Triggered by the comeback of the Martens!
By Nick Jacobs
The headline, “Engineering a Comeback” by Deborah Weisberg in the Pittsburgh Quarterly, immediately caught my attention. At first, I thought it might have been a political article which was something that I had not expected from that publication.
Who was it that was engineering a comeback? Was it the former president, a senator, state legislator, or mayor? Was it John F. Kennedy Jr., Elvis, or, as the conspiracy theorists say, aliens flying over in ships shaped like Tic Tacs or giant weather balloons?
As I read further down, I realized the article was about the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s reintroduction of the marten, a mink-like animal that was lost long ago to logging. The Game Commission was repopulating Pennsylvania with these little animals.
It was such a relief that it was not more political rhetoric. I was happy to read a wild animal story for a change. It wasn’t about Michigan or South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, or the border. It was about the Pennsylvania woods.
Then, when I went deeper into the article, the author explained that a marten is a weasel-like creature. That triggered me! Remember, the definition of a weasel is sneaky, untrustworthy, or insincere.
She went on to explain that martens preyed on grouse and turkeys. Now I was really getting suspicious. Was this an article with a clandestine political meaning? Was it a wildlife article intended to expose our political system? You know that to grouse can mean to grumble, complain, and whine, and if you watch C-SPAN or happen to tune to the cable news channels, you’ll definitely hear political grousing.
Was it true the martens ate grouse and turkeys? Or was it a way to point out that there are as many martens (weasels) in politics as there are turkeys. Then there was the connection between ruffed grouse and quail. Hmmmm. Wasn’t Dan Quayle a former vice president of the United States?
Oh, and there was a bird hunting incident that hit close to home that I remembered, too. It was a gray, rainy day when another former vice president, Dick Cheney, went to Ligonier to hunt birds including quail. He was there with Rick Santorum, who was then a Pennsylvania U.S. senator, and the past head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, who was recently found liable for misusing over $5 million of NRA money.
According to employees from the area who had been sworn to secrecy, these luminary hunters reportedly killed hundreds of birds including turkeys and ducks. No big deal. Right? Well, supposedly, they were shooting the birds as they were being released from the cages directly in front of them. That, of course, was only hearsay.
But when I read the word duck, that stirred another memory that made the Ligonier massacre pale in comparison. It was a day in 2006 when the same vice president was hunting and mistook one of his hunting buddies for a quail who should have ducked.
He turned and shot 78-year-old Harry Whittington. The buck shot from his 28-gauge Perazzi shotgun, a weapon which can cost between $12,000 and $52,900, got Whittington in the right cheek, neck, and chest. Whittington suffered a non-fatal heart attack, and a collapsed lung, but, upon examination, the doctors determined that he absolutely was not a quail.
It seems to me that people who create conspiracy theories are experts at connecting words, incidents, and unsubstantiated hearsay in order to twist the truth, slant the facts, and persuade their followers that they have answers to unsolved or unsolvable situations or problems.
Let’s face it, we’ve all seen politicians turn-on-a-dime when it meant getting or keeping votes. But I’ve known some very honorable, hard-working, sincere, trustworthy politicians, too. If you know an honest one, please tell them I humbly apologize. But remember, once a politician finds a way to keep getting re-elected and to put money where they want it to go, things won’t change, and weasels and turkeys may take over the forests.
Nick Jacobs is a Windber resident.