Years ago there was a curmudgeon’s curmudgeon by the name of Henry Louis (HL) Mencken. Way back in the days when you didn’t necessarily need a college education to get a job writing for a big time newspaper, Mencken got his first newspaper job as a part timer at the Baltimore Morning Herald in February, 1899. By June, he was hired as a full time reporter.
He really came to fame about five years later when he started working at the Baltimore Sun, where he became a fixture as a columnist/satirist and was called the Sage of Baltimore.
Mencken was renowned for his wry wit, and he called the American public the boobousie, a play on the French term Bourgeoisie, which is defined as the upper ruling class in a capitalistic society. But for Mencken, it had a far more reaching meaning as it basically was associated with the public at large.
Despite all the changes in the world since 1899, it’s nice to note that the American general public has held its ground as the boobousie. The only difference, perhaps, is that the term needs a bit of updating; that piece of the public zeitgeist today ought to be called homo simpleton. As the term suggests, it refers to the evolutionary chain of progression from homo erectus to homo sapiens to homo simpleton.
A case in point to support that statement occurred recently in Montana, where a certain subject in trying to promote Bigfoot attempted to perpetrate a hoax. In truth, we mourn for the family of this individual, as we would for any family who lost a son under such circumstances. But at times you have to scratch your head and wonder what the heck people are thinking.
This is one such time, Randy Lee Tenley, obviously a huge Bigfoot enthusiast, decided, hopefully all on his own, that he could create his own hoax by dressing in camouflage that resembled heavy foliage. A great idea, no doubt.
The camouflage worked probably even better than Mr Tenley might have hoped. The next step in the master plan was to step out on Highway 93 on a Sunday night, and just sort of freak out a few drivers who would report having seen Bigfoot and thereby create the opportunity for one of those History Channel specials to come to town. While I am not so sure that was his ultimate goal, it certainly seems credible given the amount of air time such shows get nowadays, along with other shows like UFOs, alien visits, and the myriad of other craziness that passes as TV fare today.
The only problem Tenley ran into was that, according to Jim Schneider, the Montana State Trooper who responded to the call and who spoke with CNN affiliate KECI, “He probably would not have been very easy to see at all.”
Tenley got well into the driving lane, according to reports, and was attempting to incite his Bigfoot sighting. He wanted to make people think they saw a sasquatch.
But the state police never got a call about a Bigfoot sighting. Tenley’s capering about on the highway came to an abrupt halt when a 15-year old driver hit him with her car, another car was forced to swerve to keep from hitting him, and a third car, driven by a 17-year old driver, flat ran him over.
Not so much Sasquatch as sasquish.
While we as human beings rue the wasteful loss of human life, it’s pretty hard not to think that Tenley set himself up for his own demise. Playing in traffic is not something most people would do in the light of day, but to do so at night? Incredible. And then, to do so with extensive camouflage gear on simply boggles the mind.
You have to feel for his family, having lost one of their own in such a way. But Tenley really ought to head the list of Darwin Award winners for 2012. What are Darwin Awards, you ask? They are fictional awards handed out to people who, through their own actions, remove their DNA from the gene pool.
No comments:
Post a Comment