Isn't It Ironic?
Isn't It Ironic? Toward the end of March a couple of mourning doves joined the crowd of winter birds eating seed on our back deck, and we knew it was spring. Mourning doves are like robins: They...
...Doves are very impressed with humans, for some reason...
...I'm not sure we can change it, but we can always put up feeders and watch the birds and forget about it...
...Volume two includes Forbush's remarkable essay on the passenger pigeon, which used to be more numerous than any other bird in the country...
...So they were killed and eaten and they were delicious and that was that...
...A few weeks ago the latest Biennial opened at one of the country's leading art institutions, the Whitney Museum in New York...
...Homes burn in a Los Angeles firestorm because it is essential to preserve the habitat of—a rat...
...I was in a dovish mood this season when the birds showed up because I had just located, finally, the three volumes of Edward Howe Forbush's classic Birds of Massachusetts...
...Would you like to know exactly what this institution thinks about art...
...More likely he couldn't care less about animals one way or the other...
...it stays put until the last possible moment, hoping to strike Casual up a conversation...
...Mourning doves are like robins: They can survive the cold weather without going south, but you don't ordinarily see them around our Connecticut suburb during the winter because they have all withdrawn to the forest to sulk...
...I do know that the nation's culture is upside down...
...I'm no kind of serious bird-watcher but have always been a bird-lover, along with perhaps a hundred million other Americans...
...They are famous for mournful cooing...
...Could we possibly make it any clearer...
...A photograph of the last one—it died in the Cincinnati Zoo—is, in its own way, as moving as any photograph you will ever see...
...But there is nothing surprising in any of this...
...Exactly what it thinks about the paying public...
...David Gelernter...
...I belong there...
...Basically the passenger pigeon was a big mourning dove...
...the last one died in 1914...
...The nation's shame and remorse over its history of judging people by skin color is cynically transformed into a nationwide program of judging people by skin color...
...After all, I had recently published a piece in the City Journal blasting environ-mentalism...
...for its lobby gallery, the Whitney chose one that is based, thematically, on excrement...
...The public is pretty dense, after all...
...There are many gems in the show...
...Not long ago I was enthusing about a new finch feeder we'd installed when someone told me how surprising it was—he said "ironic"—that I should be fond of birds...
...I don't claim that the average environmental bureaucrat hates animals the way the Whitney hates art...
...In contemplating the dove you can read the pigeon's tragedy in outline...
...But nowadays you can't leave it there...
...They are slightly larger than robins and available only in a lovely rose pink over warm brown...
...The grainy old picture of the bird in profile, looking hesitantly at the camera, is an image of perfect loneliness...
...It doesn't take much imagination to guess the passenger pigeons' fate...
...Today's elite makes a deliberate practice of using Americans' kindness against them, and spells out its intentions in powerful symbols that will define our generation forever...
...they were published in 1925, '27 and '29...
...If you walk up to one that is standing on the ground, it cocks its small head sideways and takes you in with a curious and admiring gaze, as if you were the Statue of Liberty or some other important tourist attraction...
...I wish I could leave it there: The killing and eating of a whole species out of carelessness is a terrible deed, and the nation has been deeply ashamed of it for generations and is determined never to do it again...
...the museum felt that perhaps it ought to spell things out in three-inch capitals...
...Environmentalism today has nothing to do with kindness to animals, which is a species of kindness in general, and can't possibly justify cruelty to humans...
...They were good eating and (guileless and friendly as they were) easy to take...
...Because they have the smooth, swelling lines of a '48 Buick and heads that are three sizes too small, they look like a cartoonist's gentle parody of a bird...
...But environmentalist bureaucrats are cruel to humans on a regular basis, which goes to show that they are part of the postmodern elite...
...We often see a pair settled down side-by-side in a yellow birch with their heads touching (or nearly touching), looking exactly the way doves are supposed to...
...Because there are not many rabid anti-environmentalists on the market, I was immediately drummed into the corps, and am happy to be there...
...The dove looks amazingly edible—and when you approach, it doesn't take wing...
Vol. 2 • April 1997 • No. 31
