THE YEAR IN BRIEF 1993

THE NEWSPAPER report I remember most vividly from the past year had nothing to do with Hume/Adams, Rabin/Arafat or even Michael Jackson.

It was a snippet from the World News In Brief section on the back-page of the Irish Independent last October under the intriguing headline DOG SHOOTS MAN DEAD and it went as follows:

“A Romanian hunter got more than he bargained for on a deer shoot – his own dog shot him dead in the car on the way home.

“Police believe the 43-year-old man was shot when his dog touched the trigger of his loaded hunting rifle on the back seat of the car. He was hit by two bullets and died in hospital 30 hours later.”

Now, none of us would like to think that were we to be gunned down in cold blood by a barking assassin, the news would not only be relegated to the back-pages but also rattled off In Brief. However, there is something about the sparse, frank nature of some small-print titbits that can potentially reveal more about the world in which we live than a dozen banner headlines.

After all, what do we actually learn from an eight-page Irish Times analysis of the Northern Ireland peace process or the GATT talks, apart from the fact that trees shouldn’t really have to die this way? Two paragraphs about a Romanian deer hunter being bumped off by his own mutt, on the other hand, tells us a great deal. It tells us that life’s a piece of shit, that it can be horrific in a random way that is impossibly freakish and even comic.

If you like, it can tell a cautionary tale about the dangers of bloodsports and the handling of guns. As far as I’m concerned, it tells me to never turn my back on an armed household pet.

Killed his Mother

Throughout the back-pages of 1993, there were thousands of other postscripts from the edge. Some of them were quirky yet oddly profound, most of them were just plain quirky but all of them were infinitely more interesting than much of what were laughingly referred to as important matters of state.

For instance, you won’t have read about it in the leading articles but a group of American scientists have this year discovered that the missing link in the chain of human evolution is, in fact, psychedelic drugs. In a paper entitled Plan, Plant, Planet, “renegade naturalist” Terence McKenna has argued that the leap from bipedal apes to beings with full human consciousness actually took place when our prehistoric ancestors began (accidentally at first) ingesting large quantities of hallucinogenic plants such as magic mushrooms.

“Over a period of time, the primates would then have experienced increased visual acuity and access to the transcendent,” says McKenna. “The state of consciousness would have provided foraging early-humans with a reason to return repeatedly to these plants, in order to re-experience their bewitching novelty. Ultimately, hallucinogenic plants became the catalyst for everything about us that distinguishes us from other primates. They were, therefore, the causal agent in the appearance of spiritually aware human beings and, probably, the genesis of religion.”

Inevitably, there will be those who will use the theory that we evolved from the primordial to the modern with the help of mind-bending narcotics to suggest that their continued use will aid the further development of our species. The genus Hippy and particularly the hippy geniuses that I know are, however, living proof that this process has already begun to reverse, and is fast heading in the opposite direction.

Speaking of creatures whose knuckles are calloused from excessively frequent contact with the terra firma, my long-held belief that most football fanatics are in dire need of a check-up from the neck up received considerable corroboration in 1993. In Britain, the trend of fans requesting that when they die their ashes be scattered all over their team’s home ground has become so widespread that the Football Association has had to issue guidelines on how best to dispose of such remains.

In any given week, some pitches are said to boast a higher body count than the Cambodian killing fields. And, in September, there was a short news story in the tabloids about two small boys who turned up at Manchester City’s ground with their grandad in a shoe box. The boys asked if they could deposit his ashes in goal and were granted permission to do so. They then went to the penalty spot and kicked balls into the net as if he were the keeper. Presumably it was done in the name of the father, the son and the goalie host.

Bob Dylan’s never-ending world tour continued this year with a month-long trek around Australia. For the most part, the concerts were as uneventful as we have come to expect from the Big Zzz but controversy did surround his appearance in the Tasmanian capital, Hobart. There, a man who had trampled his mother to death to the accompaniment of the Dylan song, ‘One More Cup Of Coffee For The Road’, was released from prison for a night to see his idol in concert.

Richard Dickinson, aged 25, killed his mother, Gladys, five years ago after she complained about his very loud playing of Dylan’s Desire album at 4 a.m. He told police he thought she was the evil character, Isis, from the album. When she was dead, he sprinkled instant coffee on the body while a neighbour tried to pull him away. He was later found not guilty of murder on grounds of insanity.

Dickinson’s outing to the Hobart concert caused considerable public clamour but it had the blessing of the prison authorities and the Tasmanian Attorney General. Bob Dylan himself was informed about Dickinson’s history and about the fact that he would be attending the show. On the night itself, Dylan decided to omit ‘One More Cup Of Coffee For The Road’ from his set.

Blown clean off

The biggest chortle of the year from the mini-bulletin board came with the news that the bullion-skinned, marble-toned cast of Baywatch are regularly laid up with bouts of diarrhoea, stomach upsets and viral infections of various kinds – all brought on by the noxiously polluted waters of Santa Monica Bay in and around which the series is shot.

Californian environmental groups blame the appalling conditions in the Bay on outflows of partly treated waste from the area’s two large sewage treatment plants and a storm drainage system that sweeps waste from the city’s gutters straight out to sea whenever there’s a downpour.

Two of Baywatch’s leading stars, David Hasselhoff and Pam Anderson, have suffered long periods of botty trouble as a result of swallowing even small quantities of water, and, at one point, the rest of the cast was averaging two sick days per week for the same reason. On one particular day in March, the severed arms of a middle-aged woman were found among the debris and detritus washed up on the beach.

Work on a major clean-up of Santa Monica Bay has begun but until the pollution levels are dramatically reduced the Baywatch team is taking no further chances. For the show’s signature ocean rescue scenes, crews film the actors jumping out of their trucks at one beach but stop the cameras as soon as the stars are ankle-deep in the sea. The action then shifts to another beach several miles up the coast in Malibu, where the sea is cleaner, or even to a specially-constructed swimming pool on an interior set in Los Angeles.

Elsewhere, from Washington we heard that the infamous rat-eating, Watergate burglar, former FBI agent and unabashed ex-con, G. Gordon Liddy, has been given his own nationwide radio talk show in the US, specialising in advice on weapons and details on different killing methods.

Liddy, who served four and a half years for organising the bugging raid on the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters in the early ’70s, has become something of a hero with a certain type of American. He brags about how he once ate rats and held his finger in a burning flame to prove his courage to his FBI subordinates and he also claims to be a master of “the dark arts of silent murder.”

As a convicted felon, Liddy – now aged 62 – is himself not permitted to have a gun licence but he says his wife has over thirty firearms, “some of which she keeps on my side of the bed.” He also boasts a collection of ninety knives. His three-hour daily radio programme is always inundated with calls from listeners who ask questions like: “How big a hole will a .44 calibre pistol put in someone’s skull?” and “At what part of the neck should a shotgun be placed to ensure that the head is blown clean off?”

Meanwhile, a pithy Associated Press report told us that, on April 7th last, a building company manager was paraded naked through the streets of the Nigerian capital, Lagos, and fined a goat and two cartons of beer for having tried to seduce a friend’s wife. The unidentified man was paraded by her husband around their neighbourhood for over three hours.

In addition to the goat and beer, a community court ordered that the building executive be ordered to pay the husband a fine that consisted of a hen, five yams, a bunch of bananas, some kolanuts, a bottle of palm oil, some pepper and $20 in cash.

An inadvertent comma

Finally, remember last year’s general election during which Albert Reynolds announced in his own inimitable near-English that he wanted to “de-humanise the health services” – and then, it turned out that he meant every word of it. In 1993, a similarly revealing Freudian slip was made by Bill Clinton.

The U.S. President was speaking to a group of Caribbean Heads of State and was given a speech to read by his aides which it was clear he had never seen before. “I’m very happy to be here with you gentlemen today,” Clinton proclaimed. “Our countries are bound together by our common interest in fighting, drug trafficking and by our common history.”

By placing an inadvertent comma between the words fighting and drug, he unintentionally told like it really is, for once.

God, as they say, may be in the details but the truth often lies with the punctuation.