Ringling Brothers, the “Greatest Show on Earth,” announced that the circus is back … without elephants and clowns.
I used to love going to the circus. When I was a boy, the circus set up almost in my backyard right in the field where a funeral home, condominiums, the fire station and the police station are now. Like every kid, I dreamed of running away with the circus.
Who doesn’t love the circus, especially the clowns?
Clowns come in all sizes, some with red noses and some with blue ones and some with big floppy feet that they sometimes trip over and get stuck in their mouths.
Clowns stuff themselves into tight spaces, unable to move one way or the other. Sometimes, one wiggles out of the clown car to leave the circus to become an advisor to new clowns who want to know how to get along under the big tent, but most stay there forever, and ever and ever.
In addition to the clowns, circuses have elephants and donkeys and contortionists who can twist and turn themselves into all manner of positions. There is even a ringmaster who controls the show and tells the clowns how to perform. Without the ringmaster, the circus becomes chaotic and stops being funny. After a while their act gets old, but they keep plugging along doing the same routines over and over.
If this all sounds familiar, it is because you have been reading the newspapers or watching TV, especially cable news. Congress is in session, and it is silly season, plus the presidential election race has begun … over a year before the election. This circus parade began with a peanut farmer who began his campaign 2½ years before the 1976 election, thus setting off a biennial race to the center ring.
Canada’s election season typically runs 12 weeks. Mexico’s general elections start 90 days before Election Day. The United Kingdom is a little bit longer, four months. France is usually no more than two weeks, and Japan is just 12 days! That’s not even long enough to put on one clown’s preferred costume of a hoodie and shorts.
Campaigns go on way too long, and governing “ain’t what it used to be” either. I can remember when politicians used to address each other as “my distinguished friend from the great state of …;” now it would not surprise me to see a shaving cream pie or a squirt bottle aimed at an opponent during a debate.
Yeah, a laugh a minute. I heard one politician say he sleeps in his office and puts on make-up every morning in anticipation of being on TV. Well, I guess that’s bipartisanship as women politicians do that every day.
Sometimes you can’t tell what is serious and what is funny. A congressman from down south asked if sending 8,000 troops to Guam would capsize the island due to the added weight. He wasn’t kidding.
I guess where there are clowns, you can be sure there is a circus. To be fair, John Steinbeck said, “Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.”
That’s my serious column for the year. Don’t expect me to return to the circus soon.
Editor’s note: Mattapoisett resident Dick Morgado is an artist and retired newspaper columnist whose musings are, after some years, back in The Wanderer under the subtitle “Thoughts on ….” Morgado’s opinions have also appeared for many years in daily newspapers around Boston.
Thoughts on…
By Dick Morgado