The circus came to town yesterday. At midnight on March 23, ten elephants walked through the Midtown Tunnel and along 34 Street, on their to way to Madison Square Garden: the 139th Animal Walk of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey's Circus. The great gray legs of the pachyderms, their swinging trunks, that strangely rapid shuffle that they do: a simple pleasure to see. Except that the animal-rights activists were out in protest at the entrance to the tunnel. There are no simple pleasures in our puritanical times; each human pleasure is run through the great fires of human guilt, where it must be consumed. What strange days: The complex pleasures of human sexuality are declared simple and guilt-free, while the simple pleasures of a circus parade are rendered complex and guilty.
Sad to think that perversion has become more palatable than pachyderms.