* RADIO RANT: Snipe Hunting—Irony of Ironies

I was just listening to The Jim Bohannan Show (7/14/07)—usually the most innocuous of (semi-)conservative talk shows; but his final segment on a birding competition brought up an old complaint of mine that must be vented once again. Jim's "final segments" are inevitably several-minute amalgams of the worst, most unoriginal puns imaginable on some "everyman" story of the day and, given how great a role birds play in the metaphoric discourse of humankind, you can well imagine how the lame banter went. . . . Now, one attempt at verbal play was that, well, at least these crazy birdwatchers weren't partaking in "snipe hunting," or some other just as ludicrous pursuit.

I grew up in the northern Great Plains, among hunters and others who know & admire hunters & hunting, and I can't tell you how many times someone has told me the grand joke that is "snipe hunting" (see Wikipedia, or whatever, if you don't know the details of this summer-camp-esque prank, based upon an imaginary bird in the woods). And yet every one of these souls who told me the story, knowingly, with an ironic "wink-wink," had no idea—I am sure—that there is indeed such a bird as a snipe, or that snipe hunting per se is actually an—uh—"sport." (I saw my first Wilson's Snipe when I was nine or ten, along the Missouri River, just outside of Fort Pierre, SD. But to most people, the snipe may as well be a Phoenix, or a Roc.) My psyche both lives and dies through ironies such as this—both revelling in the sheer irony per se, and despairing at the ignorance that created it.