This morning I read a horrific article in the Guardian that felt relevant to this project about hard men and the hardening of the heart of men. The article by Robert Booth describes how food critic AA Gill shot a baboon through its lung in an arranged  Tanzanian safari.  Perhaps worse than his disgusting reasons for this action was the fact that he wrote about the deadly encounter and his sick heart’s motivation in his column in the Sunday Times. A quote from Booth’s article sums up why I identify Gill as a hard man who doesn’t know he’s been consumed by his own hard man trash.

Gill admitted he had no good reason for killing the animal. “I know perfectly well there is absolutely no excuse for this,” he wrote. “There is no mitigation. Baboon isn’t good to eat, unless you’re a leopard. The feeble argument of culling and control is much the same as for foxes: a veil for naughty fun. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films: guns and bodies, barely a close-up of reflection or doubt. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?”

If this was an expression of an existential crisis or if he’s trying to reckon with his own mortality I might have suggested a reading list and Scotch Whiskey. What’s it’s like to shoot someone like “in all those films”? Are you fucking kidding me? This isn’t the voice of a man pained by his eventual demise or awed by the rule of nature.

This is a man with a seat at the Devil’s dinner table…