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The Lounge is the newly expanded free-talk section of the Forum. You can post anything here about any topic outside English grammar and usage. Wide-ranging discussions and debates will be allowed in the Lounge subject only to the condition that the subjects are not unlawful, obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, and threatening. As in the Forum’s sections on English grammar and usage, we expect discussants to keep the Lounge a vibrant venue for relevant, healthy, and civilized discussions, not impertinent, angry, or violent ones.
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The embodiment of all that’s fraudulent in American mass culture
As the embodiment of all that’s grand and fraudulent in American mass culture, Phineas T. Barnum, the 19th century showman and circus impresario, certainly has few equals. This much is clear in his audacious and immensely entertaining autobiography, The Life of P. T. Barnum, which was originally published in 1855 and—after being unavailable for more than a century—has been reissued in its first modern edition.
In “Hatching Monsters,” a review of the book in Lapham’s Quarterly, Charles Baxter says that The Life of P. T. Barnum (University of Illinois Press, 448 pages) “is not so much a memoir as a conduct manual by someone who believed in the material world more than the transcendental one...Some of his nuggets of advice are platitudinous truisms, as you would expect—‘Whatever you do, do with all your might,’ or ‘Select the kind of business that suits your natural inclinations and temperament’—but several items in his code are startlingly modern… Trust your fellow man? Never. ‘Do not depend on others,’ Barnum instructs. Follow your vision? No. ‘Be not too visionary.’ How then does one make one’s way in the world? Here he waxes eloquent: ‘Advertise your business. Do not hide your light under a bushel.’”
Baxter analyzes the cunning and brazen strategy that brought Barnum so much success and material wealth during his lifetime: “One of Barnum’s brilliant, almost genius-level aperçus, was that you could create news through advertising, and the advertising itself becomes newsworthy. If you advertise forcefully, the advertised object, even if perfectly vacant and without qualities (think: Paris Hilton), becomes a topic of conversation. Truth value is always trumped by hype, and hype in turn is fueled by controversy. Any news is good news. Barnum discovered that if your show generates angry letters to the editor, so much the better: people will be compelled to see the spectacle for themselves ‘to determine whether or not they had been deceived.’”
Read Charles Baxter’s “Hatching Monsters” in Lapham’s Quarterly now!
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