Crikey

So, apparently, a popular Halloween costume this year is Steve Irwin, otherwise known as The Crocodile Hunter. Of course, the point isn’t to go as Irwin the man, but Irwin the victim of a tragic death. Here, Bill Maher demonstrates the idea at a Halloween party (via):


You know, I’ve got a pretty gallows sense of humor, but this is just ridiculously rude. I’ve seen people at Halloween parties who were supposed to be JFK, made up to look like they had holes blown in their heads, and I found that distasteful, too. It’s one thing to dress up as a nonspecific victim of some type of violent death (“guy with knife sticking out of head”), but when you start mocking the deaths of real people, who lived real lives that meant something, and died tragically—for real—it just seems to contribute to a sense of human disposability. Maybe I’m just the oversensitive prude here, but there’s got to be some middle ground in between the “All life is precious” bullshit spewed by the anti-choice and anti-science brigade and the “Fuck you—nothing’s off-limits” attitude affected by costumes like the one pictured above. There are too many places on this planet where life really is disposable, which is why dressing up like a starving Sudanese man or a mangled dead Chinese baby girl aren't funny costumes.

I’m all for irreverence, but that picture just makes me sad.