By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

As I’m sure you know by now the “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin is dead. The man with a zoology degree and a magnanimous personality “lived life to the fullest, lived life by his own rules, died doing what he loved” blah, blah, blah. Believe me, if you could ask Steve whether he would want to die engaged in an activity he loved or live doing something he didn’t, he’d be folding socks right now very much alive.

If you can choose your death then I guess dying doing what you love would beat the alternative, but either way you’re dead. That is where Steve Irwin the “Crocodile Hunter” is now, dead.

In a death befitting the beginning of an episode of “Six Feet Under,” Irwin passed on, leaving a wife and two children. Let alone all the other friends and relatives of the “Croc Hunter” and the millions of fans of his programs and most importantly there are three people that will lose a daddy and a husband. Not only is the Crocodile Hunter gone, there is also a videotape of Irwin’s last moments.

Irwin’s cameraman caught the stingray sticking him in the heart and his last moments before turning off the camera. Now there is video of his death floating around out there, and there are legions of folks ready to watch it. The original copy is now in the hands of the police in Queensland, Australia but who knows how many copies are ready to surface on the Internet, and that causes me worry.

Last Tuesday a rumor was passed in the back room cubicle farm at the radio station where the on-air folks’ desks are. We were enjoying a normal Tuesday in our cubes working on our next day’s shows and ruthlessly lampooning each other in an attempt to break the other one’s spirit and bring pain and anguish to his psyche, when someone announced that the Steve Irwin death video was online.

A “free crack” sign at a D.C. mayor’s convention couldn’t have started a bigger stampede; as some of my co-workers scrambled to be the first on their block to see the video of the “Croc hunter” being speared in the heart by a stingray’s barb. Thankfully it was a miscommunication and there wasn’t a video for them to watch, but it sure showed me how callous some people are towards death, especially when it’s not one of their loved ones.

I’ll give them this pass – what my co-workers did was no different than the reaction people all over this country would have in the same situation. There are lots of law-abiding, God-fearing folks out there that will watch someone get eaten by a shark, run over by a train or beheaded by Islamic terrorist for entertainment and I just don’t get it.

I may be prejudiced to the whole discussion because I have seen violent death in person and … no sir, I didn’t like it. The idea of wanting to watch someone die is quite foreign to me. During my teenage years the macabre video collection “Faces of Death” was popular. The premise was that the scenes were of people’s last moments caught by film and video. Watching the video was rite of passage I never did pass. In later years I learned how many of the deaths on the tapes were faked, but even then I questioned why some would want to watch that.

Over the last few years the real thing, in the form of hostage beheadings by Islamic terrorists, have shown up on the Internet. The videos are released by the killers and watched by people worldwide. The fact that extremists with similar mindsets as the terrorists might watch these beheadings is bad enough, but the thought of tens if not hundreds of thousands of voyeurs worldwide using their media players to watch another human die is repugnant. I wonder if a lifetime of being de-sensitized by watching fake killings in film and television has made people junkies for violence, and we’re callous enough that it takes the beheading of a helpless hostage for them to be entertained?

Speaking of terrorists, if they caught Bin Laden tomorrow and were going to televise his execution I would no more want to watch it than any other death. I would be relieved that he had been hastened on to his eternal reward, but I wouldn’t want to watch some one punch his ticket to the next life.

Happily though, other than Bin Laden and a few of his ilk, I believe most of us don’t want to watch anyone’s last moments. I believe the number of people planet wide who would not want to see the Steve Irwins or anybody else’s last moments well outnumber those who would, and while that’s true I still have faith in humans in general if not in individuals in particular.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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