A man called from Minnesota on the odd mission of trying to explain to me that I am wrong to be amused at bow hunters who shoot pheasants in the rear end, creating a flying birdsicle.
I assume, since he called from Minnesota, and given his lack of humor, that he was a German. Or maybe even a Norwegian. You know how they are.
But I was not surprised at the call. After all these years of pulling legs, I know that no matter how bluntly you signal you are kidding, there will always be at least three people out there who take any joke you write seriously.
Pheasant hunters, for instance. Every time I do a column poking fun at pheasant hunters, I hear about it from angry people with guns. But all I did was to point out that the bow hunters are an improvement over most hunters who shoot, not only pheasants, but cows, dogs and tractors.
Of course, the calls and letters came in, but more than usual. Apparently, some hunters have lost their sense of humor right now because they are a little paranoid about a movement among sanctimonious twits to ban hunting. (No, a sanctimonious twit is not a type of pheasant; it's more a type of Californian.) The angry callers accused me of being ''an anti-hunter!''
I am not. I believe some animals chickens, for instance are mean and stupid and deserve to die. And I don't think pheasants are any better. But chickens taste better. An old oil rag tastes better than a pheasant.
I first became aware years ago that a few readers think all columns are serious when Art Buchwald wrote a column explaining how Secretary of State Henry Kissinger could travel so much, seeming to be everywhere: Kissinger had been cloned, Buchwald wrote with a straight face. There were five Henry Kissingers.
Not so, said the angry woman who called me from Clarkston the morning the column appeared. She told me the column was another journalistic lie. She said she had met Henry Kissinger and there was only one of him.
Never mind how meeting one of the Kissingers proves there aren't four more. The question is how anyone could have thought a column on cloning the secretary of state was meant to be serious.
I have since learned the hard way how literal-minded some people can be. Medicare, for instance. A lot of doctors opposed Medicare before it went into effect and I resorted to satire to answer them. Satire is tricky because it involves pretending to agree with what you consider a ridiculous point of view and then exaggerating the belief to the point of underscoring how silly it is.
And so, in pretending to take the side of those doctors, I said they were right that society can't afford medical costs for senior citizens, that it is not natural to live to be so old and that senior citizens should die at a reasonable age the way God intended all of it written with a straight face.
Too straight. I received no calls and letters from doctors. But senior citizens called me in considerable number, asking how I could be so hard-hearted.
If I were to write that column today, I would do some wild joke in the second paragraph that was so zany it would be plain to everyone that I was kidding.
Well, almost everyone. There will always be a few exceptions. For instance, I sometimes do columns poking fun at racial prejudice by attacking one of the races in this country that is not normally subjected to racial prejudice. I like to let everybody know how it feels, even in fun. And somehow suggesting that everyone of blessed English extraction is inferior tends to underscore how ridiculous it is to judge people by their race.
Consequently, when the FBI started interviewing Americans of Middle Eastern extraction as part of the war scare, I did a piece pointing out that we had also been in two wars with Germany. I said we should jail all the Germans in America as well as all the English and Swedes and all other light-skinned people who sometimes intermarry with Germans. In fact, I said, we should jail everyone in America who has dark skin and everyone in America who has light skin, just to make sure we got all the dangerous people.
Most people laughed (even the English, who are usually so slow). But I received two phone calls from furious Germans, including one who threatened to punch me out.
I was not suprised. Germans are so violent. In fact, we probably should put all 40 million of them in jail.
And feed them pheasant.
