Bull Below the Belt
Monday, July 27th, 2009More serendipity today, this time in Trouw. Really, though, how could my roving eye not take note of a headline that reads A horn in the crotch? It’s a brief piece, by Wim Boevink, but the five photos are really what it’s all about rather than the text per se. All you animal rights activists out there, come clicking, because here you can behold your ultimate revenge fantasy as, for once, it’s the bull that gets the better of the matador. He calls himself “El Cid,” after Spain’s national hero (the matador does, not the bull), but nonetheless found himself rather unheroically caught by a horn both in the thigh and the “crotch” (Dutch: kruis).
“[T]he humiliation could hardly be greater,” Boevink observes. But then he continues:
Question: with whom should we sympathize the most, the man or the animal? The former was led off wounded, the latter did not survive. When it comes to sympathy we must fear the worst for our Spanish hero, who was wounded in his manhood. But what the bull did was below the belt [onder de gordel].
Oh I don’t know, that strikes me as unseemly favoritism towards the matador, who after all entered the ring voluntarily (while his opponent did not) and was fully aware of the dangers he ran in so doing. How do my esteemed readers vote in the sympathy-stakes here?
