The Death of Irwin

The Death of Irwin


If you are as tired as me of thinking about the insanity in the Middle East, the foolishness of Israel and the White House, the failure of any sort of diplomatic mission in resolving long standing problems, starvation and degradation in Africa, the bickering about the mid-term elections, the blundering in Iraq, the blundering in Lebanon, the fact that this latest batch of war-crimes and
terrorist acts will go unpunished,
if you are just as fed up as me at the lack of good irony in
this sad state of affairs,
then you must have been just as saddened, and delightfully entertained as me,













to find that Steve Irwin, the famed Croc-hunter, was tragically killed yesterday, not by a man-eating shark, not by a giant croc, not by a black adder, a diamond back rattler, a lion, or a cobra, but rather was pierced through the chest by that undercredited, yet placid, beast, THE STING RAY...

I loved Steve Irwin. "LOOK AT THIS" he'd say, in his rye Australian tongue, with his eyes wide open, staring at a clump of "FELINE POO" that he'd found in a cave and was holding between two fingers. Then he'd take a big sniff of it, and tell us it was fresh. Good old Steve. He was as a legend. The only cool animal show host. Entertaining to all ages. He wasn't disturbingly feminine, yet married, and totally exitable and girly like that one guy who loves to do shows in Thailand... He wasn't a cocky, Irish, reptile obsessed, know-it-all with a big nose and red hair (yuck), like that other guy. He wasn't some polished BS artist made in America by lame producers who say "this guy has a pretty face, and a biology degree... so;" no, he was genuine Steve. Steve Irwin. We all know Steve Irwin, we all know the Croc-Hunter. But he wasn't just a Croc-hunter, he had a well rounded interest in all animals, he wasn't just obsessed with one species, like that Dork Manny the Shark Swimmer. Steve was as exited about feline poo as he was about a reticulated python, or a great white shark. Steve was the King. And the king has died.

This news did come as a shock, especially as I was reading it in a spanish newspaper, and didn't really get what was happening until about two paragraphs into the article. The headline in El Periodico: "El 'cazador de cocodrilos' Steve Irwin fallece en Australia... El ecologista fue atacado por una raya cuando rodaba un documental," did little for my understanding. I caught that he was attacked, or being attacked, but "rayo" was not in the dictionary, so I had little idea what was going on. The picture in the article was also misleading. It was the infamous photo of Steve holding his new baby while in a pen with a big "cocodrilo" which he is feeding. I thought maybe the spanish are a couple years behind in the news and that the Michael Jackson (hang baby from window, hang baby in front of giant crocodile...) like news story had just finally made it over to them; and for a moment it all made sense: Steve Irwin, in fine health, is being attacked by the miss-the-boat-spanish-media, for his baby mis-hap of two years ago. Not so.
A couple lines in, after gathering that he was filming a new documentary, (to be hosted by his 8 year old daughter... *couldn't my dad have been Steve Irwin*) north of Brisbane, and nowhere near his croc pens, I came across this little bit of sentence: "...fallecio ayer en aguas de Australia...", my interest thus being perked with the possibility that the attacks on Steve were in response to an Australian water blowjob, I went ahead and grabbed the dictionary to confirm "fallecio," which it turns out means "died" (in preterito imperfecto). So now I'm really confused. And I go to Google News to find out what's really going on. Well, good old Steve, petter of poisonous snakes, shark swimmer, crocodile hunter, "fallecio" while snorkling with a sting ray.

The funny thing about sting-rays is that, not only are they non-aggressive, but as emedicine.com tells us:

Stingray injuries (eg, puncture wounds, lacerations, envenomations) tend
to have good outcomes. If patients do not develope infection or other
complications, they can expect to have minimal pain in 24-48 hours and
healing within 1-2 weeks


Except when you get jabbed in the heart. If Steve had been struck in the leg, in the arm, in his ass, he would have been fine, even in the back or almost any part of his chest, he would have survived. But the venomous barb punctured his heart. Can someone please tell me what the odds of that might be?


And what a sad, but welcome change for him to die this way. It's like Elvis having a heart attack, and dying on stage, instead of just dying cause he was a fat-drug addicted, puffy bacon eater. It's a beautiful way for Steve to die, because he died doing what he loved. He was in the water, his second home; and what a shocker: it wasn't a shark that killed him, or a snake, or a crocodile, none of the animals that he wanted to show us were over-demonized, and worthy of protection. He would not have wanted to be killed by an animal we were already scared of, animals he wanted us to protect. But a sting-ray? Perfect. There won't be a back-lash against sting-rays. There won't be a "great sting-ray hunt of 2006" in response to the tragic demise of Steve. And that is how he would have wanted it. The poor guy, he probably just couldn't believe it, one of the least dangerous animals in the world to swim with, pierces his heart with it's stinger.

Steve Irwin was as cool as they come. He never went Gucci on us. Like Crocodile Dundee, he always looked out of place on 5th Avenue. His success and wealth never went to his head. He stuck around his family zoo and dedicated masses of energy into it, and into environmental conservation. He may have been one of the last people alive who deserved to be stabbed in the heart with a poisonous barb. But the people in the news on a general basis, well, they just don't seem to do enough snorkeling.
And what lesson is there here for us? For us I cannot say. For me, the only conclusion I can draw is that my Spanish is horrific. I, like Steve Irwin, am a native English speaker, and it looks as though that won't be stopping any time soon. Oh, and also, now I know i'm better off playing with poisonous spiders, snakes, and rolling around with crocodiles than swimming with a sting-ray; or wait, maybe not.