Rodeo clown banned: Did rodeo stunt go too far?

Rodeo clown banned: Missouri State Fair officials apologized for an 'inappropriate' performance, after the announcer asked if the crowd wanted to see Obama (the clown) 'run down by a bull.'

|
Jameson Hsieh/AP
This photo shows a clown wearing a mask intended to look like President Obama at the Missouri State Fair on Saturday. The announcer asked the crowd if anyone wanted to see 'Obama run down by a bull,' according to a spectator. State Fair officials later apologized.

A clown wearing a President Obama mask got a big reception at a Missouri State Fair rodeo over the weekend. According to The Associated Press, most of the crowd clapped and cheered when the announcer asked if they wanted to see “Obama run down by a bull."

The Missouri State Fair says it has banned the unnamed rodeo clown from ever performing at the fair again.

One fairgoer who was not happy about the performance, Perry Beam, told the AP that everybody “just went wild” when the masked clown appeared, and that he began to feel “a sense of fear” for himself, his wife, and a Taiwanese student that they had brought to the performance.

Another clown ran up to the clown wearing the Obama mask, pretended to tickle him, and played with the mask’s lips, according to Mr. Beam. Eventually they had to depart when actual bulls started running too close.

“They mentioned the president’s name, I don’t know, 100 times. It was sickening. It was feeling like some kind of Klan rally you’d see on TV,” said Beam.

OK, Obama mask plus stomping rodeo bulls. Who thought that equation would equal fun? Not the Missouri State Fair leadership. After the show, they apologized on their Facebook page for what they called an “inappropriate and disrespectful” performance. Not Missouri’s top elected officials. Republican Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder condemned the stunt via Twitter. “We are better than this,” he wrote. Democrats Gov. Jay Nixon and Sen. Claire McCaskill also expressed deep displeasure.

Some national conservatives, however, charged that the umbrage was hypocritical, given the popularity of George W. Bush Halloween masks during his presidency. All US chief executives are mocked, wrote Dana Loesch on the right-leaning RedState site.

“Free speech is free speech and isn’t meant to protect only that with which I agree,” wrote Ms. Loesch.

In 1994, a Philadelphia Inquirer story noted that a rodeo clown used a George H.W. Bush dummy to distract raging bulls, yet nobody called for a Secret Service investigation, pointed out Loesch.

Of course, it’s the element of race that makes the Obama incident so controversial. Many of those who are outraged by the rodeo clown perhaps see mock violence against the nation’s first African-American president in the context of the nation’s long history of real violence against African-Americans.

“Silence is an inappropriate response to this ‘entertainment’ at an event supported by all Missourians,” wrote Bob Yates on “Show Me Progress," a left-leaning Missouri website.

On the other side, those who say the Obama mask clown is part of a long history of US irreverence toward their chief executives may feel that Democrats cry “race” to block all criticism of the president.

Here’s a third point of view: Maybe mock violence against presidential masks and dummies should be judged a chancy business, whomever the target. There’s been real violence against presidents of both parties, after all. This November will mark 50 years since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Ronald Reagan was shot 32 years ago. Every president gets a horrendous amount of violent hate mail and threats.

“The young Missourians who witnessed this stunt learned exactly the wrong lesson about political discourse – that somehow it’s ever acceptable to, in a public event, disrespect, taunt, and joke about harming the President of our great nation,” said Senator McCaskill in her statement responding to the incident.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Rodeo clown banned: Did rodeo stunt go too far?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2013/0812/Rodeo-clown-banned-Did-rodeo-stunt-go-too-far
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe