Sept. 26, 2006
MANN TALK: Cheney Has Minimal Moral Maturation
By Perry Mann
Hinton, WV (HNN) – ‘The personality that springs to mind is that of a
ninth-grade bully in the junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the
letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet.” The quote is
from an article by Joan Didion titled “Cheney” that appears in the October
5, 2006, edition of the New York Review of Books.
In Pennsylvania there is a hunting preserve in which are fenced many species
of animals that hunters come miles around to hunt. They come because the
hunting is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. The hunts are called
“canned hunts,” and some very important people are attracted to this
preserve and one of them is Dick Cheney, Vice- President of these United
States. In the September edition of “Liberal Opinion Week,” there is an
article by Walter Brasch, titled “Canned Hunt: Sports Afoul.” From that
article is the following:
“In December 2003, Cheney and nine of his friends---including former Naval
Academy and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach, U. S. Sen. John
Cornyn (R-Texas), and some high-roller Republican party donors -- went to
the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier, Pa., about an hour’s drive east
of Pittsburgh. The owners of the country club, being good hosts they were,
released 500 domesticated and penned-up ring-necked pheasants in the
morning. “Bird Dog and Retriever News” reports that about 40 percent of all
domesticated pheasants, if not shot by pretend-hunters, either starve or are
killed by predators within the first week of their release; about 75 percent
die within a month.
“At Ligonier, starvation wasn’t a problem. A game keeper told the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette that Cheney alone killed about 70 of the 417 killed that day.
In the afternoon, having hardly raised a bead of sweat, the good ole boys
slaughtered dozens, perhaps, hundreds, of equally tame mallards that had
been hand-raised and shoved in front of waiting shotguns for the massacre.”
The range of human development is from an embryo to saint. Nine months of
the development occurs in the womb, which development is an abstract of
millions of years of evolution’s survival of the fittest. After birth the
chronology of development is child, then puberty or sexual maturity, then
intellectual maturity and last moral maturity; that is, the development of
the individual human repeats the development of the human species. Evidence
of the physical recapitulation or repeat is the appearance of gill slits in
human embryos. And the evidence of the psychological recapitulation is the
change of humans from reckless, self-centered youth to sometimes
responsible, altruistic, empathetic adults. Judgment is the last trait to
mature, a human developmental characteristic that causes a wild hedonist
suddenly to believe God has called him to repent and be born again.
However, if humans were a river and the river flowed from a spring of youth
to a sea of saints, few humans would reach the sea. Many would end up in
various eddies short of the sea. Some would end in the eddy of gluttony,
some in the eddy of lust, some in sloth and some in pride and some in the
eddy of anger with a disposition to kill. Most would be short of the moral
maturity of sainthood.
Cheney is in an eddy of moral immaturity. Twice I have read that he has
attended canned hunts in which he killed dozens of ducks and pheasants just
for the joy of killing them. Why does a man needs to take home 70 pheasants
and a few dozens ducks to feed his family, particularly if the man is as
rich as Cheney? He kills because killing is a part his predisposition, a
predisposition similar to someone who is morally retarded and thus
sociopathic. He had “other priorities” when he had the opportunity to kill
Vietnamese. And he is the vice-president of the United States. Little
wonder this nation is in the killing fields of Iraq.
Not only is Cheney a killer of pheasants, ducks and other game in exorbitant
and shocking numbers, he is by proxy a killer and torturer of people. Cheney
has had more to do with the preemptive, unjustified, contrived and
conspiratorially conceived war in Iraq and the horrors of Abu Ghraib than
anyone else. Cheney’s war has caused the death of thousands, the maiming of
tens of thousands and the torture of countless humans. He has initiated the
killing of people like he kills pheasants.
The concept that all life is kin to all other life and that man should show
a reverence for all life--- is a strange concept to Cheney and his ilk. Man
is kin to pheasants and ducks. But pheasants and ducks do not kill other
species for the fun of it. Or kill more than they need for the day. They are
morally superior to men such as Dick Cheney, who kills to satisfy the
primal prompting and bloodlust of the hunter, which was the evolutionary
predecessor of more developed humans, some of whom with a strong
empathetic awareness and imagination.
I grew up on a farm. Early in my life I developed an urge to hunt and to
kill. My first instrument of death was a gravel shooter, an instrument made
from the fork of a bush, a Y-shaped growth to which was attached to the
prongs of the Y strips of rubber cut from a discarded auto inner tube and to
the other end of which strips was attached the tongue of a worn-out shoe. I
killed many birds and other animals with it
At age twelve I graduated to a rifle and shotgun. I hunted with the same
passion a lad pursues a maiden and I experienced an orgasmic thrill when I
killed game. But by age 30, I had no interest in hunting and at age 40 I
looked upon hunting with moral disgust. Today, I never hunt. Someone broke
into my farm house and stole all my guns. I considered it a blessing.
I attribute my change, from one with a passion to kill to one who is
reluctant to kill anything, to my having flowed in the human stream of
evolutionary development to an eddy of reverence for life; that is, my
judgment matured. I submit that I and others who feel as I do about killing
have on our side many who revere life and who wouldn’t kill a pheasant or
duck in a canned hunt unless life depended upon it.
It may be that one who is ready and eager to kill or to kill for fun is more
of a benefit to a nation than one who has a pacifist turn. But I suspect
that Cheney’s irreverence for life and his moral immaturity will in the long
run be disastrously detrimental to this nation. Iraq is confirming the
suspicion.
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville and Huntington News Network. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton and on a farm in Forest Hill, Summers County.
