Farmer Hoggett, Stalin Claus, and the Clown Effect

by Micah Tillman

Everything you need to know about politics (and bailouts) you can learn from one scene in Babe, that talking-pig movie from the mid-90s. We join the story just as Farmer Hoggett is about to make a deadly mistake.

Narrator: “There was only one fate for any creature that took the life of a sheep on Hoggett Farm.”

Despite the “But Babe is innocent!” cries erupting from the theatre audience, Hoggett is grim and unheeding.

Narrator: “Farmer Hoggett was carrying something in the crook of one arm. A kind of black, shiny tube.”

Hoggett: “Come, pig.”

Narrator: “The pig had a vague memory that shiny tubes produced food, and guessed that some quite unexpected surprise would come out of two small round mouths.”

Indeed. The pellets that come from shotguns are not the edible kind.

So it’s consternating when Congress aims their cannons at something, and out come comestibles (not combustibles?).

It’s like meeting Stalin and discovering he’s really Santa Claus. You’d want to ask, “If you’re in the giving business, why do you need an army?”

“That’s not an army. Those are the elves who make my toys,” Stalin Claus would no doubt respond.

“Why are they all carrying AK-47s, then? To shoot kids full of toys?”

“No, full of joys.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

“Not really, no. I just do what feels right at the moment.”

I get the same feeling from our government as I get from clowns. There’s something goofy and disturbing prancing about in front of me, making dogs out of balloons. Riding a unicycle. Looking generally hideous.

And being totally fake.

Under the face paint there’s an actual person who’s not at all the jovial bundle of freaky frivolity he’s giving himself out to be.

And under the bailout there’s a government, a group of men who tell you what to do, and who say, “That army” if you’re ever snippy enough to inquire, “You gonna make me follow your rules? You and what army?”

If you’re Santa Claus, why do you need special ops? That’s what I want to know. And if you’re special ops, why the white paint and big red nose? I thought you guys wore black.

Again, I have no real objection to people in government doing whatever they want with their money. But that doesn’t make it any less bizarre that they (claim to) want to give it away.

“What then hath guns to do with greenbacks?” should be our constant question. “Why expect the shiny tubes held by government to deliver millet and not militarism?”

Money, after all, is about exchange, about giving something to get something else.

Guns, on the other hand, are about taking. Threatening to give people something unpleasant from your shiny tube (unless they give you what you want) is not an exchange.

So if government is going to open up shop on Wall Street, it would be much less confusing if they would spin off their weapons department. It’s easier on the customer’s nerves if you aren’t holding a gun to his back.

But if the government is going to keep its armored division, I would be less “weirded out” (as the kids say) if they would stop pretending to be a philanthropic enterprise. Does World Vision have an army? Does the Gates Foundation pack heat?

And when McDonald’s or Wal-Mart invades another country, don’t they do it with burgers and housewares and whatnot? (I’ve heard that Wal-Mart “carries guns” in some places, but that’s something different. Right?)

None of this constitutes a real argument against Stalin Claus governments, of course. There’s nothing necessarily unconstitutional about being bizarre. It’s just I’ve always found clowns unsettling. Creepy.

And our government has been looking really clownish these past few weeks.

Micah Tillman is a lecturer in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America