Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Activism As Cult Ritual
I took my daughters to a Mexican circus last week. It was a one ring outfit seemingly run by several interconnected families of performers. No nets. Lots of insanely dangerous acrobatics performed with considerable elan. Jugglers. Horses. A solid father-and-son dog act. A couple of genuinely funny clowns acting as curtain jerkers and keeping the crowd entertained while the serious acts changed and recovered. There was cotton candy, funnel cake, face paint, camels, bounce houses, and miniature horses kids could ride. All the things you need to separate marks from their cash – or even a smark like myself.
I like Mexican circuses for a variety of reasons. The first is that they’re actual circuses: none of that postmodern “reinventing” the circus crap (I’m looking at you Jim Rose!) Any small town American from anywhere in the 1920s would instantly recognize and appreciate them. You get pretty women being pretty because people like pretty women, clowns being un-ironically idiotic because that’s what clowns do, and brave people doing unsafe things to entertain you because they take pride in it and it beats roofing or being a short order cook. It’s obviously exciting and real to be a circus performer. The feeling is contagious. Even the bad acts were obviously striving to be good ones: and the crowd was forgiving for this reason.
I also like them for the same reason I vastly prefer small Lucha Libre promotions over WWE. American wrestling has lost the plot. The fun is gone, with all the steroid monstrosities and Hos and money. While Lucha Libre, stylized and predictable as kabuki, strives manfully onward with its love of craft and tradition, seemingly unaware and uncaring that the outside world has moved on. There’s something authentic to the inauthenticity of both art forms. Their campiness has always seemed oddly dignified to me.
But that’s all fun and good and not at all why I’m writing this. Instead, I’d like to talk about what we encountered before we entered the circus. Namely, protesters: about two dozen of them. All from the group called Circus Protest, held mercifully at bay across the street under some kind of agreement with security (and also possibly so they didn’t get beaten by angry soccer moms). As I stood in line with my daughters, one of whom has Down syndrome, they shouted at slogans such as “These Animals Are Being Tortured For Your Entertainment!” at us all through bullhorns. They waved signs, blew whistles, and chanted chants.
It was not charming. I was not happy.
However, since I don’t know everything there is to know about everything, once inside I had a good hard look at the animals. I’m an animal lover myself and, having done a bit of ranch and farm work, I know what abused and neglected animals look and act like. The animals detailed to carrying children around seemed singularly fat and sanguine to me. The dogs in the dog act were definitely happy, and the acrobatic horses looked to be in good shape as well. I wasn’t seeing a lot of evidence of physical abuse, and most domesticated animals enjoy having some kind of job. I don’t buy that employment inherently equals torture where they are concerned.
In short, Circus Protest frightened and confused my handicapped daughter, annoyed my teenage daughter, maddened me, and also factually seemed to be full of crap. None of which is inclined to make me sympathetic to their cause. They were also a group of affluent, privileged white people trying to make a racially and economically mixed group of Americans feel bad about going to a working-class Mexican circus. So I wasn’t seeing a lot of sympathy in the crowd around me, either. Just annoyance and irritation.
This was activism as cult ritual – and there’s a lesson to be learned here for anyone who engages in any kind of political activism. Circus Protest didn’t make any converts to their cause that day. Indeed quite the opposite: they made enemies. And I don’t think they cared very much. They were putting on a spectacle for the benefit of the already converted. Virtue signaling to their own. And this is the opposite of what anyone engaged in changing hearts and minds should do. I’m now less inclined to listen to anything this group has to say than I was before encountering them.
So think about that Mexican circus, father-and-son dog acts, and my daughter with Down syndrome before you decide to make a sign and protest something. Think long and hard. Democracy is the only form of government that obligates you to educate your fellow citizens. Make sure that’s what you’re doing if you protest – and not engaging in activism as cult ritual.
Published in Entertainment
One point. The protesters did not really care about you. Their goal is to get air play and media attention to “raise awareness” and then get the political types reasons to “do something”.
This came to mind:
If you want a working animal to work, you take good care of it.
If you want a performing animal to perform, you do better than that.
I always view those protesters the same way. “What have you done, and where have you been, that gives you special insight?”
They are not only ignorant they are ignorant of their ignorance. And they, smug in their ignorance and proud of their obvious superiority (obvious only to them) are happy to have a chance to dictate to any and all how to behave. They deserve to be ignored and or scorned. The problem is we have lost the ability to ignore such fools because our Republic has devolved into a Democracy where the loudest crowd gets attention and often action regardless of the worthiness of their cause.
Kudos to you for seeing through their charade, may your tribe increase.
I am a huge fan of circus and we have much the same sensibility. I’ve written here about some of my thoughts and experiences.
I’ve worked in circus also, and have seen how animals are treated, and I worked on my own comedy dog act for a while before abandoning it ( animal training requires human training and discipline too, and I needed more first )
There isn’t cruelty generally, it’s not how an animal act can survive. Animals enjoy performing. If anything is cruel, it’s at the zoo where they are not required to do anything at all. That and in the wild where they are subject to nature’s cruelty.
One exception might be monkey acts, ( I don’t find them enjoyable and I think they’ve disappeared) because, like humans, monkeys can become rebellious and then there’s too much punishment. Another exception might be whales and dolphins.
These people who protest want to be heroes. It’s really more about them than animal injustice. They inflicted psychological cruelty on your family. Sad.
My lefty son-in-law works in the nuclear weapons industry. He expresses annoyance with the occasional protesters that gather outside the gates in the morning (when the workers arrive), but are gone by the late afternoon (when the workers leave). He reasons that if they really believed in their cause, they should be there at least as long as the workers are.
These are the same idiots who profess anti-capitalism because someone/something gets exploited, blah, blah, blah.
The first rule for an entrepreneur is, don’t kill the customer (Who has more interest in safe food production, for example? The government or the food producer?). I would think it works the same for circus animals. If you’re trying to create a going concern, you treat your employees right. Even if they’re dogs.
Notably, monkeys, whales and dolphins are definitely not domesticated animals. That’s a key difference between them and trained horses or dogs.
It starts to get fuzzier with “semi-domesticated” animals like elephants, which have been used as work animals for millennia but rarely particularly well.
It’s a pretty decent bet that the debate will get even more complicated in the future, given the advances that Russian biologists have made in the science of domestication over the past century. If foxes can be successfully domesticated in only about 40 generations of selective breeding, then why not selectively breed animals that enjoy performing in circuses?
The much beloved hot dog cart vendor outside my office (back when I was employed, and it was not unusual for him to have 20 people at a time waiting to get his food, most of them regulars) cited that rule to a government inspector who had the audacity to show up right at noon, when the vendor could least afford to answer his questions and show him things.
There’s a pretty good memoir about life in an old-style American carnival: Step Right Up, by Daniel Mannix.
Great post, Job. I learned from it.
I too think the circus protestors are fools. Cruel fools at times. But always fools. I would be right there with them, however, if I thought that the animals were actually being abused.
By the way, I too am an animal lover, Bob the Dog in particular — but also Ebony the Cat. Horses, sheep, lions, and tigers, and bears, all the way down to insects — I like them all.
As I grow old, I find I like most of the animals more than I like my fellow humans. I’m not a misanthrope. I like an occasional human, my wife for instance, and a few friends, but I can take or leave, mostly leave, the rest of them.
Perhaps we already have – just without keeping notes.
Not many dads take their kids to a circus and a zoo in the same day.
And. The staff over the street performers/protestors is in the business of renewing and increasing their annual grant from a leftist foundation. Count on it.