"I just googled 'mutton busting,' which was a new topic for many of us yesterday, when one of the Republican senators asked Gorsuch about taking his clerks to the Denver rodeo."

"Now I really want to see it in action," wrote Amy Howe, at SCOTUSblog, where they were doing something I just can't bring myself to do, live-blogging the Neil Gorsuch confirmation hearing.

But how can you not know about mutton busting?!



You'd think these eastern elite types would at least have seen it on PBS. What's the point of funding PBS if you're not even up to speed on mutton busting? I think this relates to why people don't understand how Trump won the election.

The NYT also made much of the mention of mutton busting:

Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, wanted to hear about the Denver rodeo. And Judge Gorsuch, elusive all week as Democrats have strained to pinpoint his judicial leanings, turned instantly expansive.

“Mutton busting, as you know, comes sort of like bronco busting for adults,” he began on Tuesday. “You take a poor little kid, you find a sheep and you attach the one to the other and see how long they can hold on.”

He went on.

“…You know, it usually works fine when the sheep has got a lot of wool and you tell them to hold on — I tell my kids hold on monkey-style, you know? Really get in there, right? Get around it…”

The Democrats stared blankly.

“…Because if you sit upright, you go flying right off, right? So, you want to get in. But the problem when you get in is that you’re so locked in that you don’t want to let go, right? And so, then the poor clown has to come and knock you off the sheep.”

Key line:  The Democrats stared blankly. 

In real life, the rich clown has come and knocked you off the sheep.

Oklahoma boys training for rodeo make the New Yorker writer think about "a playground near my house in Brooklyn, in Park Slope."

"A couple of years ago, it was beautifully renovated by the city, with a rock-lined stream meandering through it and an old-fashioned pump that children could crank to set the water flowing. The stream was the delight of the neighborhood for a while, thronged with kids splashing through the shallows and floating sticks down the current. Yet some parents were appalled. The rocks were a menace, they declared. The edges were too sharp, the surfaces too slippery. A child could fall and crack her skull. 'I actually kept tapping them to check if they were really rocks,' one commenter wrote on the Park Slope Parents Web site. 'It seemed odd to me to have big rocks in a playground.' Within two weeks, a stonemason had been brought in to grind the edges down. The protests continued. One mother called a personal-injury lawyer about forcing the city to remove the rocks. Another suggested that something be done to 'soften' them. 'I am actually dreading the summer because of those rocks,' still another complained."

From "The Ride of Their Lives/Children prepare for the world’s most dangerous organized sport" by Burkhard Bilger.

"The House GOP Should Man Up Instead of Resorting to Political Theater in the Courts."

Writes Erick Erickson at Red State, and I don't have to read beyond that headline to know I want to blog this. I too think the lawsuit is political theater — bad political theater — but I think I'd forgo the masculinity disparagement (which continues with "I realize John Boehner and the House Republicans may lack the testicular fortitude to fight President Obama...").

You might remember that we were just talking about the phrase "man up," in a post titled "Is America's dominant 'man up' ethos a hypermasculine cultural construct, a tenet rooted in biological gender difference or something in between?" The post title isn't something I wrote, but something some NPR guy said. I questioned whether America had a "dominant 'man up' ethos," and in the comments, I wrote about the origins of the phrase "man up":

For what it's worth: The Oxford English Dictionary finds this as the earliest use of "man up" (to mean "To demonstrate manliness, toughness, or courage when faced with a difficult situation"):

1996 Palm Beach (Florida) Post 2 Mar. c1/2 He made a commitment, and to his credit, he manned up to it.

And I quoted from Ben Zimmer's "The Meaning of ‘Man Up'":

"One notable forerunner of man up as we know it today is cowboy up, a phrase that has been used in rodeo circles for decades.... Cowboy up wasn’t much known outside of rodeo country until 2003, when it became the rallying cry for the Boston Red Sox.... Man up owes its early popularization to another American sport: football, where it originally had a more technical meaning relating to man-to-man pass defense...."

Note that the earlier meaning of "man up" was not act like a man, but (to quote the OED again) "To supply with the full number of workers required" — that is, to get all the men you need on the the job, which actually would fit the idea Erickson presses on Boehner better than the "testicular fortitude"/masculinity notion.

By the way, the OED, on that older meaning of "man up," quotes some British writer in 1947 complaining about the unnecessary "up":

Must industries be fully ‘manned up’ rather than ‘manned’? Must the strong, simple transitive verb..become as obsolete in England as it appears to be in America?

We Americans do like adding "up" to verbs that might do without it. We don't just fill the glass, we fill the glass up, and we don't just drink the drink, we drink it up. We don't just build our self-esteem, we build it up. I'm calling that optimism, but maybe it's more of the phallocracy that dominates the ethos around here.

Is depicting the "Obama Presidential Library" as an outhouse racist?

This miniature outrage arrives from Norfolk, Nebraska. A float in a 4th of July Parade had a fake outhouse labeled "Obama Presidential Library" and, standing outside it, a mannequin of a dark-skinned man wearing overalls.

Clearly, this is disrespectful, but there's nothing violent happening, so it doesn't implicate the concerns about presidential safety that bothered me during the 2013 mini-outrage over the rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask.

It's important to be able to express disrespect for the President, and race shouldn't immunize the President from criticism, though it's easy to see the temptation, for at least some Obama supporters, to push back critics by scaring them with accusations of racism.

Yes, it's a bad float, inappropriate for the 4th of July, but the only reason to pay any attention to this — what other bad floats appeared in local parades on the 4th? — is that the accusation of racism has been leveled.

What is racial about an outhouse? Outhouses are associated with poverty, and while there are correlations between poverty and race, the outhouse as a marker of poverty is associated with poor, rural white people. I think of the original iconography of Mountain Dew:

John Brichetto drew the first sketches of the original Mountain Dew bottle labels in 1948, depicting a character known as Willy the Hillbilly shooting at a revenuer fleeing an outhouse with a pig sitting in the corner. Below the illustration is the phrase “by Barney and Ollie”—as in FILLED by Barney and Ollie, a nod to the way a homemade jug of moonshine might be hand filled by the moonshiner. This labeling quirk was carried on until Pepsi Cola entered the picture many years later.

I think of Li'l Abner, the cartoon character:

A priceless rube, Abner was so gullible that he could be tricked by a small child. The loutish Abner typically had no visible means of support, but sometimes earned his livelihood as a "crescent cutter" for the Little Wonder privy company, (later changed to "mattress tester" for the Stunned Ox mattress company.)

Now, let's move on to the overalls. What does it mean that the figure of the President is dressed in overalls? The association is to rural poverty (or rural work), but is it racial?

Thinking about race and overalls, I heard the line "You wear overalls!" What was that? Some recording from the 60s... Ah! I was thinking of Carla Thomas, singing with Otis Redding, in the 1967 song "Tramp." At 0:37, you hear:

You know what, Otis?
What?
You're country.
That's all right.
You're straight from the Georgia woods.
That's good.
You know what? You wear overalls, and big old brogan shoes, and you need a haircut, Tramp.

And, again, as the song is fading out, at 2:42, Thomas harps on those overalls:

You a tramp, Otis. You just a tramp.
That's all right.
You wear overalls. You need a haircut, Baby. Cut off some of that hair off your head. You think you're a lover?

There is zero chance that Thomas's problem with Redding is racial. She's rejecting him because he's country. His retort: That's good.

So I think the float used the iconography of poverty to express the point of view that Obama is utterly lacking in achievement worthy of a presidential library. Maybe you could build an argument that because so many black people have been poor, any depiction of a black person as poor is intended to associate him with black people in general, and that is enough to warrant an accusation of racism. But I think this float belongs in the innocuous category of traditional American disrespect for authority figures.

Looking at it that way, I suddenly see how it might be exactly what is appropriate for the 4th of July:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States....

The rodeo clown speaks.

"I didn't do this to do any hating on anyone. I did it to be funny. I did it to be a joke."

This bit, this clown bit has been around for generations. And I didn't think anything more of it than what we've done 15 years ago, 10 years ago, five years ago, when we've done it with Bush and Clinton and Ronald Reagan.

I actually think that a lot of people have lost their ability to laugh. Look at the country as a whole. There's a lot more to be mad at than a rodeo clown at a rodeo trying to make somebody laugh.

"Excommunicated from the clown community."

"'Excommunicated' is our word, but there really is a 'clown community,'" writes James Taranto, who's apparently a community unto himself, judging by his use of the first person plural.

Judy Quest, author of a CNN.com op-ed titled "A Real Clown Wouldn't Mock Obama"... informs us of the existence of "international clown organizations," a "strict code of ethics" governing "the craft" of clowning, and "clown journals," for which Quest, who's been a clown for 32 years, "writes regularly."

But does the Clown Code of Ethics forbid dressing up as a particular President of the United States and appearing to have your life threatened? Taranto says:

[N]one of the Clown Commandments forbid political humor, so that it would appear to be permissible to pantomime truth to power. 

Yes, but do clown ethics forbid making comedy out of a physical threat to the President? What truth is spoken by saying Wouldn't it be funny if the President's life were in danger?

If you've wondered why I hadn't previously blogged about the rodeo clown, these questions reflect my reasons for avoiding what might seem like such a tempting story. I favor free speech, and I'm sorry this guy lost his job. He shouldn't have received so much attention, which is why I'd refrained from giving him more. But an employer is justified controlling the speech of employees. The speech expressed by the rodeo is the speech of the business that is the rodeo. It's not the individual speech of any particular performer. But I suspect the guy got scapegoated. Did the employer approve of this kind of performance before the nation's spotlight fell on this one clown?