killing God, or at least removing religion from the public square (and our films and television sets) is one thing. But by elevating animals through anthropomophism, thereby diminishing what was traditionally seen as mankind’s unique positioning above the larger animal kingdom, one diminishes man’s rights and freedoms at the expense of the whole. You may end up with more snail darters, but the cost can be industrial progress, jobs, freedom and individual wealth creation. Those aren’t exactly priorities for the Left.
The environmental movement enabled by a Hollywood eager to morally equate humans with animals (“The Cove” comes to mind) certainly benefits from elevating animals to an equal station with man- – provided the man happens to be a capitalist. In fact, given the culture today, simply quoting from Genesis could be construed as a thought-crime:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.
Having watched several episodes of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, it seems clear to me that the values she deliberately seeks to emphasize could be called traditional. From pointing out the need to foster independence in her children, to celebrating rugged individualists more interested in making it on their own, than depending on government, such references seem to repeatedly emerge. Perhaps it’s that, more than just killing Bambi, that really has Leftists like Aaron Sorkin so upset – though certainly hunting and its relationship to the 2nd Amendment and self-reliance shouldn’t simply be dismissed.
Is Sarah Palin intent on killing Bambi with her travelogue on The Learning Channel? Perhaps, both figuratively and literally. If so, freedom and free market conservatives and American traditionalists should hope her aim is true.