Nicholas Kristof imagines, in a recent New York Times op-ed column, “President Donald J. Trump in a tense international crisis, indignant and impatient, with his sweaty finger on the nuclear trigger.” It’s a vision that should give even the most Hillary-hating voter pause. The column ends with Peter Feaver, a former Bush White House national security official, asking, “Why, at a moment when the country desperately needs our A-team, would we send in the clowns?”
I’m planning to write a post at some point on the use of “clown” as an insult, but I think I’ll save that for another day. Instead, I’d like to continue the survey of clowns and short fiction that I started last week. I promised a few thoughts on Michael Chabon’s “The God of Dark Laughter,” a story that appeared in the April 9, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. (And you can’t just say “a 2001 issue of The New Yorker,” right? Pre- or post-9/11: It makes a difference.) I’ve taught Chabon’s story a dozen-plus times, and I’ve mentioned it before on this blog—but I’ve never really thought about it in a political context. Maybe it’s time to do so. Listen to our discourse: we’re in an age of glowing sand, apocalyptic showdowns.
“The God of Dark Laughter” is narrated by Edward D. Satterlee, the district attorney of a county in a “doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania.” A murdered clown has been found in the woods; stranger still, the clown has been (literally) defaced. What starts as a criminal investigation soon turns into a kind of cosmological rabbit hole: Satterlee discovers evidence of “two competing cults of incalculable antiquity, which survived to the present day: that of Yêh-Heh, the God of Dark Laughter, and that of Ai, the God of Unbearable and Ubiquitous Sorrow.” (The followers of Ai leave behind pillows soaked with human tears.) According to Satterlee’s source (“the scholar or charlatan Friedrich von Junzt”),
The Yê-Hehists viewed the universe as a cosmic hoax, perpetrated by the father-god Yrrh for unknowable purposes: a place of calamity and cruel irony so overwhelming that the only possible response was a malevolent laughter like that, presumably, of Yrrh himself. The laughing followers of baboon-headed Yê-Heh created a sacred burlesque, mentioned by Pausanias and by one of the travellers in Plutarch’s dialogue “On the Passing of the Oracles,” to express their mockery of life, death, and all human aspirations. The rite involved the flaying of a human head, severed from the shoulders of one who had died in battle or in the course of some other supposedly exalted endeavor. The clown-priest would don the bloodless mask and then dance, making a public travesty of the noble dead. Through generations of inbreeding, the worshippers of Yê-Heh had evolved into a virtual subspecies of humanity, characterized by distended grins and skin as white as chalk. Von Junzt even claimed that the tradition of painted circus clowns derived from the clumsy imitation, by noninitiates, of these ancient kooks.
The followers of Ai, it appears, are hunting down the Yê-Hehists—the extermination of which will result in the return of Yrrh, “the Absent One, the Silent Divisor who, an eternity ago, tossed the cosmos over his shoulder like a sheet of fish wrap and wandered away leaving not a clue as to his intentions.” Got all that? I should add that Satterlee is resistant to these occult discoveries; his own mother’s invocation of “cosmic emanations, invisible empires, ancient prophecies, and intrigues” has led him to heartbreak. He writes that it has been the business of his life “to reject such folderol and seek the simpler explanation.”
But maybe the simplest explanation, he allows, is that “the world is an ungettable joke, and our human need to explain its wonders and horrors, our appalling genius for devising such explanations, is nothing more than the rim shot that accompanies the punch line.” And maybe, when Yrrh returns, he’ll offer only “a single, a terrible guffaw.”
Anyway, we were talking about Trump, I think. (As were John Oliver, Seth Meyer, Jacob Weisberg, Amy Davidson, Louis C.K., and George Takei.) “The most satisfying episodes of my career,” Satterlee writes, “have been those which afforded me the opportunity to prosecute charlatans and frauds and those who preyed on the credulous.” Chabon’s story begins with a bit of drollery, but it becomes sad by the midpoint and scary by the end. The Trump campaign stopped being funny months ago. Can we skip the scary ending? Begone, clown.