The Relevance of Crocodile Dundee

Crocodile Dundee was a movie, originally released in 1986, that was madly popular into the 1990s. You can watch it digitally on Amazon, Hulu, or YouTube, if you want to pay. It's still popular enough that the YouTube version isn't free.

In the movie, Paul Hogan plays a man called Mick "Crocodile" Dundee, based on a real Australian character, who advertises his services as an "outback" guide with exaggerated claims about his adventures. Some of his claims and feats of outdoorsmanship are the cheap tricks city people suspect. Asked what time it is when he's outdoors, he'll sneak a peek at a digital watch, then squint at the sun and tell the correct time to the minute. Reported to have had a leg bitten off by a crocodile, he has two good legs but one does show faint scars that might have been made by a crocodile that was not actually trying to eat him, or by who knows what else. A reporter goes out to report on his claims, spots his fakes easily, and prepares to denounce him as a fraud. Then Dundee, the reporter, and others get involved in an adventure in which Dundee demonstrates that he's a real outdoorsman, at least capable of doing all the things he claims to do, even if he's faked some of them. 

This post is relevant to local events. If you don't know which ones I mean, it doesn't matter, because the idea is relevant everywhere.

People who really are extraordinary, and really have done extraordinary things, face unusual temptations to play with their audiences. If there's a market for any memoirs you might write at age 25, as Meghan McCain observed, there's a tradition of making stuff up, too. 

I understand it well. As a child prodigy I used to be pestered by older kids. I really was able to read their schoolbooks--no faking there. At age five I could read the words in eighth grade books. Understanding what those words meant was a different matter. So these kids were actually doing a feeble juvenile sort of psychological research, only they didn't know that real psychological researchers always compensate people they study for their time. People would come up to me, not paying for my time, and try to find out: "If you can read this, do you know that? Do you remember what you read last week?" (Probably not, since I was sounding out words I didn't understand.) "If you don't remember it, do you understand it? If not, how can you be reading it? Did you really memorize the words in advance, or are you using 'extrasensory perception' to get them out of someone else's brain, or what?" Bored and annoyed by this attention, I'd start ignoring the questions and giving random answers. More than once I remember warning the pests, "I Am A 'No' Machine," and saying "no" to everything. My preference just to ignore the pests, however, led to bullying. "Do you want me to stop spanking you?" So I came to understand why people who, through no real fault of their own, attract a lot of attention, sometimes start feeding the pests really preposterous lines of, well, baloney.

In grade eight I heard some whoppers my brother had been telling people. They were boringly plausible except that they conflicted with what my school friends knew. Mother said I didn't need to debunk my brother's stories; it was nobody's business whether those stories were or weren't true. I thought about this and, later, told a set of whoppers of my own, for reasons that seemed sufficient at the time. As an adult, of course, I think we should have just refused to answer inappropriate questions, instead of telling lies. But neither of us was an adult at the time. So I can understand why some adults still revert back to that instinct that at least reduces the boredom schoolchildren feel, and tell lies.

Say Joe Jones puts a stuffed bear in a display in his store. The literal fact is that Mrs. Jones's great-uncle died two weeks ago, and although one of his heirs wanted to move into his house, and the others agreed to that, the heir wanted the former owner's "junk" cleaned out. So the Joneses were hauling away their share of the furniture, and their van had room for this bear. Mrs. Jones said "Don't bring that nasty old thing into my house!" Jones thought it would attract attention to the store, which it's doing. 

People ask, "Did you shoot that bear?" 

Rather than go into the facts Jones yields to temptation. "Yop."

"Where? When?"

"In Georgia, in 1968." He thinks that might have been when the bear was actually shot and stuffed, though as he remembers the story it was the great-uncle's cousin, who went along on that trip, who shot the bear. Though of course whoever shot the bear would have been motivated to lie. Bears were a protected species.

"Huh! Bears were a protected species in 1968. Yer lyin'."

"Nope. Y'see I was too young to be legally responsible in 1968. I had sneaked out with Grandpa's shotgun, as any fourteen, uh, four-year-old boy might do, and when I saw a real bear I started to run, but when I saw her starting to come after me I turned around and fired a lucky shot. Daddy gave me a big long lecture and a dollar, and had the bear stuffed. That's how it happened. Is too!"

Jones goes home, and Mrs. Jones, going through a trunk of her great-aunt's paraphernalia, finds an old straw hat with lace trimmings, and Jones takes it to the store and puts it on the bear.

"Where'd you get that hat?"

"Bear was wearing that hat when I shot her. Musta stolen it off a clothesline."

"Nobody hung hats out on a clothesline. Yer lyin'. Anyway that's a male bear."

"Is not."

"Is too. Lemme look..."

"Hands off my bear! Get out of my store!"

Now Jones is stuck with a big fat lie that he's told just because he doesn't want to get into any conversations about who his wife's great-uncle was and what his estate amounts to. That kind of conversation can attract thieves. But he knows the story's a lie, and suspects most of the people who've heard it know it's a lie and think it's funny, so he sticks to it. 

The question then becomes whether Jones is misrepresenting himself, with this harmless though inane lie. Does he, in fact, hunt? Can he, in fact, shoot? 

A couple of business owners in Gate City used to be known, and sometimes visited, for the outrageous stories that were told about them--maybe originally told by them, maybe not. 

Was my town really the home of a real Green Beret who saw a grenade coming at him and had the presence of mind, being righthanded, to catch the grenade lefthanded and throw it back? Who knows? I know we were the home of a Vietnam veteran who'd been ruled disabled, which he was not, and considered himself disfigured, though the only one of his scars other people seemed to notice was the damage to the left hand. I know there are photographs of Green Berets, and one of them looked like him, in Bob Hope's books. I know he was righthanded. I saw him show good reflexes and great presence of mind. If there really was such a Green Beret he might easily have been the one. Then again a person looking at the scars he had to point out to people, after claiming to be disfigured by them, would naturally think of landmines. I never heard that veteran describe what happened to him in Vietnam, exactly. It was not the sort of thing I like to ask people to relive. We'll never know.

Did X really claim to have shot...I have no idea. I do happen to know that, unlike the mediocre marksmen who usually invite me to shoot because I make anybody's scores look good, X was a real sharpshooter in his day. I've seen X bag squirrels. Maybe he did some other improbable feat of brilliant shooting, in the past, and maybe not. I wasn't in the hunting party. I don't know.

Did diabetic women give birth to healthy babies, and live to rear those children, in the 1930s? Not normally. But my grandmother did.

Did people who had polio recover and become strong, active outdoorsmen, in the 1930s? Not normally. But my father did.

Do children three and four years old see letters printed on pages well enough to read books? Not normally. But I did. 

 

Do small underfunded schools normally out-perform big, lavishly funded schools and win state trophies year after year after year? Not normally. But our school does.

Which makes our town an odd place to find scoffers who scoff, "Huh, he's lyin'," every time someone claims to have done something a bit unusual, although we have some of those too. Maybe he is lying. Maybe he has a valid reason for lying--not that he's cheating people out of money, or casting suspicion on an innocent person to protect a guilty one, or even pretending to be something he's not, but just to amuse himself at the expense of people who ask too many questions. Then again he might just be telling the truth. 

My town has been the home of a few characters like Crocodile Dundee. 

I still catch myself slipping into that kind of thing myself.

"Why weren't you at the computer center or, more recently, the cafe? Where've you been?" I've heard during some of the hiatus periods in the history of this blog.

"Spring cleaning."

"Nobody spends three weeks spring cleaning."

Well, actually, if what they have to clean is an orchard, they could make three months of it, if they really enjoyed being in the orchard and did not particularly enjoy writing in public places. 

So, one year, somebody went on. "I thought I saw you and John Doe in a boat, on the river, with a dog." 

That image sounds more complete than a dream. Maybe the person really saw two humans and a dog in a boat. 

But there was, for a minute or so, a real temptation to say, "Oh yes, and we just rowed on down the river and out to the Gulf of Mexico and..." 

I stopped. 

"No, really. I like living where I do. Sometimes I like being out in the fresh air. I did some pruning, some weeding, moved things around in the storage barn..." 

Maybe in some alternate universe I decided to elope with John Doe (maybe in that universe I did have that sort of feelings about him; maybe in that universe he and I were not otherwise attached). I don't know. If you believe that making up that kind of stories is lying, you have a moral responsibility not to tempt people to act like Crocodile Dundee.