The professional kinship between historians and rodeo clowns has long gone unnoticed, a situation that has to change.
When rodeo clowns see that a rider is in big trouble, tangled in his gear while the animal beneath him is bucking and twisting up a storm, the clowns do not hold themselves back. They head straight into the epicenter of trouble, putting themselves at risk to distract the bull and do everything imaginable to rescue the rider.
To use the terms of our times, in a bull-riding competition, the clowns (also known as bullfighters) are hands-down the most essential of workers. No rider with an ounce of sense would agree to come out of the chute on a bull if the clowns weren’t waiting in the arena.
When historians see that their nation is in big trouble, polarized and divided in the midst of an enormous challenge, it is time for people in my line of work to follow the example set by rodeo clowns and to head straight into the epicenter of trouble. We are called to put ourselves at risk—thankfully only of scorned expertise and bruised egos, rather than broken bones or fractured skulls.
In the Covid-19 crisis, no one in any line of work is escaping the burden of making hard decisions under conditions of great uncertainty. When it comes to making tough choices on the sharp edge of a disturbing and unpredictable future, rodeo clowns are our preeminent experts. When all hell breaks loose and disorder rules, rodeo clowns stay self-possessed and focused, setting an example, not just for historians, but for elected officials at every level from the offices of county commissions to the White House, and for good citizens of every political persuasion.
Rodeo clowns would be at terrible risk if they did not carry enormous expertise with them into the arena. They know a lot about bulls and about the men who compete to ride those animals. They know the turning radius of an angry bull, and they know how to identify the pocket of safety where the bull’s horns cannot reach. They know all there is to know about the Newtonian physics of “bodies in motion.” And even more important, they know themselves, which is to say they know how to make precise and quick calibrations to map the subtle line that separates confidence from over-confidence. The legendary rodeo clown Flint Rasmussen has summarized this expertise: “to be a rodeo clown takes a lot of . . . patience, knowledge, and timing.”
Even though they have the advantage of a defined goal (“save the rider” is a lot clearer than “save the nation”), rodeo clowns still get tossed around and still hit the ground hard. Here is the most important lesson for historians to acquire from the clowns: step forward to help your nation, and the next thing you know, you could be landing on the earth without a lot of dignity to cushion the impact.
If we shift our attention for a moment, from the bullfighters to the bullriders, rodeo also sharpens our thinking with its scoring system. Your score shrinks if you draw a bull that moves meekly and demurely around the arena. The rougher your ride, the higher your score (that is, if you are able to hold on for eight seconds). So, if you don’t find yourself bucked around hard, you really should have stayed home. To apply this to my fellow historians, if you aspire to status as a Gold Buckle Historian, then you must also aspire to have a very rough ride.
And there’s no escaping the fact that rodeo is controversial. Animal rights activists abhor it. From the point of view held the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the bull and the rider should never have been locked into a contest of dominance in the first place. But from the angle of the rodeo clown, the rider is in trouble; that train has left the station; and that horse is out of the barn (and waiting in the chute for the bronc-riding event). There is no time for the clown to visit the PETA website to contemplate a different perspective.
Currently unrecognized by practitioners in both fields, the alliance between rodeo clowns and historians is already in operation. In every move they make, the clowns are the most applied of historians. This is the question that is always front and center in their work: “What have we seen happen before, and how can we put that knowledge to use in saving this rider’s life?” They are full-out practitioners of the slogan of the Center of the American West: “turning hindsight into foresight.”
Imagine, for a moment, that you have received an invitation to attend the first-ever joint convening of the annual convention of the American Historical Association and the annual Rodeo Clown Reunion. How could you possibly claim to have a priority more compelling than celebrating while these two groups of professionals finally team up to rescue your nation?
And yet, as some readers may already have noticed, the two occupations are not entirely similar.
To help riders, the bullfighters do not have a second to spare to ask what went wrong to produce the crisis they face. By contrast, historians have seconds, minutes, days, maybe even weeks.
But they do not have forever.
Here is the core advantage that rodeo clowns have over historians: an immunity to discouragement, an advantage that seems to be acquired through a combination of intrinsic character and constant reinforcement, rather than through vaccination. (Still, once the scientists come up with a vaccination for Covid-19, immunization against despair might be a fruitful line of inquiry for them. And for the rest of us.)
But here is what we know with certainty: no rodeo clown will ever linger on the sidelines thinking, “What a lost cause! Let’s leave this guy to his fate.”
The crucial talent for a clown, one second-generation professional told a reporter for Forbes in 2009, is “adrenaline control,” or “the ability to remain calm in a dangerous situation.” “A lot of times,” Dusty Tuckness said, “the crowd won’t even realize that we prevented a huge wreck. But that’s our job.”
For half my life, I have been entranced and enchanted by rodeo clowns, dazzled by their breathtaking willingness and capability to help people who are in trouble.
For the whole of my life, I have myself felt compelled to try to be helpful. Yet I am fully aware that my compulsive helping has sometimes made things worse (at the risk of indiscretion, just ask my ex-husband).
Thus, fair warning.
Drawing my inspiration from the “patience, knowledge, and timing” that make it possible for rodeo clowns to save lives, this is my first effort to be helpful in a pandemic.
But this isn’t my first rodeo. Not by a long shot.
Here are two links that will show you rodeo clowns in action. The first is a very efficient exposition of the work of bullfighters (a.k.a., rodeo clowns). The second offers a more intense, very explicit encounter with the dangers that these men take on, to save the lives of people in trouble.