I feel like you could probably lay down some interesting context for the recent wave of clown sightings
Doesn’t seem any less random to me tbh. Wracking my brain I can only think of two things tangent enough to even bother sketching:
1) Gesturing vaguely towards the concept of social contagion and copycat transgression, examples being the wave of late-’90s mass school shootings following the Pearl High School attack in ‘97, with other rampages in the wake of the Amish schoolhouse massacre in ‘06, or how the 2002 Tampa and 2010 Austin kamikaze attacks were clearly inspired by 9/11.
In the course of getting my dates right, I learned that the first big school shooting/massacre happened in 1764, and inspired Pennsylvania to (re)institute a bounty on natives (with scalps as proof). Sounds about right. ‘Merica!
2) A history of circuses and other traveling performers (theater troupes, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Stage Show, revival preachers) in America, emphasizing just how huge and sparse and rural America was before WWII, and just how important railroads were to making that at all workable. Possible digressions include:
- How homesteading requirements to live on your claim and the larger acreages required to sustain a farm on the arid Great Plains led to a culture of isolated farmhouses rather than more traditional concentration in villages, affecting society and requiring more dispersed modes of providing services and goods (bookmobiles, Rural Free Delivery and catalog shopping, etc.)
- How a lot of old hoohaw about Teenagers! In high school! Going on dates! was subtextually about how by countering this isolation automobiles were changing society.
- How movie distribution initially followed this traveling performer model with reels traveling a circuit around the country for months, making brief engagements in individual theaters where they’d have an audience that would show up to whatever entertainment was on offer that week before moving on to the next. How that started to change in the 1970s with the collapse of the studio system, the development of multiplexes, and the rise of competition from TV prompting a shift to the blockbuster/tentpole model, with films given widespread simultaneous release with national promotional campaigns and then judged on opening weekend receipts.
That’s not really about clowns tho.