{"id":14506,"date":"2016-10-09T07:10:12","date_gmt":"2016-10-09T13:10:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=14506"},"modified":"2016-10-10T06:47:18","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T12:47:18","slug":"prairie-lights-crazy-country-swept-by-clown-panic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/10\/prairie-lights-crazy-country-swept-by-clown-panic\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: Crazy country swept by clown panic"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Afraid\"<\/a>

Be afraid. Be very afraid.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have been seriously out of touch lately.<\/p>\n

We let our subscription to the dead-tree edition of the Billings Gazette lapse a few weeks ago and haven\u2019t renewed it because we get sticker shock every time we see how much they want to charge us for the damned thing.<\/p>\n

I know I\u2019ll go crawling back one of these days, though, because I belong to that dwindling tribe of dead-tree loyalists whose morning doesn\u2019t feel quite right if it doesn\u2019t involve a newspaper next to my cup of coffee.<\/p>\n

Without a subscription, I quickly exhausted the number of times I could read the online Gazette for free. Some helpful people say I could \u201cclear my cookies\u201d and read for free anyway, but come on: \u201cclear my cookies\u201d is the most ridiculous of all the phrases accompanying the Age of the Internet. I might lose my cookies, but I won\u2019t clear them.<\/p>\n

I have tried to make up for the loss of the Gazette by reading other online newspapers, in Montana and elsewhere, but I just get sucked into the latest explosion of the Trump dumpster and don\u2019t read anything else.<\/p>\n

Did you happen to hear what Trump said about women? My immediate impulse was to call him a pig, but what has an actual pig ever done to deserve such a comparison?<\/p>\n

\"EK\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n

Anyway, thanks to the isolation I\u2019ve found myself in, it wasn\u2019t until this weekend that I first heard that the United States is undergoing what has been referred to as a \u201cclown panic.\u201d I was aware that a disturbingly large number of my fellow Americans lived in fear of \u201cillegal aliens\u201d and Muslim immigrants, which suggested that we had gone pretty soft, and more than a little crazy.<\/p>\n

But clowns?<\/p>\n

The first thing I read on this subject was a Montana story, which I believe was brought to my attention by Facebook, that sum of all fears and crazy trends, and which happens to control the world in a way that V. Putin could only dream of.<\/p>\n

The story, reported by KRTV<\/a> in Great Falls, began so absurdly that at first I thought it was a joke:<\/p>\n

\u201cA string of \u2018scary clown\u2019 sightings\u2014whether real, imagined, or hoaxes\u2014continues to plague communities across Montana.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolice in Great Falls recently responded to such reports by stating that there have been no confirmed sightings of clowns in the community.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story went on to say that there had been an incident in Butte: \u201cKennedy Elementary was temporarily on lockdown after some students reported seeing what they thought was a person dressed as a clown near the school at about 12:30 p.m. Police searched the area around the school and later determined there was no clown, but just a woman taking a walk in the area.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the woman in question was being followed by a person dressed as a Trump, I can see where there might have been cause for alarm, but a person dressed as a clown?<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>The Onionesque nature of the KRTV report got even thicker when the TV station reprinted an entire press release from the Great Falls Police Department, which included this remarkable paragraph:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the absence of suspicious or unlawful behavior, there is nothing illegal about someone walking down the street, riding in a vehicle or hanging out at a public park dressed as a clown. Some are even reputable, professional entertainers. Dressing in a costume is not a violation of any city ordinance or state statute.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went looking for more information and ended up on a website called The Verge, which had a long article<\/a> on the Great Clown Scare of 2016. If you enjoy dressing up as a clown and were reassured by the Great Falls cops\u2019 press release, please note: The Verge reported that \u201ca man in Kentucky was arrested for dressing up as a clown and hiding in the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe it\u2019s legal to dress as a clown and legal to hide in the woods, but illegal to do both at the same time?<\/p>\n

Speaking of which, The Verge also reported that the so-called panic started in South Carolina where, back in August, \u201cthere were reports that clowns were lurking in the woods outside the town of Greenville.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what it takes to start a panic in the United States of America these days: One paranoid person calls the cops, then social media swoops in and spreads the deranged virus nationwide in a matter of minutes.<\/p>\n

And everything circles back to Trump. How can anything be brushed off as absurd or outlandish if Donald Trump has a chance to win the presidency?<\/p>\n

No clown sightings? If only.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been seriously out of touch lately. We let our subscription to the dead-tree edition of the Billings Gazette lapse a few weeks ago and haven\u2019t renewed it because we get sticker shock every time we see how much they want to charge us for the damned thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[5066,2853],"class_list":["post-14506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-clowns","tag-donald-trump","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}