The Village Idiot: Trying to outrun bulls not smart
It is time for the yearly running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. You’ll see it on television, thousands of young men dressed in white slacks and white shirts with red bandannas tied around their necks trying to outrace six thundering bulls through the tiny, narrow, slippery cobblestoned streets of an ancient, northern Spanish town.
Why would anyone risk life and limb to do that?
Because what they don’t tell you on television is that almost every runner is falling-down drunk. Suddenly, the “why” makes all the sense in the world. It’s like that old joke: What are the most common last words of a drunken redneck? “Hey, guys, watch this!”
The running of the bulls is a nine-day festival, but the running only takes about 10 minutes every day. The other 23 hours and 50 minutes are spent drinking cheap red wine. Let an angry bull the size of an SUV chase me down the street? Sure, why not.
(Everyone knows drinking a few bottles of red wine every day is good for your health. Or was that a few glasses? I can never remember which one is right. Mainly because alcohol has killed my memory cells.)
And, as every year, a few dozen drunks will get gored trying to outrun the bulls; some even get killed. Very few of the news reports will point out that it turns out badly for the bulls, too, who are running from a holding corral to the bullfighting arena where they rarely win. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they NEVER win.
A lot of people think bullfighting is a mindless and brutal sport that should be banned. Those people have obviously never watched a WWE “SmackDown!”, or a NASCAR race, or skydiving or rock climbing or extreme this and extreme that.
It seems the more dangerous and the more pointless the sport, the more fans it will get. Sailing around the world solo. Crocodile hunting. Billionaire hot-air balloonists.
Baseball keeps losing its audience each year, while at the same time it’s getting so crowded on Mount Everest that there are “climber jams” on the way to the summit. You actually have to wait for people to come down before you can go up. What is this big hurry to kill ourselves?
Most people who do this sort of thing say things like, “I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I wanted to prove something.” I saw one mountain climber on the news who had spent six months away from home on his quest. While they’re interviewing the guy on the side of a mountain, the network made it possible for him to speak to his wife and child. What you saw was a frazzled looking woman with an 18-month-old kid on her hip saying, “Be careful” and “I love you.”
All I could think was “Why?”
Why couldn’t the mountain climber prove himself by staying home and changing a few diapers and helping around the house?
And what does climbing a mountain or running with the bulls prove? Are you really going to put “Got drunker than usual and ran with the bulls in Pamplona and by sheer dumb luck I didn’t get killed” on your resume? Is that the kind of employee companies are looking for?
Maybe some companies are. Maybe that’s who was running Enron and Worldcom. But wouldn’t “Spent six years learning to speak Spanish fluently” prove you can do something, too? Doesn’t taking eight years to get a Ph.D. prove something? But then, why bother? You’ll never see it on television.
(Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)