Shocking? Not so much
The resignation of Karl O. Bender as St. Lawrence County deputy highway superintendent this week is about as shocking as ... well, about as shocking as an electronic dog collar. Not so much.
It probably was quit or get fired after he admitted to zapping a friend’s teenager with one of these dog collars. Oh, and the canine training device at the time was somehow positioned around the private puppies hanging out in the teen’s underwear.
The headlines said Bender pleaded guilty to child endangerment. But charges can be misleading. If police ticket you for taking a leak behind a downtown bar after last call, you’ll be branded by the charge of public lewdness and the implication that you were doing something really, really weird. Truth is, getting rid of 10 beers behind a closed bar isn’t all that strange. Dumb? Sure. Strange? Not so much.
When you hear child endangerment, canine shock collar and family jewels in the same sentence, you tend to think the worst. I know I did. When a staffer read aloud the first police report about the arrests of Bender, the boy’s mom and his uncle, my gut reaction was thoughts of kinky sex acts or cruel and unusual punishment. Things dark and sickening. Then I found out there was clothing between the boy’s boys and the shock collar prods. And he was taking the zaps on a dare, collecting $10 every time his package got pinged. Dumb? Sure. Dark and sickening? Not so much.
The boy must have been pretty proud of his bravado – even though the shock from these collars is little more than the ones you get after walking across a carpet and touching a door knob – because he took cell phone videos of the event into school to show his friends. The cell phone got confiscated because students are not supposed to be carrying them around on school property. The rest is history.
The story created quite a buzz, but is hardly shocking. Two things have been true forever: Humans will do almost anything for a buck. We love to laugh at the minor misfortunes of others. That’s human nature. Want to get some big laughs? Stub a toe in front of a friend and start hopping around cursing. And by all means, get the event on video.
In the old days, we laughed at films of Charlie Chaplin slipping on a banana peel. Today, you can go to the Internet and find as many videos as you want that show clips of people doing things like zapping themselves with shock collars. And television shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos have become immensely popular basically by showing clips of people hurting themselves.
Here is an example from that show: You got a baseball on a tee. The ball is connected to an elastic string to make it easy to retrieve between tee ups. A young boy at bat takes a Mighty Casey swat and sends the ball rocketing off the tee. When the ball reaches the end of its rope, it rockets back at the child and hits him – you guessed it – in his cojones. This is what America thinks is a funny video.
Another popular show called Jackass took to new heights the idea of videos showing people getting hurt for laughs. These guys hurt themselves. And we laughed. Did you see the “Beekini” episode? That’s where Johnny Knoxville in scant underpants has bee nectar painted on his crotch and then allows thousands of bees to land all over his manhood. http://www.jackassworld.com/blog/2009/03/04/jackass-archive-the-beekini/ America laughed at that kind of behavior through years of television episodes and two full-length Jackass movies.
The parents who made the America’s Funniest video of their boy hurting himself with a baseball sent it in to the show for a chance to win $10,000. They were never, as far as I know, charged with a crime for encouraging their boy to engage in behavior ultimately harmful to the business partners in his young jockstrap. They were lauded for catching the hilarity on video.
Bender was suspended from a job that by all accounts he has done very well for a long time. Then he was fined $270 by a court. Then he resigned. That’s too bad. He didn’t need to be fired or resign. This was a Jackass prank. It was a dumb bet. No one got hurt. Change only a few details of the story and wouldn’t people today be on the Internet laughing out loud at the video of the teen doing the testicle tango? Sure. Bender? Not so much.
