Reality TV star Donald Trump is one step away from being elected leader of the free world. The Irish government is appealing against the ruling that Apple owes it €13bn in unpaid taxes. Armed French police forced a Muslim woman to remove her clothing in public against her will. The Nobel Prize for literature has been awarded to a musician. Sightings of Killer Clowns are being reported all over the world. Are you starting to see the pattern?
People are saying that Killer Clowns might pose a threat to women. Most women who suffer assault do so at the hands of men they know and ought to have been able to trust. It is far more likely that a woman will be raped by her own husband than by a stranger in a clown costume.
People are saying that Killer Clowns are scaring children. We have plundered their world’s resources, caused irreparable damage to the environment, made them obese by filling them with junk food and set in motion armed conflicts unlikely to end in their lifetimes. Given this toxic inheritance, children already had far better reasons to be scared.
People are saying that Killer Clowns are becoming a threat to the livelihoods of real clowns. Legal loopholes and zero hour contracts are making job security a thing of the past for an increasing number of people. If someone loses their livelihood, you ought to expect that a greedy business owner is to blame.
In a world gone mad, Killer Clowns are the appropriate response. It may be that Clinton is finding it so hard to battle Trump because he has embraced the madness while she keeps making the mistake of being the rational one. Does the world not seem to reward those who act irrationally? Case in point; a former host of Have I Got News For You, Boris Johnson, is now Foreign Secretary of Great Britain. Would it not make sense for us to fight fire with fire? Alec Baldwin, portraying Trump in a series of satirical Saturday Night Live sketches, has succeeded in getting under the Republican nominee’s skin in a way that Clinton could only dream of.
We live in a wold that demands conformity, enforced by increasingly disturbing surveillance of our daily lives. It may be that the Killer Clowns have it right after all. People like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have succeeded because we are all complicit in propping up a broken system. We follow the rules while they live outside of them and reap the rewards. We need agents of chaos to remind us that rules were made to be broken. The Killer Clowns are a symbol of the fact that people are not robots. They scare us because they are exercising their free will in a way that we dare not.
To quote The Joker, as seems appropriate, “Madness is the emergency exit…” Looking at the state of the world right now, it would seem that the man has a point.
Michael Everitt
(Image courtesy of PA)