<\/a><\/p>\n

The circus was actually under a tent when I was a kid. It featured wild animals jumping through fiery hoops, high-wire acrobats a hundred feet or more in the air, and of course the clown car. I loved watching a dozen or so people emerge from a small red coupe, and the crowd roared in delight.<\/p>\n

You know where this is going, right? In the Select Committee hearings the Trump lackeys are bailing out, repudiating for the world the Big Lie they all formerly endorsed, emerging en masse from Trump\u2019s red coupe. How they all could manage to fit in that car, with such doubts about their boss\u2019s sanity, is the mystery<\/a>. Yet finally it is no mystery that they are trying to save their skins.<\/p>\n

Like so much of what passes for politics now, I find this full of comic overtones\u2014like something Kafka could have written. Our late-night comedians have big problems<\/a> getting laughs from Trumpian politics. So many clowns have jumped out of the car that the gag just isn\u2019t funny anymore. \u201cBut there is also a sense, as the president talks openly about defying the results of the election, that satire has not accomplished what its champions believed it could. Even the professionals seem disillusioned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Satire works best as a dark form of irony that makes its object look ridiculous. The audience must be in on the joke, or the attempt falls flat. One can cite Jonathan Swift, as I did regarding guns<\/a>, and most people either don\u2019t know who Swift was or they find the comparison bogus. Such are the perils of irony. If you mock Trump with humor you\u2019re up against some sixty percent<\/a> of Republicans who continue to believe the Big Lie.<\/p>\n

But I still like the metaphor of the circus. For those who pay any attention to it, politics has become entertainment for the masses. The media could not survive without it. The poet Juvenal said this<\/a> in Roman times: \u201cGive them bread and circuses and they will never revolt.\u201d Are the Select Committee hearings merely a distraction or a diversion for most people? They aren\u2019t \u201cblood sport\u201d for most people, as in ancient Rome, though they might lead to that.<\/p>\n

Folks like Rudy Giuliani can also be expected to provide comic relief, as when the old drunk urged Trump to contest the results on election night. Or the wonderful press conference<\/a> he hosted at the Four Seasons Landscaping Service. John Eastman<\/a>, chief clown to the president, kept pushing for a plan to kick the election back to the states, even while he acknowledged its illegality.<\/p>\n

For many, the very gravity of the hearings indicates that real dangers are lurking. So do the words of the witnesses. Yet a strong sense of artificiality often pervades. We hope the acrobats don\u2019t slip and fall, even as we expect that they might. That tension is part of the circus appeal. Here we hope the clowns will go to jail though we know they may not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The circus was actually under a tent when I was a kid. It featured wild animals jumping through fiery hoops, high-wire acrobats a hundred feet or more in the air, and of course the clown car. I loved watching a dozen or so people emerge from a small red coupe, and the crowd roared in … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Send in the Clowns”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[11,15],"tags":[1301,1297,1302,1305,1300,1307,1278,1306,1308,1303,544,1304,1299,1298],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n