Sarah Palin has boldly proclaimed that Donald Trump is “ballsy enough to get out there” and put the “issues on the table.” Seeing Donald Trump and Sarah Palin on the same stage, for some, could be a once in a decade event similar to the aligning of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in the morning sky. This is the first time in a decade that these planets have formed a cosmic conga line.
The lining up of Trump and Palin is a cosmic combination of promoters not seen since P.T. Barnum merged his circ
us with James Bailey and James L. Hutchinson in 1881 to form “P.T Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth.”
Barnum knew “every crowd had a silver lining” and had no shame pulling a sham on the American public. Barnum once said, “The bigger the humbug the better people will like it.” He gave an eager public an aging slave that proclaimed she was George Washington’s nurse. Never mind the fact that this would have made her 161 years old. This show’s silver lining netted Barnum $1,000 a week way back in 1835. He later promoted General Tom Thumb the 25 inch, 15 pound singer dancer to the courts of Europe.
One of his greatest hoaxes was the “Feejee” mermaid. In 1842, a supposed, British naturalist arrives in New York with a mermaid. A believing public clamored to see the bare-breasted mermaid. Advertisements were circulating showing “the mermaid to have the body of young beautiful woman.” In reality, “it had the withered body of a monkey and the dried tail of a fish.” A sight one writer of the times said shattered any illusion of “wooing” a mermaid “for the Feejee lady is the very incantation of ugliness.”
Barnum himself styled the mermaid as “an ugly dried-up, black-looking, and diminutive specimen… its arms thrown up, giving it the appearance of having died in great agony.”
Americans have always loved tall tales starting with Rip Van Winkle all the way to Big Foot. It is hard to tell when the next fish story will wash up. But as long as politicians get free play it is always sure to be a whopper.
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