Tales From the Third Lobe - Why We Hate Clowns

About the author: Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird. About his bi-weekly column: Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week. View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...

So I was coming back from a McDonald's restaurant today, and in an instant, I saw the root of the nightmare: Ronald.

Yeah, I know. Coulrophobia is a growing fad. Clown-bashing is in. But it's always been in. That's why they get invited to parties.

See, a clown, originally, was merely a hick. A rustic. An occupant of rural regions. The word clown is derived, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, from a word meaning "a clod or clot of earth", or, alternately, from klunni, an old Scandinavian and/or Low German word meaning "clumsy".

Consider the traditional image: Ill-fitting clothing and shoes largely appropriate to an rural setting, typically of selections made by someone who would emphasize durability and affordability over cut or fit or color. If additions are made that don't fit this bill, they are likely to be failed attempts to incorporate more modern elements (ruffs, bowties, fine hats, walking sticks, etc.) without the benefit of ever having seen a complete modern outfit. Makeup is used to provide a complexion that can only be thought of as weathered: a whiteface base provided as a contrast for rosy cheeks and noses scraped raw by wind and burned by sun, matted or dreadlocked or just plain wild and unruly hair. Add to that a physique trained to heavy labor instead of grace and ease.

There you have it: a caricatured bumpkin. Uneducated, naïve, ignorant, slow-witted, ungroomed, and uncultured.

And they get invited to the party so the other guests can laugh at their inappropriate attire and ignorance of etiquette and general out-of-place-ness. I imagine that originally they were normal bumpkins invited to sophisticated parties out of cruelty. Then perhaps, by arrangement with kinder hosts, "professional" clowns and boors would get invited or hired as entertainment, causing a large enough ruckus to make the other guests feel that their own little lapses and faux pas were ignorable in comparison.

Ronald is a bit different, actually. In his weird little corporate mythos, he's the only one who is competent and educated and worldly enough to know what's going on at all times. He's an anticlown. But it was still his goofy face that got me started thinking about all of this. And, after a fashion, his anticlownness....

See, bumpkins aren't the problem. As dangerous as ignorance is, confusion concerning the purpose of a fingerbowl or which fork to use or where to put your elbows isn't exactly a dangerous kind of ignorance. The chuckle that triggers is more than half based on how silly the rules are that are being broken and how pleasant it might be for us to get away with breaking them too. Bumpkins are lovable. Give your country cousin a call tonight.

No, the hatred and fear are for the professional clowns. The ones that have to know what all the rules are in order to break them so emphatically and willfully. The ones who do it for money and for the express purpose of encouraging laughter at the expense of the ignorant, poor, and slow-witted. The ones who are there for the sole purpose of keeping us from seeing more important rules being broken.

Almost all of the clowns I know of that fit this latter category are involved in politics.

Stay with me here.

Rules get broken—big rules get broken—and one of these ludicrous entertainers-for-hire pops out of a barrel, runs around n front of the bull for a few seconds, just long enough for the guy who was trying to ride the bull to get away uninjured—and then hops over the fence. Someone falls off the trapeze and misses the net—and a handful of these bastards come charging out from trapdoor in the stage and slap each other silly with ladders to nowhere, slinging buckets of whitewash and honking horns with no bicycle attached.

Heavy-handed sleight-of-hand. That's a clown.

We hate them because we're supposed to. See, we're the bull that's being ridden. If we're distracted by the clowns, then we can't interfere in what's actually going on.

Rush Limbaugh is a rodeo (radio?) clown for the conservatives. He doesn't serve any purpose whatsoever except to draw fire from angry liberals. Same with Ann Coulter. Whiteface makeup, baggy clothes, and big shoes would be more honest, but that would kinda be counter to the strategy, don't you think? Liberal clowns are poorer at it, more often ending up as straight men for the conservative clowns. Not that it matters, because they're just clowns.

George W. Bush is a clown, too. He might have some say in policy and administration, but largely he's there to stumble up to the stage and hold a press conference declaring that all people who claim that the United States of America is responsible for flagrant violations of human rights at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba "hate America." For instance.

See how it works? We're mightily pissed off that people are abused and tortured and held with no rights or recourse or representation (as reported by those American-hating FBI agents), GWB makes some completely irrational and insupportable statement at a press conference, and suddenly we're totally stunned and, in our confusion, more concerned that the Leader of the Free World is apparently an imbecile than we are that innocent people (until proven guilty, remember) are mutilated and traumatized and disappeared in our own collective name. If Bush had more style, he could sport an extra head and a third arm and he couldn't distract us more.... Honk your bicycle horn if you get the reference.

Social security reform is a clown, too, if you hadn't noticed. There's nothing like smashing a hornet's nest in passing when you're being chased by a bear.

You'd think it'd be hard to find another three and a half years of clowns to keep us angry and distracted and charging everyone but the fuckers who keep putting the spurs to our flanks, but there's been no shortage of the bastards so far.

Fucking clowns.

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Vidicon was the Buddha but the pay was lousy.