Carnies

We get given a mixed picture of carnies in the arts. 

Wait a minute, my information is 40 years old.  I have no idea how carnies are portrayed now.

There was one thread, that they were the decent folks, no worse than the normies and perhaps even better, because they had a clannish, supportive network. It was we normies who were the sick ones for rejecting them.

The other thread was that they were cheats with contempt for outsiders, with low-rent morals in every way.

Going to the Deerfield Fair the other day, I suddenly remembered that I had a patient around 1980 who was a carnie, about 35 years old with at least one child.  She was depressed and suicidal, and there was a difficulty because the whole family was moving on to the next fair, but she still wasn't safe to leave. Her story was that she had grown up in a carnie family, eventually marrying a boy she had played with throughout her childhood. This was not unusual. She shrugged at the incest and violence toward women.  It was normal. The drinking and dishonesty, same. She said those who only came on for a season or so, were both better and worse. 

There was a code, as many criminal groups have, that talking to the police or the outside authorities being absolutely forbidden. You grew up being told that the outside world hated you and would never accept you, so you were better off putting up with whatever is handed you by your family and associates. 

The documentary descriptions suggest that it's not anywhere near so bad now.  The law has penetrated and much of the abuse has been eliminated. It used to be that the police took a hands-off approach, figuring they were going away, and were going to be nothing but trouble if you arrested them and held them over for trial. It was asking for violence from the others. The same happened with gypsies in Europe. Just let 'em move on.  People should know the risks dealing with them.  Social workers?  They would need to find a place to keep the women and children while they waited for the dangerous others to get far enough away. Not gonna happen.

I think movement is part of the unenforced law.  The local gendarmes are concerned with the safety of the local citoyens. Their job is to keep the peace in Cheshire County. It is enough to keep a lid on it for five days, tolerating a fair bit, because there is a reason the fair is there - the people want it, and pay money for it. Whatever the hell happens to those girls that we don't see is not our problem. The police were more violent, also. Sometimes "solving" the problem through rough justice. That, of course, only strengthens the insistence that the boundary between carnie and outsider be maintained by internal violence.  The strong in the clan had the primitive justice that such people, usually men, had.

We were talking last night about the old Rochester Fair, and some of the scams the midway would play on customers, fending off any objections to getting cheated with hefty bouncers who suddenly appeared as the realisation that the cash wasn't being given back sunk in.

There were cultures throughout the country years ago that operated like this, with more violence, more isolation, more covering up for each other. Was it worse than in the general population? Almost definitely.  A lot worse? Well, that's a tougher question. There were plenty of people who had been in town for generations who did terrible things, or people that moved into the nicest apartments in the city that beat their wives and cheated people. Those people usually cheated at a much more expensive level, too, and had a longer reach for wives trying to run away.

Yet I don't think you would hear my patient's story of closed violent societies so much anymore.  We were shocked at it then, considering it to be something from an earlier era, surprised it still existed. The frontier functioned in this way to a fair extent. We romanticise it, but my great-grandmother didn't much romanticise her husband heading west and changing his name, leaving her with three children. It wasn't all just restless eccentrics who were misunderstood by the folks in Medina, Ohio.

We disapprove of the surveillance state, but being able to check paternity with DNA and track down deadbeats has been a good thing for women and especially children.