The Enduring Appeal of Freaks and Freak Shows

 

There's something about us that makes us enjoy freakish displays.  Traveling carnivals and circuses brought with them sometimes real, sometimes faked, human physical oddities and humans with deformities to be viewed by amazed and revolted locals for a fee for many years.  They were popular in Europe and in the United States, though it seems their popularity lasted somewhat longer here than there. 

Freak shows were characteristic of carnivals.  I don't know if they still exist, but if they don't in the form they have in the past it seems we can't do without them as we've managed to replace them with something similar.  They must satisfy some need we have.  It delights us in some strange sense to see people who are deformed even if they're repulsive.  My guess is it does so because it makes us feel we're better or at least normal when compared with those who clearly are not, provided they're displayed in a manner which poses no threat.  They provide us with a kind of reassurance.  Through them we think ourselves acceptable, and demonstrably so.

There are those of us who still enjoy the deformity and disability of others, I'm sure, but we're not as willing to express our enjoyment as openly as we did and could when invited to view freaks of nature as they were called by paying a fee and visiting them as they posed in tableau at some local fair.  Much as we are inclined to inflict pain on others, there's been a decline in the tendency to do that publicly, although our recent toleration and approval of hate and the hateful on the national stage makes one wonder whether that decline will continue.  One doesn't want to be accused of "political correctness" after all.

I think freak shows have been replaced, by reality shows.  I suspect others think so as well.  The similarity is fairly clear.

Some reality shows unashamedly center on people who are physically uncommon, e.g. they are morbidly obese.  Some center on people who have problems of a particularly disturbing nature, which impact others visually, e.g., hoarders.  Their lives are displayed in detail.  Generally, such shows also are carefully structured to have, in most cases, a "happy ending" where there is some kind of redemption or at least the hope of redemption.  The physically unusual is somehow rectified, a house full of rubbish is cleaned.  Nonetheless, peculiarities, physical or psychological, are on display for our entertainment though we watch them from some comfortable, private venue and not at a public showing.

Some modern day "freak shows" are more subtle, however--if that word can be used when exhibitionists are observed by voyeurs.  They involve anything from people beating one another senseless with fists and feet, to people brought together in an unusual environment and manipulated in certain respects so that the manner in which they react is displayed, to men or women being romantically paired with a number of women or men and made to choose one or another of them for marriage while we watch.  In the case of such shows, what is put on view for the public at large are not physical deformities or psychological or mental deficiencies in particular.  Instead, individuals are treated as freaks once were; they are made the objects of our attention, our review.  We watch them and marvel at them or use them by comparing them, usually unfavorably, with ourselves.  They become freaks, eventually, if that suits the producers or directors of the shows.

Freaks shows and reality shows appeal to the voyeur in us.  A voyeur is not necessary someone who derives sexual pleasure from watching others, but may also be someone who enjoys the pain or distress of others and wishes to observe it, or to observe people in sordid or scandalous circumstances.  They appeal, in other words, to what is base in us and we debase ourselves by watching them.  Their appeal and popularity doesn't speak well for us or our hopes for improvement.

To Hell in a Handbasket

These are sad days here in our Glorious Republic, the home of the free and the brave, beautiful for spacious skies and purple (really?) mountains.  This land which is my land but not necessarily yours.  For some of us, certainly not yours unless you are in some manner us as well--unless we are what you are, which is simply to say unless you are already here in which case this land may indeed be your land if, that is, you truly are like us.

But although we're being told that the America we love is disappearing due to massive demographic changes, fear and loathing (trembling too, no doubt) are not reserved for immigrants and foreigners only.  Paroxysms of anger and dismay may be triggered by so many things in these fraught times.  We perceive ourselves to be besieged by enemies of all sorts.  There is, of course, the media which our tiresome and unusual president tells us repeatedly is "the enemy."  Then there are efforts to prohibit speech of particular kinds on college campuses.  There are fascists and white nationalists everywhere.  Nuns are being forced to purchase contraceptives, according to our Attorney General.  Chicago is a war zone.  NFL players kneel or sit down or raise fists when the National Anthem is played.

One must wonder if other nations are similarly plagued by outrage and anxiety and whether expressions of outrage and anxiety occur on a daily basis in other, less favored, lands.  Here, we wake up to revelations of monstrous conduct each day, or in the rare case when there is none, we're regaled with new information regarding those evils which have taken place. 

It's as if we've been consigned, as a nation, to the Fifth Circle of Hell as described in Dante's lighthearted Inferno.  There, those who have committed the sin of Wrath are either engaged in constant conflict with their fellow sinners, or lie sullen and silent beneath the waters of a river, stewing, as it were, wrathfully.  We are a nation of the irate.

I wonder how this came about.  I don't think we always were so highly annoyed at most of what takes place, though certainly some of us always have been.  We have all come to consider ourselves dispossessed in one manner or another, but unfortunately there are those who have not actually been deprived of anything but what they think is their due or is proper rather than anything tangible, and they are the loudest in their discontent.  I refer to those who are offended by other people doing things or saying things which, it's believed, shouldn't be done or said.  What's done or said in many cases does no harm to those who object to it--some monuments are taken down, some pundit or institution is boycotted, some people speak a language which isn't English, etc., or someone is a boor. 

What has brought us to this?  Our ancestors faced economic depression and terrible wars.  We face nothing like that.  Instead, we take with great seriousness what people say and ignore our many problems.  The self-righteousness required to feel anger and outrage over such things is monumental. 

This kind of pettiness is troubling.  If we react in outrage to such things, who knows what we'll do if we're actually subjected to some real injustice, or are impoverished for some reason, or grow suddenly and seriously ill.  Perhaps we'll lose all control, all reason.  Has there ever been a case where a nation has fallen apart because it's people are, for the most part, spiteful and small-minded?  It would make us unique in history, I think. 

If you've ever wondered about the phrase "going to hell in a handbasket" and have done an Internet search of it, you'll probably find as I did that it is an American colloquial expression the origin of which is uncertain.  Why is going to hell in a handbasket different from going to hell in some other manner?  What makes it remarkable or poignant or interesting enough to comment on; what distinguishes it?  If you search for the definition of "handbasket" you'll find such useful definitions as "a small basket, which may be carried by hand."

The articles which may be carried in a handbasket are small, relatively speaking, and that may be why the saying seems especially apt at this time.  We've become small as have our concerns and grievances and so will fit in a handbasket as we're carried by some force or by ourselves to a hell of our own creation.

Charged with Grandeur



The 19th century English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, had a remarkable way of using language in his poetry which sets him apart from other poets of the Victorian era, and from the English Romantics generally.  It's hard to describe, for me at least.  Hopkins' poems seem playful sometimes, sometimes erudite, sometimes philosophical.  Often philosophical, I think, and even more often religious.

The language he employs can be archaic, antiquated.  He was fond of alliteration.  He seems to have sought to use unusual words--unusual groupings of words--in his poetry, and I believe this sometimes saves him from the sanctimony which too often infuses the writings of the religious, and from being sentimental.  Sanctimony and self-righteousness was prevalent among the Victorians.  Sentiment was prevalent among the Romantics.  In a way, his poetry seems almost modern.

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God."  This is the first line of his poem titled, unsurprisingly, God's Grandeur.  It's an arresting opening line.  "Charged" suggests electricity, a force invisible but pervasive, empowering the world as it courses through all that it is, all that's in it.  "Grandeur" as in splendor, greatness, majesty, magnificence.  The world seethes with God's splendor; it's an embodiment of it.  It shines forth "like shook foil."

It seems a Stoic view, to me at least.  Perhaps a view of the world even older than that of the Stoics.  This can be inferred from another of his poems, one with a lengthy and somewhat awkward title, That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.

Heraclitus was one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and what we know of what he thought and taught is fragmentary.  Some of what he is said to have said is well known, like the statement that one never steps in the same river twice, and all is flux.  The fragments we have sometimes seem contradictory, and he is criticized for this by Plato and Aristotle.  The Stoics valued him, however, and it seems Cleanthes especially admired him.  The Stoics seemed to have admired his cosmology, particularly his view of the universe as being eternal and its basis being a kind of fire, divine it would seem as the Stoics conceived of it.  God to him and to the Stoics was immanent in the world.

It seems Hopkins thought well of him also, given the title of this poem.  Like God's Grandeur the poem begins with an artful, witty, even musical-sounding celebration of the world.  "Nature's bonfire" is referred to.  That's the only clear reference to anything like the fire of Heraclitus I can see in it.

In God's Grandeur, the celebration of Nature is followed by lines which express regret that the world has been sullied by man and his toils, bleared and smeared by it, in fact.  Then, hope and wonder is expressed that there remains something beautiful and divine in nature, nurtured still by God in his capacity as the Holy Ghost, or as that person of the triune God called the Holy Ghost.

In Nature is a Heraclitean Fire the celebration ends in sad reflection on the temporary nature of man:  "Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone!"  But these broodings are ended by the knowledge of the Resurrection to come after death:   "In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond."

That's very impressive stuff, to me.  And perhaps it expresses and explains better than anything I've read the appeal of Christianity at its beginning to those who came to be called pagans, and its success even though the wisdom of pagan philosophy was acknowledged and admired.  It was an appeal the mystery cults may have had as well to an extent, but were the gods they extolled "what I am" as Jesus was, before his Resurrection, fully man?  But also fully God, it seems, inexplicably to me but perhaps this was, and is, of little concern to true believers, and pagan philosophy forgotten in the acceptance of mystery.