The level at which Australian “Wildlife Warrior” Steve Irwin appealed was epitomised by a blog from some sweet soul responding to a trenchant United Kingdom Guardian article in which Germaine Greer criticised the self-delusion of Irwin and his kind.
One fine Australian commented: “What else can you expect from a woman who’s never had a cock in her.” What clearer glimpse of the television viewer echelon where Irwin enjoyed his most ardent support? The headline above, which has been circulating on the net, reveals, however, that not everyone’s been conned.
I can’t say that Irwin’s passing inspires even the most transient distress. Rather it is a sense of relief that yet another exploitative human parasite has left us.
And a parasite Irwin was. With his blustering invasions of the natural world, he personified slum-grade television. The Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, called Irwin a great conservationist. That comment is as ridiculous as saying lion-tamers in circuses, who make their tigers and lions sit on gaudily painted barrels, walk tightropes and jump through flaming hoops, are contributing something positive to the natural environment and our understanding of it. Or was Howard doing a bit of payback for Irwin having called him “the greatest leader the world has ever seen”?
Steve Irwin was of the lion-tamer breed. No animal he dealt with was ever allowed its own terms. There was no observation, not the slightest attempt at understanding how wild creatures assimilate, how intrinsic the morality of the natural edifice. Instead of the respect, the knowledge and the sheer wonder of a David Attenborough, magnificent snakes had the Irwin buffoon hanging on to their tails, yapping at the camera in another show of cheap bravado, dangling dead chickens in front of crocodiles sick and distressed from their confinement in the slimy green ponds of the Irwin zoo.
Make no bones about it, Irwin made a shithouse full of money out of his violations. He recognised that there was endless profit in the world of the so-called nature “documentaries” that punt the wilderness as a place of mortal danger. Look across the satellite TV menus and see the brand of television ordure Irwin exploited to such effect: The World’s Deadliest Insects, Wilderness Warfare; Killer Crocs; The Terror of Sharks; Dangerous Snake Encounters. Steve Irwin’s contributions were the wildlife equivalent of the Jerry Springer Show. To call him a conservationist is like calling Springer a marriage counsellor.
When Irwin was killed he was filming a new series called, predictably, The Ocean’s Deadliest. He’d taken time off to get a few extra shots for his eight-year-old daughter’s upcoming TV series. If he wasn’t offering up his toddler baby as crocodile bait, Steve was making sure his children would cash in.
I remember feeling a similar sense of gratification some years ago when hearing about another stroke of natural reciprocity. The dedicated Okavango crocodile hunter of the Fifties and Sixties, Bobby Wilmot, proudly and loudly responsible for shooting legions of these animals, got his come-uppance from the world of reptiles in the form of a black mamba bite that killed him. More than poetic justice. Until such time as they show the still suppressed footage of Irwin’s so-called guileless encounter with the stingray, there will always remain the visions of him torturing and stressing some animal for his cameras. More than likely he was sticking his finger in the stingray’s eye.
I also feel quite gratified when some malarkey I’ve written provokes aggravated response, as was the case in a letter published in the Mail & Guardian last week, from one Andrew Kenny of Noordhoek. Mr Kenny is well known in Cape Town. During the recent murky goings-on at the Koeberg power station, Kenny could be relied on to do a personal meltdown every three or four days in the readers’ letters columns of the local newspapers; always in shrill defence not only of Koeberg but anything to do with nuclear power stations and their supposed safety.
Since he never states otherwise, we can only assume that Kenny’s vindications of nuclear power generation are mounted in his personal capacity. He certainly displays the molten passion of the self-appointed expert. I would not deny him what seems an almost obsessional love affair with Koeberg and all things nuclear, but I must protest at his fuming attack on what I had to say about the Nersa (Nuclear Energy Regulator of South Africa) report on Eskom’s paucity of properly administered safety measures at Koeberg.
Kenny says that the staff at Koeberg do make “minor mistakes” — like dropping bolts into generators — but that the superior design of Koeberg defies any penalty for these — apart from industry, business and private lives being brought to their knees. I said nothing about the differences in design of the reactors. I couldn’t care if Koeberg is run on cream cheese and Chernobyl was on boiled turnip juice. I merely compared Koeberg to Chernobyl in the sense that shabby management and the lack of discipline at the former, and which led to that disaster, was eerily similar to the Nersa’s finding of a lack of such discipline at Koeberg.
Who’s actually paying you for all this anxious lobbying, Andrew? Do we detect the shades of “human instrumentality” in your fallout?