January 20th, 2017

LET THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH BEGIN

What comes around goes around.

With that in mind, it’s worth noting we witness the ascension of Donald Trump to President of the United States mere days after it was announced that the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus has popped its big top for the last time.

P.T. Barnum’s show may have ended but it’s been replaced by the MAKE AMERICA THE GREATEST show on earth. It’s been booked for four years, could be extended to eight and will be performed LIVE and continuously at 1600 Pennsylvania Blvd, (aside from the impromptu road show stops). It promises to be NEVER THE SAME THING ONCE. It will take your breath away 140 characters at a time with death defying Twitter posts.

This 21st century newer, bigger, better, great-again show has all the rubber necking qualities of the original American three ring spectacle.

Phineas Taylor Barnum, like the 45th President, was an inveterate self-promoting huckster who is often quoted as saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute” and “Every crowd has a silver lining.” Imagine how great his show might have been if he’d been able to avail himself of reality tv and social media!

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​Barnum’s brand was burnished by his live acts and curiosities, highlighted by his menagerie of mutants and hoaxes.

There was no height too high for his hype. Barnum apparently felt no compunction to overstate or overblow a promotional claim so long as the paying public left the show feeling that they’d got their money’s worth.

All sounds a little familiar, eh?

Barnum had his Hippodrome, his freaks, giants and exotic woman.  Trump has his towers, the WWE and beauty pageants. Barnum had fire-eaters. Trump fired apprentices.

But Barnum had no time for fraudsters who deceived the vulnerable to make a buck. He actually testified against a photographer of the day who claimed he could photograph dead people! (The photographer, by the way, was married to a ‘healing medium’.)

Even for all his bluster and over-hyped self-promotion, the Circus King drew a line. He couldn’t abide “fake news”.  He made it his mission to expose the “tricks of the trade”. So maybe it’s poetic that the spectacle he founded announced its demise this week.
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A century and a half later, the United States has elected the first Flat Earth President who rode a wave of unprecedented populism that was whipped up by a wilful acceptance of wilful ignorance and falsehoods, and it landed him in the White House.

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The ‘fact of the matter’ is no longer meaningful. Trump’s truth is uncontested by rational, skeptical, logical, factual argument. It’s true simply because it has been blurted out in a Twitter post.
As Barnum said, “Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung.”
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Let the show begin. 

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