mallorys_camera | The Sad and Cautionary Moral Tale of Dog the Bounty Hunter (Reply)

The really big news this morning as oil reaches for $100 and the stock market plunges and Hillary's advisors dance the Headless Chicken (kinda like the Funky Chicken only you pretend your head is in a noose) is the Fall of Dog Chapman, a Cautionary Moral Tale for the ages.

Dog Chapman – for those of you who have better taste in late night insomniac television viewing than I do – is the bounty hunter whose life A&E has been chronicling for several years now. A&E call him "the greatest bounty hunter of all time!" I don't know. I think that's a gratuitous Steve McQueen dis.

But that's nothing in comparison with the dis below:

http://www.nationalenquirer.com/2007/popup/full-wmv.html

There's a certain Cassandra-like prescience to this sound byte. Dog's no dummy. He doesn't want his son dating an African American girl, he says, because chez Dog they use the N-word on a casual basis; he doesn't want somebody taping this and selling it to the tabloids: "I'm not gonna take a chance ever in life of loosing everything I've worked for for thirty years because some fuckin' n_____ heard us say n_____ and turned us in to the Enquirer Magazine –"

(Yeah, I know. Kind of mealy-mouthed to render it in dashes. But the word makes me queasy. I can't even use it when I'm talking about the rap group who recorded Straight Outta Compton. I've been well conditioned, I guess.)

" – Our career is over. I'm not taking that chance at all!"

And yet that's exactly what he was doing! A real M.C. Escher buh! moment, the hand drawing the hand.

I'll miss Dog. Cheesy television really is the best soporific plus, you know, now I'll never know the secret behind Beth's formidable rack.