One thing that fascinates me about McCandless is how invested a set of people who write about him, including Jon Krakauer, are in him not having been a dumbass. Like, Krakauer has spent a lot of time attempting to prove that one of the wild plants McCandless ate poisoned him, and that the book he had which said it was okay was wrong, and There Was No Way He Could Have Known. And I'm like, look, maybe this is true, and maybe the book was misleading, but what does it do to prove that you're right about this? He's still dead. His death was still both preventable and tragic.
But Krakauer has gotten into actual in-print feuds about it. There seems to be this need that some people have for this kind of death not to be attributable to any error on the part of the person who died, and I don't understand it at all. I mean, I don't think any less of McCandless for starving to death! It sucks that he was unprepared, but... sometimes people get in over their heads? That just happens sometimes?
Oddly, I think in a way that Krakauer et al. live in a world that's somewhat kinder than the one I live in, because there seems to be an element of 'if you do it Right you will always be fine', along with 'and if something bad happens because you did it Wrong, it's your fault', whereas I'm more along the lines of well, sometimes when you do it wrong you get lucky and sometimes when you do it right shit happens anyhow.
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Date: 2017-01-30 02:12 am (UTC)But Krakauer has gotten into actual in-print feuds about it. There seems to be this need that some people have for this kind of death not to be attributable to any error on the part of the person who died, and I don't understand it at all. I mean, I don't think any less of McCandless for starving to death! It sucks that he was unprepared, but... sometimes people get in over their heads? That just happens sometimes?
Oddly, I think in a way that Krakauer et al. live in a world that's somewhat kinder than the one I live in, because there seems to be an element of 'if you do it Right you will always be fine', along with 'and if something bad happens because you did it Wrong, it's your fault', whereas I'm more along the lines of well, sometimes when you do it wrong you get lucky and sometimes when you do it right shit happens anyhow.