Dean Poling
The Valdosta Daily Times
VALDOSTA —
A TALE
And so it came to pass that a traveling carnival re-instituted a long-lost American tradition: The freak show.
“Come one, come all,” the carnival barker cried. “See what is possibly the last of its kind in America! You won’t believe your eyes! See a throw-back to another era! Another time!”
The barker spoke of the show’s main attraction, but he could just as well have been speaking of the general concept of a freak show.
At some point in American society, freak shows had ended. Not out of any compassion. Not really. Carnival sideshows vanished because the nation reached a point where supply overwhelmed demand.
Why pay to see a colossus of obesity traveling town to town when most American towns had dozens of people tragically overweight?
Why pay to see a tattooed person when a trip to a community swimming pool revealed tattooed people by the dozens?
Why pay to see the rippling muscles of a strong man when gyms had produced musclemen and musclewomen in every town?
Why pay to see someone hammer a nail in her tongue when every town had people with pierced tongues and other body parts? Or gauges gaping holes in their ears? Or faces and bodies altered by surgery? Or mohawks? Or blue hair? Or balding pates with fringes of long hair?
There was no longer a need for sideshows when America had become a nation of freaks. Yet, once everyone adopts the attributes of what was once considered freaky then different becomes the same.
Yesterday’s freak had become today’s normal.
Until, the carnival discovered “him.”
The promoter found him working in a diner somewhere in middle America. Everyone who knew him had become accustomed to this young man being unique. Anyone stopping at the diner couldn’t help but gawk at this new kind of freak.
The promoter signed him to a contract. Traveling, they kept this young man under wraps. He wasn’t allowed to show his face. They kept him covered with a trench coat, a hood, and a drooping wide-brimmed hat.
To see him, people had to come to the carnival. To see him, people had to pay.
And they did. He was quite the extraordinary American. Listen to the barker’s call and you may agree ...
“Come one, come all! See him to believe him! You’ll be amazed to see that once man was a thing of flesh not ink! A creature of moderate size not flesh-upon-flesh-upon-flesh and bone! A being that came unpierced as any animal of the wild! A being of proportionate strength! He is a thing as untouched, as untampered as any newborn babe! A man as natural as the day he was born!
“See Norm! The untattooed, proportionate body-weight, unpierced, proportionate strength man! See him now! Before he vanishes from the American landscape!”
Dean Poling is The Valdosta Daily Times assistant managing editor.
