It Was Probably Rodeo Classism

I love how Crooked Timber doesn’t bother with silly topics like the NSA spying on Americans. What really matters is a dude wearing a mask in a rodeo. Daring, scathing commentary!

Keep on fighting the good fight!

Well, Anon., when the central topic of conversation on this blog for the last week or so has been the persistence of racism and racial animus in American culture, then it’s pretty clear that NSA surveillance would be about as irrelevant as your comment.

Belle, on the tenth anniversary of the blog, a lot of us wished that you would post more. Now we’re getting our wish, and it’s great stuff. Keep it up! I only worry: is it healthy for *you*? This sudden burst feels somehow like the manic phase of manic depression. I worry that you are going to burn yourself out, and then we won’t hear from you again for years.

Still, let us sport us while we may and all; it’s your call, and it’s great to hear from you.

p.s. took me a while to think what “bobbling his lips” might mean. I assume it involves placing one’s index finger horizontally between one’s slightly-parted lips, and oscillating it (literally!) vertically while humming, typically in order to express derision or contempt? I have never heard that phrase, but then I have also never heard any other phrase used for that behavior either. Do other languages lexicalize it? Do other cultures practice it?

Nitpick: I think “nameless square states” would have dipped deeper into the Lovecraft.

But yes please do spend more time here and less Gawking! Not that I’ve been able to resist the Call of Kotaku (AS IT WERE) – they seem so impressionable at first, so amenable to a bit of information, but then they start replying.

Well, others (pedant and AW) got there before me, but it’s wonderful to see the return of our very own Southron, Belle. Please set awhile, and if you leave us again, be sure to come back now ya hear. We appreciate you more than those vulgarians at Gawking (and what’s Kotaku anyway?), and judging from too many of the comments, you are not preaching entirely to the converted.

Original anonymous dude: were you in a fucking coma? Did you just discover the site literally today? Every goddamn post in June was about NSA spying.

Kodiak bears (I haven’t researched Alaska’s 4H offerings)

We had an afternoon to kill around Anchorage in August 2008, and wound up attending the AK state fair in Palmer, three days before the former mayor of nearby Wasilla got famous. The birch syrup was our best find of the day.

I did like the comments of Perry Beam, whom the AP described as a “48 year old musician from Higginsville:

“It was the usual until the very end at bull riding,” he said. “As they were bringing the bulls into the chute and prepping them … they bring out what looks like a dummy. The announcer says ‘Here’s our Obama dummy, or our dummy of Obama.

“If an old country boy picks up on something like that, imagine what a person of color would think.”

To SamChevre @07 – I stand corrected! Funny though that, as Pedant notes, the other prez used as a “dummy” was the conservative so liberal as to raise taxes and lose to Clinton.

Wonder if the appearance of the GWH Bush dummy came with vile, hateful commentary like that spewed at the MO fair.

Great post, Belle, but I’m afraid you missed a spot:

A rodeo stunt at the Missouri State Fair has come under criticism after a clown donned a Barack Obama mask and stuck a broom up his backside.

“You got gay panic in my racism! You got racism in my gay panic! Hey…y’know what?”

The definitive look at state fair food, Indiana edition: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/adventures-in-indiana-state-fair-food-2013/

“You got gay panic in my racism! You got racism in my gay panic! Hey…y’know what?”

This is a sad part of opposing almost everything that Obama does from the left. Normally you can’t go too far wrong with mockery of powerful people. But with Obama, only a tiny fraction of the people who think he’s a bad President are all about the Grand Bargains and failure to stop talking about the deficit and the sabotage of single-payer and the near-complete failure on global warming and the drone assassinations and, yes, the NSA spying. Most of them are all about the Kenyan Muslim gay panic. As a result, there’s nowhere for the left to go, electorally. He was always the lesser evil, because the GOP is the vehicle for plain old evil.

The comments on the newspaper article are cool, if by “cool” you mean that you like to have stereotypes confirmed.

22: violence between green-team and blue-team supporters (distinguishing themselves on religious grounds as well as by which sports team they support) isn’t just for Byzantines. Ask any Glaswegian…

And the depressing rodeo clown story is a perfect example of the kind of facts that are bound to be read in opposing ways by members of opposing tribes, with no prospect of disambiguation.

I don’t think this is quite right. Both tribes read it basically the same way: at best, utter indifference to the racial implications of behavior. Only one tribe thinks this is a bad thing.

“and then there are state specialities, like in the unnamed square states in the middle of the country, where they fry sticks of butter. ”

This surely cant be true? Surely!?

The Roedeo was just a public display of what 100+ posters identified as a more normally private pursuit.

I contest your use of the word “just” here. It’s a pretty big deal when racists don’t feel constrained about acting out in public.

Can’t help wonder why the point about state funding … more creeping secularism, I suppose.

Wait, is the argument here that a rodeo is a religious observance? And thus that state funding for one contravenes the Establishment Clause?

Belle, I think this is outside your speciality; do we have any Texans here who could confirm this?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2389798/Oprah-Winfrey-branded-liar-Swiss-sales-assistant-racist-handbag-row.html

Breaking but unsurprising news: OPRAH WINFREY LIED about the Swiss saleslady refusing to show her the $36,000 Tom Ford handbag. Winfrey lied about the particulars of the exchange with the saleslady and in the general sense that she was being profiled. Turns out the saleslady did what she did with all her clients, great and small, she first showed Winfrey the handbag that she, the saleslady, thought was the best and then moved on to show her the Tom Ford.

Yes, I believe the saleslady over Winfrey. Read the story, judge for yourself.

Daniel, so you automatically believe the white person over the black person. Interesting.

And the fried beer, how does that even work? Is it just pouring beer into a deep fat frier, and then drinking it?

I am not even thinking about following that link. I’m not even looking at that link. No, no, no.

“They all look ‘shifty-eyed’ if they haven’t gotten waaaay down to the end of the line and look ‘actively malevolent/probably a serial killer who will murder a small child at the close of the fair and ritualistically use its blood to lubricate the “Roll-O-Plane” as he does in his grim trek through all 48 states, every year since 1996.’ ”

OK, this should totally be a Hannibal, or even Criminal Minds episode.

@Daniel
The story was reported also on italian newspapers. The italian version isn’t as bad for OW as the clerk says her english is “ok but not excellent” so maybe there was a misunderstanding.
See my comment 154 here:
https://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/09/awkward-conversations-we-have-had/#comment-477551

(Also, ha! I wrote this first

mpower69: “The president is african-american, therefore all parody and/or criticism of the president is based in racism. Got it.”

Nope. It’s the lip-bobbling that reveals the racism.

If I thought that hatred of Obama (of the tea-party variety) did not have a significant (probably overwhelming) proportion of racism (along with classic classic anti-socialism paranoia, conservative “if I pull myself up by my bootstraps, so can they” narcissism, etc), this might, just might, be a different discussion. I, for one, could not put forward with any confidence a story that attempted to tease the racism out of the anti-Obama sentiment.

Maybe the story here is precisely that Obama hatred is so robust because it is a publicly acceptable way of venting those racist feelings.

The Obama baiting doesn’t surprise me a bit. State/County Fairs thrive on the “we’re the hardworking, decent people vs. the decadent urban metrosexuals” theme. In the mid-70s I went to a state fair where the rodeo announcer introduced the riders as “real men” and went on to deride long-haired men as draft dodgers and queers. The crowd went wild, as I, with hair below my shoulders, caught the dirty looks from everyone around me. Worth every penny of the admission price. Now you’ll find lots of long-haired country boys (many of them big city pretenders) at the fair but the theme continues.

The 4H kids with their animals also creep me out. You have some sweet-looking 12 year-old girl with an immaculate show cow nuzzling her hand. She then remarks about how much the cow is going to bring at the slaughter house.

@47
“I, for one, could not put forward with any confidence a story that attempted to tease the racism out of the anti-Obama sentiment.”

We’ll have an easier time of it in a couple of years while we try to tease the feminism out of the anti-Hilary sentiment.

44, 50. Or, as Christopher Walken might say: Needs more Belle!

Daniel at 49: are you serious? It was the Puyallup State Fair in Washington. If you don’t believe this you’ve led a very sheltered life. Or are very young.

TJ @51: was “feminism” a lexo for “misogyny”, or do you really predict that it’s feminists who will be unhappiest with HRC?

“The president is african-american, therefore all parody and/or criticism of the president is based in racism. Got it.”

To add to my #21, you also get people who won’t even admit that parody that’s based on racist imagery is based on it, and leftists who deny that racism even exists as an important social category. So yes, you end up representing such a vanishingly rarely held point of view that you might as well just say that left opposition to Obama that acknowledges racism doesn’t exist outside of a few cranks. America, you suck.

I for one am hoping for another NSA thread, just so I can point out to Andrew F. that everything he dismissed as crankitude has actually been proven true since then — the head of the NSA was caught openly lying to Congress, the fact sheet that he put out that I dismissed as all lies has since been retracted since it was indeed proven to be all lies, and additional programs have come to light proving that e.g. the wiretapping of everyone is really being used to catch drug dealers and other ordinary criminals — branching out into calls from law enforcement to even use it for copyright evasion. If I have to be a crank, I might as get my laughs in.

@54

>>No, I believe the hardworking, humble saleswomen over the prima donna.

If that is your understanding of the world of luxury goods retail in Zurich, you should probably sit this one out.

True the luxury shops of Zurich, London or New York is not a world that I am familiar with and so unless one is, say, a fabulously wealthy media star or a wealthy parasitical City or Wall Street trader one could not possibly appreciate how wickedly mercenary and racist these Zurich shop helpers can be.

The Horror! The Horror!

You don’t have to wait for Hillary to get elected to talk about mysogyny- the venom directed at the Bill Clinton administration was laced with it. The bumper-sticker on my dads truck read “Impeach Clinton – and her Husband!” Old Bill just wasn’t man enough for the Presidency, see. And that doesn’t even get into the venom that was directed at Janet Reno!

In fact, I am not sure that the venom directed at Obama is much worse than that directed at the Clinton administration (from my own vantage point of having right-populist family that flirted with the militia movement). The mysogyny directed at Hillary and Janet Reno is pretty comperably vile to the racism directed at Obama.

“There have been parodies of presidents since there were presidents, and various different dummies, effigies, etc (well, maybe there was a stodgy post WWII era when people didn’t really do things like that – respect for the general and all – but I am dubious). ”

If you look at the official apologies for the rodeo incident, they go very heavy on this aspect — that it was wrong because we’re not supposed to show disrespect for the President. It’s so that they won’t have to acknowledge that it was racist. This makes the apology into obvious nonsense, because every late-night comedian makes fun of every President, and no one minds.

A second-order, fallback apology is that it was wrong not because it was disrespectful to the President, but because it took a political position for one party and against another, and the fair wasn’t a context in which you’re supposed to do that. That one’s a better excuse for why some people were shocked without having to say the racism word — Southern politeness and all.

Allow me to prëempt a certain type of stupid First Amendmentry by noting that the Fair got $400,000 from the state to put this on.

Good heavens, so you’re saying that everything and everybody receiving money from the state should show appropriate deference to god, country and our dear leader? That’s what Jesse Helms and Giuliani stood for in the Piss Christ case (and yes, I’m aware that a rodeo clown is not an artist, but the logic is the same). I’m by no means a free speech absolutist, but this is scary.

Btw, Obama’s “war on terror” is racist as hell, but I guess that doesn’t really matter.

I’m pretty indifferent about the substantive issue here, but Belle your prose reminds me of Flann O’Brien. Keep it up.

novakant, please note the stated purpose of that passage: “to prëempt a certain type of stupid First Amendmentry.”

Normally, one wouldn’t need to pre-emptively address stupid arguments, but I think Belle knows her audience.

Dr. Hillarious @ 57 – you mean the Western Washington Fair.

I mean, really – don’t mention the P-word on an open board like this. People are going to try to pronounce it, and their going to hurt themselves. It took me 3 months before I could get my east-coast tounge around it, and my partner worked their (the town, not the fair).

It’s just not a nice thing to do to people.

For the guy who doesn’t think there would have been disparaging remarks over long hair at a state fair in the 70’s, let me just say that I was assaulted over my long hair in 1980, in an elevator at the MD Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston, TX. When did you think this sort of thing stoppped?

And more generally, there is a history of racist actions against blacks in this country, which means that portraying a black man being beaten or lynched carries racial implications that are not present if a white man is similarly portrayed.

@81 – well, in the late ’90s I was told “Hey pony-tail boy. I’ve got one piece of advice for you – the ’80s are over.”

Dr. H – and we best leave Sequim out of it as well.

Re: Theophylact at 6:10’s comment.

This confused me too. The states in the middle are Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, which are more trapezoid than square. Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma are also pretty central, but two rectangles and a frying pan, not squares.

Wyoming and Colorado are probably the closest, but they’re westside, not middle, and they’re not paradigmatic fried butter sorts of places. (I’d have thought the southern states were the butter-friers, which are middle neither lattitudinally nor longitudinally. I hear the UK is fry-anything, especially candy bars, country.)

Also, why “nameless”?

“This is scary stuff: Lèse-majesté invoked in the land of the free.”

Yeah, I saw that part too — the incident invoked as possible threat to the President, as if the guy was modeling a plot to have him trampled by a bull or something. But as I wrote above, that’s pretty much unavoidable if lots of people had a horrible feeling that they were seeing something wrong when this happened, but no one can admit that they felt bad because it was racist. They have to desperately look for some other reason why it was bad, and it’s easy to settle on that it wasn’t respectful enough in an authoritarian sense. They can even write something about how it made Missouri look bad not because Missouri is full of old-style racists, but because Missouri wasn’t respecting the President.

Rich at 87–

I think that’s exactly the right analysis of why people are now over-reacting.

I think the talk about ‘not making fun of the president’, and the fact that this poor clown has been banned for life, are all forms of over-reacting.

But the root cause of the over-reaction is the inability to say what really happened, and why it was so deeply offensive, sc. the crude racism, in a large public setting, re-enacting the kind of tribal violence against blacks that the US has seen far too often, and far too recently.

So I think you are spot-on, and also think this is why I am less troubled by what troubles novakant. It’s not really an invocation of lese-majeste, just a confused over-reaction to what they cannot name outright.

(As for the clown–I both feel bad for his disproportionate punishment, and also worry that his career will flourish after this, as he is made a martyr and feted by the racists who line up to hire him.)

I both feel bad for his disproportionate punishment

I don’t.

Following on Belle @22 and js. @36, I am bowled over by how far over the line the broom goes. Talk about things that can’t be named: despite running the same picture all day that was shown in Belle’s link, nbcnews.com didn’t refer to the broom at all in its article. Great family entertainment they like out there in the alleged God-and-family-loving alleged heartland.

1) You seem to have picked up an unusually stupid batch of trolls of late. My sympathies. You could call the disemvowelers.
2) How could you not talk about butter queens in a post about state fairs?
3) The Navajo Nation Eastern Agency Fair is all kinds of awesome.
4) Best part of a rodeo is the kids riding sheep.

Maybe this has been mentioned above, but if not: a lot of the boss media seem to be washing the racial gesture(s) out of the story, so that it becomes huffing about the lèse majesté of it all and defensive comparisons with the derision accorded Bush multiply endlessly.

Barry @90:

I imagine Rich means the kind of people who keep saying, “It’s not racism, it’s classicism!” no matter what’s happening around them. No proper leftist (I just mean, not a left-liberal type) I have met in the flesh says dumb shit like that, but they’re all over comment threads, so they must be out there. (Tho RP can of course correct me if I’m wrong.)

JanieM @91:

That is crazy to me that they did not mention the broom. Like, hey, no! what do you mean there’s something sticking out of the clown’s ass!? I don’t see it at all!

Also, thanks for the fried butter link up above. I do think they missed something by using a honey glaze rather than a butter glaze to top it all off. I mean, just go for the trifecta, no?

Oh, that’s horrible! In my defense, ‘classism’ is an awful neologism, and my mind turned it into a word that made sense. Ok, yeah, I’m grasping. Bye now.

Belle @92 – I was automatically looking for a Like button. As for what 4-H do up here in Alaska — a lot of cool things indeed (https://sphotos-b-pao.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/264334_10151165016644844_505534762_n.jpg) . Bear might be something they encounter as occasional subsistence food, but it’s not an agricultural item.

js. 08.13.13 at 4:06 am
“Barry @90:

I imagine Rich means the kind of people who keep saying, “It’s not racism, it’s classicism!” no matter what’s happening around them. No proper leftist (I just mean, not a left-liberal type) I have met in the flesh says dumb shit like that, but they’re all over comment threads, so they must be out there. (Tho RP can of course correct me if I’m wrong.)”

That’s what I sorta thought. This is usually a right-wing theme, but Rich has gone so far left that he’s gone around the bend.

Barry @90:

There is also an old Marxist interpretation which argues that racism is a by-product of class difference, as a divide and conquer method to keep the working man down. And there is definitely some truth to that story, but it has been used on the left to treat racism as subordinate to the class struggle and “racism will melt away after the revolution” or some such. Which, in slightly different language, seems to be alive and well.

At the very least, the notion that racism is nothing more than an instrumental technique that a small elite uses to keep poor white folks down is problematic. It ignores the cultural aspects of racism, it assumes that poor white folks matter more than poor Black folks, and it denies how People of Color actually experience racism. Which isn’t to say that an elite may not marshal racism in order to maintain power, but its not the whole story.

This is only barely relevant, but the conversation at the beginning of the thread about public figures being ridiculed at state fairs reminded me of this anecdote by Mo Udall from Too Funny To Be President (which, has one of the best chapter titles I’ve seen in a political memoir — “Get Cancer, You Parasite”: Letters from Home)

Throughout this entire period, my popularity in Alaska was plummeting ever lower, as this anecdote illustrates: Each summer, service organizations sponsor booths, featuring games of chance, at the Fairbanks County Fair. In 1979, at the height of Jimmy Carter’s unpopularity due to the gasoline shortage and the hostage crisis in Iran, the Jaycees came up with a foolproof scheme for raising money. They constructed a backdrop with three faces emblazoned on it: Ayatollah Khomeini, Carter, and Morris Udall. For a dollar, you got three chances to throw a long-necked beer bottle into a hole below one of the three faces. By the time the fair ended, the heap of broken shards beneath my face, much higher than that below the Ayatollah or J.C., irrefutably demonstrated that I was the chief villain in Alaska that summer. The fact that this was the first time I had bested Carter in any political contest (to say nothing of the Ayatollah) was small consolation.

Barry: Will Shetterly is notorious in some circles for the thing Rich describes. He ended up banned from a bunch of forums and blogs about marginalization and prejudice in science fiction and fantasy for endlessly derailing arguments about how anything that might look like racism was actually classism and any claim to the contrary was toadying denial. He went on to spend months and months making sock puppets to get around bans. He still shows up with the same arguments, wherever he’s not banned any topic of the sort comes up.

That’s just the first name that comes to hand. If you spend much time talking about social justice in action on a site hosted by a woman, or a person of color of any gender identity, you’ll find this persistent swarm of white guys (and a few white gals) who really, deeply, truly don’t want to hear about racism (or homophobia, or anything) being as significant as classism in driving social tension. And there’s a significant population of them prepared to do whatever they can to shut down any discourse to the contrary, up to and including sustained harassment and vilification of designated targets.

It’s common enough that social-justice bloggers who don’t let class trump everything else warn newcomers to the scene to expect this flavor of creep, with regrettably solid justification.

Funny, I was just browsing the anti-racism dictionary the other day and I could swear I saw a quote of Daniel’s 35 in there under “derailment”.

WTF does that have to do with anything exactly, Daniel?

Or are you trying to casually imply that because some black person somewhere may have incorrectly attributed a racial/prejudiced motivation to someone one time, that this somehow disqualifies any possible allegations of the same, hereafter and forever?

Or was it just this cool thing you happened to see, and thought , “Wow, this here crooked timber thread is as good a place as any to broadcast my new anecdatum of how black people and their accusations of racism are just full of it”?

Glancing over this thread reminds me of the most unbelievably offensive thing I have ever seen at a county fair (or anywhere, for that matter) (Santa Clara County, now Silicon Valley, with my brother in 1970) — they had an actual freak show featuring deformed live people and a few malformed ones in formaldehyde. Sort of like I remember Mr. Venus’ shop in Our Mutual Friend, and I think there’s a Todd Browning movie?

Anyhow, we went in figuring it would be cultural education and walked out sick to our stomachs. It was banned the next year.

I will say this in the interests of ending what I will admit threatens to become a derail (though I don’t think it started solely with me) on an already distressing thread: I agree with you completely as far as the racism of the incident, and I will absolutely admit to being privileged and blind to my own prejudices from time to time.

For example, when I said you might refer to your upbringing in the South to prove blue collar bon fides? I mean, you have a colorful way of frequently writing about personal history, but South=blue collar? What’s that about? Totally messed up. I had no right to insinuate that, and it’s just plain wrong and blind and prejudiced of me. I apologize because that was offensive.

The hair thing, though? I pointed out the moldiness and hackneyed nature of the whole “carnival worker is shady” script (in regards to which the whole facial hair choices thing isn’t some kind of innovation) precisely because I’ve heard it so many times before, and I know what people have implied by stories like that in the past. If that really isn’t what you meant by introducing this character for no reason into this story, then I apologize.

In fact, never mind. I apologize full stop. I cynically misunderstood what you wrote. You are right about Americans being unable to talk about race and about people having difficulty owning up to prejudices.

Ditto what PatrickinIowa said @120 / 5:16 pm.

At times like this I wish I could get it together to comment more frequently. When I get the urge to comment, it tends to be when either

1) I’m riled up, and that usually doesn’t end well, so I try to avoid it; or

2) there’s so much I’d like to say that I can’t (or don’t have time to) condense it into a blog comment.

Plus, there’s a self-imposed intimidation factor in that a lot of the OPs here are in fields where I have no training and almost no experience outside CT itself. So I read to learn, but don’t have a lot to contribute.

But I also agree that the comment threads are getting more frustrating. There’s quite a list now of commenters whom I just ignore. But that’s not very satisfying either, since a lot of threads tend to fall into a rabbit hole of back-and-forth with those very same commenters.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do hope, Belle, that you don’t stop posting.

fwiw I read that this guy was a carnival worker at one time.

… child of carnival workers, actually, but in an interview he said, “me and my brother would get dragged along to these things all the time and have to work.”