Last Saturday, my 80-year-old dad and his lady friend came to my house in Wellesley for lunch. I roasted haunch of venison shot with bow and arrow and served it with butternut-squash lasagna made with winter vegetables from our garden. My dad looked at me and said, “I saw on the news about a woman who runs a cupcake store. The kids come and decorate the cupcakes themselves. She can’t make them fast enough. It’s wonderful!” Glowing with pleasure, he took another bite of my pear-and-apple pie and asked, “Why don’t you open a cupcake store?”
Uh, because I am wearing sweats and not a girly dress? Why would my Korean dad think that I long to make cupcakes for a living? Probably for the same reason that he thinks buying “gold, physical gold” is a safe investment: He’s been watching too much television. On cable and network channels, it seems that every other female character dreams of making cupcakes her business. The Food Network is now in the third season of its show Cupcake Wars, and it’s become the driving engine for 2 Broke Girls, a new sitcom about a pair of diner waitresses whose goal is to save enough money to open a cupcake shop. Never mind that the broke girls are too busy having misadventures to perfect their baking skills. If the people lack for bread, let them eat cupcakes! Plucky in their poverty, the two girls are the mystical mates of Doofus Dad and Viagra Man, white men who stumble around proudly unable to get the job done even as they inhabit strangely privileged worlds. The meta-narrative is clear: Cupcakes may be fluffy, but they will pay the bills, unlike those silly stockbrokers who lost all of your money but magically kept all of theirs.
In the real world, emasculation is a downer and cupcake boutiques fail. Sure, Sweet Cupcakes has four swank shops in the Boston area, and Kickass Cupcakes has two locations and a hipster food truck that mostly lives in front of the Harvard University Science Center. I’m not a fan of sweets in general but I love the idea of a “kickass” pastry that flaunts the frill in your face. Take that, fairy cake! (“Fairy cakes” are what the British call cupcakes.) The truck crew will also make a special-order gluten-free organic free-range cupcake for Cambridge people like my sister.
Those are the success stories. The list of cupcake bakeries that have closed is far longer. In a lousy economy, the dismal statistics are entirely beside the point. Cupcakes evoke nostalgia for stay-at-home-moms making sugar bombs lobbed with love, except my Korean mom never made them, and probably yours didn’t, either…except, maybe, once for the school bake sale using cake mix and icing from a can, and the end result looked like mutant muffins after the Labrador licked off all the jimmies.
So what is the meaning of this national cupcake obsession? There is even an origin story for the American cupcake craze: Point Zero is Sprinkles of Beverly Hills, California, where pedigreed French cupcakes glisten with good taste and even better fortunes. Pastry chefs like to yabble on about the petite proportions allowing them greater creativity in the kitchen; teenage girls think they’re cute and swirly, like sleeping kitties made of frosting. Admittedly, this is an unscientific observation based on my household’s giggling girls. One was just assigned an obscure short story about cupcakes in her Honors English class. She refused to give me details on the grounds that the story was about “Little Debbie-type cakes and not cupcakes.” Apparently plastic wrappers and preservatives are too down-market to fit the cupcake image.
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“Uh, there’s a lion…standing there under the streetlight,” the 911 caller told the Ohio dispatcher. Another caller declared, “I think I’ve just seen one. Looked like a jaguar or a wolf or something.”
These lines sound as if they were lifted from Charles G. Finney’s subversive 1935 novel The Circus of Dr. Lao, which tells the tale of a very unusual traveling show filled with werewolves, sea serpents, and a dog made of chlorophyll. One day this circus arrives in the tiny town of Abalone, Arizona, where it parades through Main Street before setting itself up in a nearby field. Throughout the book there is a running joke swirling around a hairy beast in a cage: “It’s a man.” “No, it’s a bear.” “It’s a Russian.” The strange overlapping of identities underscores the known problems of eyewitness testimony, as well as difficulties of sustaining a sense of wonder in a small-minded century.
Inside the story’s strictures, Dr. Lao’s circus is real. According to all other parameters of reality, so was the Muskingum County Animal Farm of Terry Thompson, who last week covered himself with chicken parts, let his wild animals loose, and then killed himself. Newly freed, the lions and tigers and bears went running into the streets of the aptly named town of Zanesville, Ohio, and started casting come-hither looks on street corners, brazenly shocking the neighbors. Fox News made sure to emphasize that these were “wild and dangerous” animals that made for a “frightening and tense” day in Small Town, USA, with the good sheriff declaring that “public safety” was his top priority. The ASPCA intoned, “Schools were closed. Businesses shut down. And the majority of residents stayed locked in their homes….” BBC News quoted the sheriff as saying: “We didn’t want kids waiting by the bus stop and seeing these big animals.” The next morning, forty-nine animals were dead, but not from indigestion or spitballs. Using duty pistols, law-enforcement officers had shot to death two wolves, six black bears, two grizzly bears, 17 lions, one baboon, three mountain lions, and 18 Bengal tigers.
Such animals are TV stars on the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, wild carnivores that the Western world has invested with glamour, sexual power, and complex mythologies. It was thus shocking to see the videotaped footage of so many large lions lying dead on the grass, reduced to pure objects without food value because their carcasses were not correctly prepared. The cameras did not rest on (lifelike) taxidermied specimens, hunting trophies, or handsome actors shot through filters to appear as seductive as possible. Deflated of narrative, the animals were just limp casualties of civilization. They weren’t even covered up as human victims are covered to show respect for the dead. They were exposed like the bodies of fallen enemies in battle. I saw the bodies over breakfast courtesy of Fox News.
During the French Revolution, debauched aristocrats were accused of letting wild animals loose to “devour the spectators” and sow the seeds of fear. This was perceived as a cynical political ploy to distract people from the Revolution’s goals. Last Tuesday, it was a mad collector of guns, guitars, and wild animals who released the beasts, letting loose equally vague but powerful fears into the global consciousness. As spectators watched with horrified fascination, the news of these animals’ deaths traveled around the world. It is perhaps not without interest that Charles G. Finney was a journalist and The Circus of Dr. Lao was published during the Great Depression. In times of sustained financial crisis, there are a lot of reasons to be afraid.
The Circus of Dr. Lao refused to explain how or why this peculiar collection of animals came to Abalone. The story of the Zanesville animal incident also leaves many questions unanswered, but only if it is framed as a whodunit. Instead, it has been narrated as a fable of marvels and madness, with a terrible lesson attached if one cares to learn it. Does it matter that none of the wild animals attacked? The issue isn’t whether they could, but that it was assumed they would.
Throughout human history, wild animals and humans have long lived in proximity, for the most part in a kind of wary agreement to live and let live—as long as human needs take priority. Humans domesticated the animals that they could, and called the others “wild.” When wildness asserts itself in the street, the consequences are severe: dogs that bite humans are destroyed as threats to human safety, but also because they defy those laws that make civilization possible. The more fragile those laws become, the greater the need to enforce them. But for the same reason, the use of lethal force smells of desperation.
There is a parable here regarding the political uses of fear. For in the final calculus, it is forty-nine animals dead and one man by his own hand. The media version of the story concludes with the six survivors now living happily in the Cleveland Zoo. They did not appear on television.
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