First comes the smell that announces a food-on-a-stick event. When food is served on a stick, the message is clear. You arrived as part of a pedestrian crowd to an event for your amusement and entertainment. It is kick-back, let-go time, an opportunity to be festive and forget seriousness and the formal trappings of "productive" behavior.
Food on a stick was the Id of my world when I was a kid. It meant I was on vacation from the superego influences of the agents of my socialization. It meant I was at a playful and fantasy-ridden location. It meant I was free of stuffy dress clothes stored in mothballs that stood at attention on their own and made me feel as though I were an ironing board.
Food-on-a-stick places were the best for people watching. Here, I fed on the vaudeville melting pot of the surreal, quirky, freak crush of unassuming plain-folks also hoping for a chance glance at people of fame, power, and position. Food on the stick was my circus life where Diane Arbus photographs came to life in Stan Lee's Marvel Comic worlds built on boardwalks, sand, grass, and concrete and in stadiums and pavilions. However, I sadly knew it was a seasonal Potemkin circus world that could only gift me limited time until I had to move on. Move on I did, but I continue to be fascinated at the powerful allure of food-on-a-stick mentality and how it correlates as a predictive quality of an America that insanely seems to have evolved into a politics-on-a-stick nation.
The curtain of August and summer is closing and the clown circus train of politicians is on the move after visiting the food-on-a-stick Iowa State Fair, the official audition site down the presidential crowded runway. Here the candidates test their plain-folk, threadbare, elect-me-masks, while lasciviously soliciting handouts in the form of caucus supporters by wantonly and shamelessly hugging, kissing, handshaking and eating all sorts of stuff on a stick. This four-year ritual has moved on from amusement and morphed into an obnoxious, out-of-touch, nauseating, and philandering menu of politics-on-a-stick. High on poll numbers, Donald Trump parted Iowa soil landing in his own circus-copter, served up some great politics on a stick, then gave kids an amusement park ride in his magic copter before departing as the Lone Ranger. No one was heard asking, "Who was that masked man?"
For years, Republican opponents of President Obama have been feeding the ravishing a skewered politics-on-a-stick, always cooked as Obama unconstitutional overreaches, with toxic dire predictions of doom, gloom, failure, and collapse -- the sky is falling and the world is coming to an end. In July, they dished out Jade Helm 15 as the recipe on a stick to smell as if Obama was deploying the military to invade and to take over Texas.
Seven years later, every single one of those political bites on a stick turned out to be spoiled by the ready and steady Obama. The bites satisfied the base of low information -- big on bad attitude, anti-political establishment folks. Their current flavor-of-the-month is the narcissistic babbling self-propelled billionaire developer and reality game show actor who leads the field and is making waste out of his competition by offering folks a flashy politics on a stick diet of low-fat details breaded, fried and dripping excess artificial ingredients.
Iowa in August is ground zero of politics-on-a-stick, but the inevitable indigestion that results from this toxic intake will eventually have many using their Obamacare and reaching for antacids -- and a bland ballot card. Hopefully, the masses will realize how starved they are to return from the food-on-a-stick world.