Mainstreaming to Normalcy

Had an odd but brief dream last night.

First, a bit of exposition:

Television has always been a medium for advancing social causes. One of these is mainstreaming something to normalcy. In particular, making “those not like us,” those philosophers pretentiously call “the Other,” making them normal. Granting them normalcy. The process starts out as pushing the envelope, and then, after a handful of seasons and ratings sweeps, “the Other” becomes positively humdrum boring.

Now, in lots of cases – most, in fact – this is a good thing. I’m talking mostly racial and ethnic things here, traits people were born with. No one should be shunned because of the color of his skin or the sound of his last name. That’s a given, and pretty much ninety-nine-point-something percent of the American population has agreed with that for the last couple of decades.

Television has been on the forefront of this probably since the sixties and seventies. For example, teevee shows with black characters sprouted up back then, back when I was a kid. Hispanic characters. And as a result, if you forgive the massive simplification, different races and ethnicities were “normalized” (for lack of a better term) to the majority white audiences. Me, I had a Fat Albert lunch box in third grade.

Anyway, where teevee gets in trouble, especially of the past few years, is its attempt to mainstream different behaviors to normalcy, behaviors which large, majority-sized chunks of the population view as immoral, behaviors that have been historically viewed as immoral for millennia. I won’t get specific here, for I want to talk now about my weird little dream.

Often I find myself in the middle of movies when I’m dreaming, and the result is dismay because I don’t know whether it is a movie or is really happening. This time, however, I’m in a teevee show. I’m an extra in a scene that’s some cross between a happenin’ bar of the kind you only see on the small screen and an Olive Garden commercial. People eatin’, laughin’ talkin’ too loud, the camera swooping in and out and figure-eighting amongst the very diverse crowd.

Which is okay to me. Then, I see something that almost makes me spit up my generic label-less beer. In the middle of the festive feast is a clown.

A kind of grungy, older clown, a clown that looks like he doesn’t really care. A clown whose makeup’s sixteen hours old and starting to flake off. A clown like Heath Ledger’s Joker, only middle-aged, ulcer-riddled, and a little too interested in having a drink to take his mind off things.

All that’s not the weird part, though. The weird part is – everyone at the table, or bar, or whatever it is, is treating him as if he’s perfectly ordinary. It’s as if one-sixth of the population where clowns, so this clown being in this room with twenty other people should be nothing worth raising an eyebrow about. Everyone is pal-in’ around with him, regardless of his white caked makeup and big red nose thingie, and there ain’t a single thing unusual about it.

And I all but cry out, “Does this not seem forced to anyone here? Am I the only one that sees the agenda here? Am I? Hmm?”

Then the earth turned a mile or so, and my dream slipping into more pleasant in-a-movie territory: Me and Richard Carlson, black and white, scanning the skies with a telescope, ready to defeat those hidden aliens from conquering the world!