I swear I did this blog once this morning, yet as I return to my page it isn't here. It's that type of stuff that just brings today to it's most rightful conclusion. Anyway, it was a prime stolen comment blog from one of my favorite local columnists, Dennis Roddy at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Dennis hasn't been writing as many columns recently, he has been doing a series on mining safety for the Post Gazette and has also been involved in their still developing podcast project, where he is one of the contributors. as a result, his columns have been much less frequent than they used to be, but enjoyable reads nonetheless. He recently did a column on Saturday, that me in my esteemed wisdom felt I should steal as I am prone to do with this blog, if for no other reason that so you can say, "Why the hell did he post that?" Anyway, rather than bother you with my blather (I have other things to blather about which I will get to soon enough) I will leave you to your reading.
Saturday Diary: Clowns in life, clowns in death, clowns on view, 24/7
Saturday, February 24, 2007
By Dennis Roddy
Scrolling the web site of the Cable News Network at mid-week in search of news about something other than Anna Nicole Smith, I came across the following item from Reuters which, at first viewing, would seem to defy comprehension. I quote:
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Dennis Roddy is a staff writer for the Post-Gazette (droddy@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1965). |
In Colombian Circus
Two clowns were shot and killed by an unidentified gunman during their performance at a traveling circus in the eastern Colombian town of Cucuta, police said Wednesday.
The gunman burst into the Circo del Sol de Cali on Monday night and shot the clowns in front of an audience of 20 to 50 people ..."The clowns came out to give their show, and then this guy came out shooting them," one audience member told local television. "It was terrible."
Clown killing is always an ugly undertaking. One moment, a man in floppy shoes is yukking it up; the next, he's being piled into an undersized ambulance with 50 other people and driven off in a zig-zag.
But such a moment requires careful deconstruction. Its roots are fragile, but they can be found. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida noted that reality -- more correctly, the construct we call reality -- is in truth a text that we write to suit our needs, and rewrite as necessary to make its components fit into a narrative of reality. At least that's what I choose to say Derrida said and, as a man who views perception as the text we write, he has no choice but to put up with me. He started it.
The point here is that as plaintiffs and a judge in Florida were debating the disposition of the remains of one clown, who apparently hid her seltzer bottles somewhere in her blouse, other clowns were being disposed of with a cool finality that suggests we've found some karmic groove. It is, in essence, the script writing itself in an endless loop.
We have created a reality in which buffoons are celebrated without judgment, then mourned with the same lack of critical apparatus. It is little wonder, then, that the deaths of clowns become necessary for this mourning to be validated as a salient aspect of the contextual reality we create. Simple as that.
Too bad it's Lent. A man needs to be drunk after reaching that conclusion or, more to the point, after being dragged there upon finding the clown killing on the CNN Web site, just a few clicks away from an account of the ongoing decomposition of a body more accomplished than its former inhabitant.
The courtroom dispute over the clay of Anna Nicole Smith was being fed to me Wednesday as I walked a treadmill at the JCC. Rather a fitting metaphor, yes, but all the more delicious by the fact that the screen had been split to allow live coverage of two events. On the left of the screen, Miss Smith's mother, Virgie Arthur, was demanding that the daughter she neglected in life be brought to Texas to be buried alongside the same line of undistinguished DNA from which she sprang. Mrs. Arthur also suggested that Miss Smith's not-quite-husband somehow played a role in Anna Nicole's death as well as that of Anna Nicole's son, Danny, and that her daughter's latest production, Dannielynn, is in mortal danger near such a Dracula.
On the right screen, CNN delivered up what might have been the first-ever high-speed chase involving a PT Cruiser. An airborne camera followed the event, which climaxed in the driver T-boning a passing sedan. The denouement was three young men piling out of the Cruiser and being tracked down in the back yards of south Florida.
It was almost as if -- or perhaps exactly so -- a battle among morally ambiguous people fighting over a corpse required an antidote: a clearly defined competition between cops and robbers.
In the end, whether drawing out a conspiracy theory in the fight over a cadaver or sprawled on a Florida pavement after crashing a car more suited to a taxi stand, they all looked like clowns. That is what we should feel like for watching.
We do not know how events finally sorted themselves out after the young men were chased clown-style across the streets of south Florida. The chase was the event of interest, not the fate of its participants, nor the health of the innocent bystander rammed by the fleeing Cruiser, nor, especially, the long list of circumstances that might have led the three young men into the lives they had chosen for themselves. That is unexciting, and it is clear that the received wisdom is that God put us here to be entertained.
Miss Smith's fate is a bit clearer. The judge decided that Dannielynn should get custody of her mother's remains. That is to say, the judge awarded a corpse to an infant.
In a world where clowns are gunned down and trashy people fight over a dead body with an indignation that only makes them oblivious to their ridiculousness, giving a cadaver to a five-month old passes as the wisdom of Solomon if only because nobody thought of settling the dispute by an old-fashioned tug-of-war. Now that would have sent the cable ratings skyward.
Copyright © PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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