Culling The Herd

Every now and then I read about some group of off-road enthusiasts who try to make themselves more palatable to the population at large by repairing trails, picking up trash, or issuing press releases urging their members to be courteous and to obey property laws. I'm all in favor of that. As a former dirt biker myself, I have no problem with people enjoying themselves with off-road vehicles. But I happen to think that their efforts are doomed by the fact that a significant population of quad owners are jerkwads. I don't know of it's 10% or 40% or what, but I'd estimate that at least a quarter of all the quad owners I've come into contact with in the last few years have, shall we say, taken their social cues from NASCAR.

There was the guy who, when told that he was trespassing on private property, said "So?"

It's not like we have a huge spread either. We own two and a half acres of land, so it's not as though we're running the Ponderosa Ranch here.

Or the guy who tried to argue with me that he had the perfect right to ride on my land because it happens to include a portion of a dry wash and was thus "public property". He got all red-faced and ornery about it too, apparently believing that it was better to try to intimidate his way into riding on my property than to simply go out in the desert where tens of thousands of acres of actual public land awaited him.

Or the guys who tore down our "No Trespassing" signs and threw them in the bushes, or the guys who dismantled and moved aside the barricade we put up to replace the signs, or the guys who can't find anything else to do with their quads except spin doughnuts on the gravel road and tear it to hell, or the guys who can't seem to find anywhere to blubber back and forth on their quads than six inches beyond my property line, back and forth, back and forth, all damn day, pausing only long enough to throw down another six pack of cut-rate discount beer.

So while I applaud the efforts of concerned off-road enthusiasts to give their hobby a better political smell, I don't think they'll succeed until they cull their own herd. I don't know how many of these boobs they'd have to kill, but maybe after rubbing out a few thousand of them the rest would get the idea. Every time I hear off-roaders crying about how they're being systematically shut out of this or that area, I can't help but think "You know, if some of you guys didn't act like assholes and didn't comport yourselves as the lords of creation because you've got quads, maybe you wouldn't be systematically shut out."

Not that quads and off-roading are the only offenders. Every hobby and pastime has its proportion of assholes, and the "normal" members of that hobby or pastime should be given extraordinary powers to thin out the jerks. I once entered a model of a Chieftain main battle tank in Iranian markings in a model contest, only to be told in a highly deprecatory manner that "Iranian Centurions were never that color." Oh yeah? First of all, it's a Chieftain, not a Centurion. Second, how the hell do you know what color Iranian tanks are painted? Served in the Pasdaran Baseej, have you? One should be permitted - expected - perhaps even required - to drop such people on the spot with a single well-aimed shot. (Nobody has any real clue exactly what WWII German airplane colors like "grauviolett" really looked like, but you'll still run into self-satisfied turds who insist that they know.)

One of my favorites was the owner of a hobby shop (I won't divulge names) who suffered from Panzer Lust. The characteristic features of Panzer Lust are a bizarre fixation on German tanks from World War Two and a tendency to say things like "The Germans had the most powerful military machine in the world..." (A statement which any sane person would recognize as nonsense, considering the truly unparalleled size, power and reach of the US military in World War Two.) Anyhow, in the closing stages of World War Two German engineers developed a superheavy tank that German tankers nicknamed Maus. Maus is pronounced "mouse" and in fact means mouse; the German tankers intended for the nickname to be ironic, considering the vast size, inordinate weight and general clumsiness of the superheavy tank. But this guy, the guy with the Panzer Lust, proceeded to tell his cronies in the hobby shop about the great features of the tank, which he consistently mis-pronounced as Maws, clearly suggesting to his credulous lackies that it was somehow related to the Maws of Death. Anyhow, as he was going on about how if the Germans had only built ten or fifteen more of them they could have thrown the stupid smelly Russians all the way back to Moscow, I found myself wishing that I had been granted what the Romans called postestas maior so I could have culled the herd.

Panzer Lust really irritates me, mostly because I can't tell it from low-grade Nazi Worship.

Once I was in a wargame store where the clerk and his chubby, sebaceous, ungroomed cohorts were having a fairly impassioned discussion of what exactly they should do to celebrate Rommel's Birthday. Last time I checked, Rommel was a Nazi who fought for the most evil regime in modern history (and maybe the most evil regime ever). But there they were, debating whether they should have burgers or brats, and whether they should play Panzerarmee Afrika or Tobruk to celebrate. These guys weren't physically intimidating, nor were they assholes in the usual sense, but still, Rommel's Birthday? What's next, Zyklon-B Day?

The need for cullage even extends into music. I once read a quote from a black metal drummer who calls himself Hellhammer, where he said something like "I was playing in the shit band Entombed..." BLAM! Time for that to end. If Entombed was such a shit band, what were you doing in it? And I think that any band which records a song that includes the lyric "Yeah!" needs to be culled. Or bands that mention themselves, or who write "concert songs" that consist of basically nothing but a list of cities, so that no matter where they go they can get a cheap roar from the crowd (and, if Hoboken isn't on the list, they can simply swap Holbrook out and get a cheap roar anyway).

I'm drifting off topic.

Mainly, I'm just complaining that there seems to be a lot more stupidity out and about these days than in the past, and that pop culture makes virtues of stupidity and confrontational nastiness. I don't like that development. And if you don't like it, I'll punch you in the snoot! Oh no, they've gotten to me too!

Time to cull myself.