SACRED CLOWNS

Where are the jesters, anyway?

You know that old saying about how you can never find a policeman when you need one? Well, clowns are in the same category, especially where computers are concerned. And these days, if anyone needs the intervention of irreverence, it has to be Apple!

If you missed the leaked iMac pictures and the company's subsequent legal threats against anyone who published them, consider yourself blessed among men (and women). It wasn't pretty or fun and it probably engendered a few more Luddites. Why, even Dan Knight took a few days off, and a lot of people envied him. What's especially sad about the way the Great Picture Pogrom unfolded is that everything was ridiculously heavy-handed, on all sides! Apple managed to take almost all the joy out of everyone's anticipation of the new iMacs, and over-sensitive webmasters at Mac sites everywhere acted like humorless dolts.

Ergo: [drumroll, fanfare, lifting of eyes to the light or to receive a pie in the face] What this business, what this society needs desperately is more than just a "sense of humor." We need something like the medieval jesters who got away with murder by making people laugh. We need to be mocked, ridiculed, turned upside down! We need to be dunked, doused, dipped, duped, and dangled. We need to be bashed, boffed, beaned, and bounced. We need to break the glass. We need to honor the performers, the artists, the satirists, the publications, the Web sites, the TV shows and movies that do these things. We need to appreciate that we create the world we inhabit, and not the other way around. We need to realize we've chosen to be the way we are.

You know what? We need some sacred clowns!

I saw a few real ones at the Pueblo last Thursday (San Geronimo Feast Day, Sept. 30). They're called "koshares." They spend the afternoon running through the crowds, scaring the unwary and uptight, mocking everyone's carefully-tended self-images: (I can describe them, but they're much more than this!) Mostly naked, bodies painted in wide horizontal bands of black and white, whooping and hollering, they walk through the crowds looking for someone to mess up. I loved it! I saw them grab children to dunk in the river, steal people's hats, chase people through the plaza, draw circles in the dirt (?), and force a teenage boy to drink a whole bottle of green soda. Another kid, maybe 10 or 12 years old and obviously in need of special attention, was dunked and dusted!

The following paragraph from an article by Jane Odin in the Sept./Oct. 1999 issue of Horse Fly,* a local news magazine edited and published by Bill Whaley, may be helpful:

"Last year a tourist couple, all decked out in turquoise and silver and wearing cowboy hats, were shoveling food into their mouths with great gusto. Suddenly out of nowhere two sacred ones appeared directly in front of them. Each clown grabbed a plate from the couple and brought it up close to his black painted smile, imitating the tourists in detail before returning the plate empty. Then off they scampered, snatching a Native American infant for the ice-water treatment. Running down to the river, they held the tiny infant aloft like a loaf of bread. (Natives consider infant dunking a blessing of strength for the child.)"

What can I say? You had to be there. And that, friends and neighbors, is another trip in itself. We're talking about a public festival taking place on Indian land. Notice I didn't say "reservation." The Taos Pueblo is a thousand-year-old community that was already there and doing just fine, thank you, when Coronado's men came up the Rio Grande in 1540 looking for cities of gold. What they found was a cluster of five-story adobe buildings on either side of a river that flowed from the sacred Blue Lake high up in the nearby mountains, and it's all still there (Allah be praised).

On this particular day, the feast of San Geronimo (St. Jerome), the public is invited to come into the Pueblo and stroll around in certain areas. And what a show, my God. In the old days this was a "trade fair," with Plains Indians, mountain men, Pueblo people and local settlers all declaring a truce for the day to exchange goods. Today it's just as colorful: older Native Americans in beaded moccasins and blankets, hordes of local Hispanics and Anglos, tons of tourists laughably ill-prepared for the blazing sun, Santa Fe ladies dressed for no one but themselves, and a sizeable contigent of dusty, dark-tanned, tattooed post-Apocalypse hippie bikers. I saw a Buddhist monk in a skirt and could have sworn I spied Kevin Costner. Dogs, dust, and drums. . .

And the clowns! What a privilege to witness.

These guys aren't performing for laughs or trinkets. It may be serious fun, but it's also sacred business: the clowns are the interface between the material and spirit worlds. They can do whatever they want in their improvisational performance not just because it takes place on sovereign Native soil instead of suburbia. (Try to imagine the baby-snatching episodes in your own neck of the woods!) They embody that interface I mentioned. And guess what? The teaching is true. I doubt if very many people "get it," but 'twas ever thus: there is right action and wrong action and the choice is ours. Always has been. Dip your finger in the water and the ripples spread.

What this knowledge does is create balance. You can feel it the moment you drive onto Native land. Something very, very old and calm, an underlying belonging, acceptance, and tolerance. I'm trying to communicate this as best I can from this one experience, so please don't write this off as some kind of New Age, post-hippie B.S. from another starry-eyed Anglo goofball. I'm just telling you I was there and it was different!

Now then: being (and thinking) different. I hope to God most of you have seen a Marx Brothers movie or two in your lives, because those guys come the closest to being sacred clowns of any palefaces I can think of. Especially Harpo! During one of the most stressful periods in American history, the Marx Brothers tore the house down and restored a kind of equilibrium to the national psyche. They weren't just funny, they were relentlessly anti-authoritarian and disruptive. If Groucho were alive to hear me credit them with fulfilling some higher purpose, well hell: he'd make fun of that, too.

Somehow, for some reason, in the latter half of the almost-gone 20th century we white people developed the very bad habit of killing all the clowns. This is a despicable, rotten business that started with Lenny Bruce and is now hopefully ending with the last feeble paroxysms of "political correctness." There have been plenty of comedians, all right, but serious, sacred ridicule is usually shot down in flames by labeling it blasphemy, bad for children, or detrimental to the psychological well-being of this or that group of newfound victims. Well, pooh-bah!

I own a Power Macintosh computer. This gives me the inalienable right to declare that I could run the company better than you-know-who, as every Macintosh user knows. The wonderful thing about owning a Mac is that merely possessing the machine confers upon one a kind of higher wisdom and insight that pitiable PC owners will never know. Who wants to run Packard-Bell, anyway, or poor beleagured Compaq? What fun is that?? (Heck, I'd rather write news about Apple and be corrected every day by other Mac owners!) So here's a suggestion:

The next time Uncle Stevie wants to dazzle us all with the latest "insanely great" product, why not flood the Internet with fakes? I'm talking obvious fakes, of course. Crazy stuff. Offensive, even. Tear the joint to pieces! Scare people the right way by threatening them with embarrassment!! Blow up their silly little worlds and make us all roar with laughter!!! You know what? I just figured it out. I want everybody to email the company and say:

If that doesn't work, send in the bikers and the Indians. We'll give 'em a product intro to remember, and we just might save the world!

John H. Farr also edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives have links to all past columns and occasional snippets of biographical info.

To be notified whenever the column is updated, just send a message titled "Subscribe FSN" to this address.

*This is the inaugural issue of Horse Fly! Soon to be on the Web at http://www.taoswebb.com/horsefly. Taos County, 12 issues for $15. Out of town, $35. Send checks to P.O. Box 1135, Taos, NM 87571. You'll be glad you did!

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July 05, 2009