May's Douche Bag of the Month

5/25/06

It may be a bit early, ladies and gentlemen, but I think we have a winner for May's Douche Bag of the Month. What makes me especially giddy about this is that I get to pick on a guy with no legs. That's right; May's DBOTM is a double amputee!

Mark Inglis is a 47 year-old Kiwi (that's a dude from New Zealand, to you and me) mountaineer who lost both his legs to frostbite back in 1982 after scaling New Zealand's highest peak, Mt. Cook. But that's not why he's a dick.

Earlier this month Mark became the first double-amputee to scale the summit of Mt. Everest's staggering 29,035 feet. That's also not why he's a dick.

On his way up, Mark and his team passed by British climber David Sharp, who had been attempting to summit Everest on his own, sans guides or oxygen. This seems to me to be a shockingly bad and arrogant idea. Sharp froze to death on the mountain, unable to get back down and having failed to reach the pinnacle. And that is why Mark and his team are all dicks.

Prior to the discovery that Sharp had died, Wayne Alexander, selfish prick extraordinaire and a member of Mark Inglis's team, had this to say in a telephone interview:

"We came across a chap sheltering under a rock, who was perhaps hours from death. That was probably only two and a half hours into the climb.

"He had made a mistake the day before. He started too late and couldn't get off the mountain. That was a very sobering reality, that every pace you took further from that point was further from safety, and we had to all make it back. It didn't deter Mark." (1)

Wow! What an asshole! So, if I understand this correctly, Mark and his gaggle of climbers, drunk on the prospect of scaling the highest peak on the earth for the simple reason that it exists, chose to trudge right on by another human being who was clearly in a life-or-death situation, for their own glory and accomplishment. Kudos, gentlemen! You have successfully rendered not only your feat irrevocably tainted, but also ordained yourselves casual by-standers of human misery!

Hey, it's a real pity that Mark doesn't have any legs (though he did lose them through his own actions) and it's just dynamite that one of the supposed reasons he went up this very large cone was to show other amputees, in the words of New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, "that your ambitions should never be limited." But just because you have a hard-on for parking your severely reduced keister upon the roof of the world doesn't give you license to ignore some dying dude as if pretending you didn't see that old acquaintance from high school at the movie theatre.

I'm honestly baffled that one of his team could so casually say they went skipping past a man who was "perhaps hours from death" without, oh, I dunno, helping him the fuck out? Would saving the Limey who was trying to get down the mountain somehow have seemed a less self-aggrandizing act than planting your chaffed stumps on an arbitrarily tall hunk of rock? I guess so. "Hey, fuck that guy, I gots to get my climb on!"

Not every famous mountaineer was so dismissively complacent with the disposability of another human life in the face of glamour and prestige; Sir Edmund Hillary, (the guy on the left in the below picture) first man to conquer Everest some 53 years ago, initially congratulated Mark Inglis on his phenomenal achievement, until, you know, he heard that ol' Mark had left a fellow climber for dead in his sprint for the top. Sir Edmund (now 83) had this to say:

"I don't approve of the fact that he just rang up base camp and said, There's a fella up here lying under a rock, what do I do about it? I mean, that attitude to me is pathetic.

"They don't really know whether he's alive or dead, but they just pass him by. Their aim is to get to the summit and the welfare of anybody on the way is just too bad.

"He's a human being and we would regard it as our duty to get him back to safety." (2)

What was Mark's response to the tongue-lashing from this icon and personal hero? In true douche-bag form, he said:

"Yeah, it would have been nice to avoid a lot of that, that's for sure. Yeah, it's made it difficult, not necessarily on me, but certainly on David's family."

Moses-smell-the-roses. I dunno, if I were talking about the fact that I had more or less ignored another human being in trouble for my own selfish goals I might have said something to the effect of, "hey, sorry I left, what was his name, Dave? David Sharp? Sorry I left Dave to die so I could get up the hill. Did I mention I've got no legs? I'm awesome." Maybe something like that. While true that David Sharp seemed woefully unprepared for the summit, I don't think he deserved to be allowed to freeze to death.

And that's why Mark Inglis, legless mountaineer and royal dickhead, is our pick for May's Douche Bag of the Month!



Sources:

(1) Feeling on top of the world - with no legs and laryngitis

(2) Climbers death raises questions over Everests Traffic-jam