At the behest of a few friends and writers, I decided to watch Grizzly Man, the oft-lauded documentary about Timothy Treadwell, self-defined "protector" of the brown bears in the Katmai Park, part of the Alaskan Peninsula. The film tell us that after 13 years of Treadwell spending time amongst bears, the bears ate him.
They took too long.
The movie reveals a mental and emotional defective with gender-identity issues confusing feverish intensity and a feeble grasp of reality with being worthy of transcendent importance. Treadwell suffered delusions of adequacy and parlayed that iota into a wispy grandeur by tireless self-promotion and relying on the odd characteristic of some of society's elements to extend "the kindness of strangers" to creatures too weak to survive on their own.
Time and again the film shows a man who is at best confused, but more likely deranged. His emotional stability is virtually non-existent, and this is revealed by film he took of himself, so Freud only knows how Treadwell dealt with life off-camera. His friends seem to make more apologies for him than anything else and his parents practically call him a lost cause.
The more I watched, the angrier I got. Stepping back from the feeling, I noticed it really wasn't directed at Treadwell as such, but at his type.
Treadwell was a Fool. And you know by now, The Jenius despises Fools.
What I saw in Treadwell is what I see to a nauseating degree in what passes for Our "leadership":
-- Feverish intensity as an excuse for a lack of true passion, confusing activity with productivity.
-- A grasp of reality that makes Alice in Wonderland seem like an anthropological paper.
-- The delusion that because they are doing something, that something is actually valuable. Forget results. Forget logic. Forget any semblance of competence. The Fool shrieks to the winds: Because I am doing this, this is great!
-- Lack of knowledge or the IQ of a fruit salad are not impediments to continuing empty behavior and crow-squawking cacophony. In fact, they are requirements.
And let's not forget the role the media and audience play in this debacle. Playing the gaseous role of the media in the movie is director Werner Herzog, who can't help but insert himself into the story. Herzog acts as if Truth doesn't exist unless he smarmily pokes a stick at it, layering pseudo-philosophical crap over the issues he thinks are relevant. Forget the facts, is his style, let's look at my feelings about this.
Our local media suffers from the same wishy-washy, half-assed attitude as well, eschewing any head-on analysis in favor of gossip, scandal and morbid curiosity. Their defense is "That's what the public wants," which ranks up there with "I was cleaning my gun and it went off accidentally--17 times." The public wants Truth, and it is up to the media to choose how that Truth is to be presented, without the need for a subjective id to intrude.
And in the role of audience, the silent majority, is Amie Huguenard, Treadwell's girlfriend who died in the same grizzly attack. As My father has said time and again: "An idiot always finds bigger idiots to applaud him." What happened to Amie is a tragedy, but let's not release her from the responsibility of doing something stupid to follow a Fool in his Foolishness.
The Fools We have here--as do so many Fools--have their own coterie of sycophants and lamebrain applauders, fervent supporters of idiocies, who fall into the canyon of unreality and set up camp. These camps all-too-often grow into bigger nuisances, with Fools roaming freely.
The difference is, grizzlies will kill and eat these Fools. We, in the civilized world, aren't so lucky.
The Jenius Has Spoken.
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