It's a bird! it's a plane! it's GORE!

September 15th 2007 – In Shoreham U.K. this week, an experienced pilot and airfield manager (Brian Brown) was killed during a WW2 reenactment at an air show; his plane crashed into a hill in front of 20,000 onlookers. Earlier this month, in Radom Poland, two pilots in light aircrafts ran into each other at another air show; both were killed as a result of aerial acrobatics gone bad. Finally, in Late July, at the end of a Wisconsin air show, two pilots ``clipped wings`` upon landing at the closing of the show; once more, the aircrafts were WW2 relics that fell apart killing one of the pilots and severely injuring the other one. I could easily draft a dissertation of these occurrences; needless to say they are frequent and international.

These are surely very tragic events and the victims are people with grieving families yet I simply must advance my hypothesis that these talented people died in an unnecessary and futile way. Some people can paint or play music, some can master foreign languages or calculate logarithms in their minds….and then there are those who can juggle chainsaws, wrangle lions or fly a small and old plane really fast and really close to another oncoming tin can. These last ``talents`` aim to entertain us by performing death-defying stunts which we could never dream of living through. The problem is, we don’t WANT to attempt such a thing because of the words DEATH-DEFYING. The term also applies to activities such as: throwing rocks at a bear in the forest, drinking a tall glass of detergent, going down Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel, telling Vladimir Putin of Russia he looks like Dobby the house-elf or pretending to hide nuclear weapons in the Middle-East. Everyone will be very surprised and entertained to know how you lived through it but it would take some truly morbid fans to watch the activity in action…with their children, a beer and some popcorn. They are at the edge of their seat, waiting for some really cool stuff.

We rarely hear about chainsaw jugglers cut to pieces in front of amused children but a fatal plane crash at an air show no longer seems possible, it seems probable. I accuse the pilots of risking their lives simply for the adrenaline rush of entertaining the working classes. Furthermore, I heavily criticize and judge the attending spectators that gawk at an accident waiting to happen. The deceased pilots could have been valued and talented members of a military organization and when they would have died in action, a general would have given their national flag to their widows saying ‘he was a great man, he made a difference, he died defending what he believed in’’. It is with such a tragic subject that historic distance can provide some welcomed comic relief.

Morbid curiosity such as the fans attending an air show is not a product of the XXth century. We must travel back through the ages of tightrope walking over waterfalls, Medieval jousting or throwing some slaves to the lions in the Roman coliseum to see some truly disturbing events. It is by trekking backwards through history that we encounter highly fluctuating levels of morbidity AND curiosity. British history, for example, is drenched in very questionable entertainment.

In Tudor England (1485-1603), perhaps the bloody conflicts with Holland, France and Spain as well as horrid living standards, overwhelming taxation and constant epidemics created this morbid curiosity that the English revelled in at the time (contemporary analysts would probably blame violent movies or video games). This period was the birthplace of ``bear baiting``, a ``sport`` where a bear was sedated, tied to a sturdy post at the center of an arena and left to fight off rabid wolves that were unleashed upon it. No no, I know what you are thinking, ``surely this was an obscure activity that was performed secretly by the poor masses``, but unfortunately, this was as popular and attended as NFL football, NBA basketball or FIFA Soccer. Actually, Shakespeare’s famous Globe Theatre was only half of a larger entertainment complex; the other half was a bear-baiting arena. Queen Elizabeth I herself was quite fond of the macabre spectacle. This being Elizabethan England, they got bored quite fast, so they made the show more interesting by blinding the bear with acid beforehand or pitting the bear against more exotic monsters such as elephants or hippopotamuses (or is it hippopotami); now that’s some good comic relief.

All in all, I personally like being entertained by the taboo and the morbid but that’s what cartoons and movies are for, use your imagination people! If you can’t, TV and books can do that for you. A person, especially one with potential, should never have to walk to an early grave for such a stupid reason and at this point, the other people that come to watch, make me wish we never tore down the bear-baiting arenas of England.

(Pictured: A grizzly bear who has the awesome Latin name ursus arktos horribilis - F16s over New York)

End.