Quarantine days. The whole world shuts down – as COVID 19 keeps millions in their homes. Sitting at home, in a place of total isolation, many watch the sensational new docu-series “Tiger King” – a show that achieves instant pop-culture recognition. Joe Exotic’s mugshot becomes a meme. The internet is plastered with photos and jokes surrounding the exotic zoo-keeper with a golden mullet.
There’s a lot that can be said about this show (or any pop-culture phenomenon for that reason.) I could spend many paragraphs recounting the events surrounding Joe, Carole and others. However, I’m attempting to avoid rephrasing the story. I figure anyone can watch the show if they want to see it, or there are other places one can read a summary.
Instead, I want to take a spiritual reading from this series. When I say “spiritual reading” I am referring to a process akin to divination. This means that paying attention to the signs of the story, we can gain a better understanding of current patterns in our world. In general, pop-culture phenomenon gives an impression of part of the collective consciousness at any given time. Moreover, Joe Exotic’s story is a series of real events, so it directly relates to the world we live in – in reading (or divining) into these stories, we may achieve a greater degree of undrstanding about the current state of our world.
So all that being said, here is my reflection on Joe Exotic’s story (spoiler warning):
Numbness. The people come to the zoo for the tigers – they come because their kids want to play with the baby tigers, and when they hold these animals, it’s an incredible moment of connection. Yet underneath that happiness there’s a numbness: the people have no sense of what’s really happening behind these cages. The visitors don’t see the trouble in the zoo. They don’t see that the animals are starving because the keepers ran out of meat donations. At best the animals eat spoiled meat from Wal-Mart. The visitors don’t see the sexual exploitation of the workers, or the screaming bosses who threaten to kill or hurt people. They don’t see the tiger’s euthanized by gunshot in the muddy ravines behind the zoo.
On one hand these things happened in secret, where the visitors couldn’t see them. But it’s also true that the people would not want to see them. When the visitors come to the park, and they see hundreds of tigers crammed into little steel cages, including many that look unhealthy, they don’t question this. They don’t question whether or not these animals are being treated correctly. They look no deeper than the surface.
I don’t blame these people – the word “blame” is not something I want to throw around. After all, there’s a good chance I would have done the same things, I would have been eager to play with the baby tigers too. But the deeper truth is: a lack of awareness in this world has created more suffering than all malice combined.
The interesting this is: Now we’ve seen the show, Tiger King, so we’re no longer blind to what goes on inside some of these zoos. The show has revealed all kinds of stories about the zookeepers of various roadside attractions – many of the stories shocked us. Ignorance is no longer an option. No one will ever visit Joe Exotic’s zoo again without thinking about the story of the man himself. So now that we’ve seen these stories, how does that change the way we react?
It’s remarkable: there is a huge range of reactions to this show. Some people found it purely entertaining. They enjoyed the drama and the colorful characters. Meanwhile other people were horrified. They felt the pain of the animals (and people.) They saw an expose of real-life suffering and abuse, where each instant revealed something more vile than the next. Many viewers developed disgust towards Joe Exotic and others – the series became something of a Freak Show for them. It was so grotesque, they couldn’t look away.
Yet others love Joe Exotic. They even idolize him: he became a sort of hero to some people. After all, Joe speaks his mind, stands up for his rights, and tries to kill his hypocritical (and equally vile) enemies like Carole Baskin. So what is true in the end? Is Joe Exotic a hero of the people or a vile monster? The show has polarized people. It’s not unlike other sociological phenomenon in our culture in this way, where the populace has essentially split into irreconcilable pieces. Some people bemoan the “animal rights groups” and “overly-sensitive” people who would stop these zoos. Other people want to destroy Joe Exotic and the zoos. They want to throw these people into jail (or an unmarked grave.)
It’s clear to me that the people who idolize Joe Exotic don’t want to see the suffering. Even when it’s obvious, they don’t want to even question the possibility of suffering. Essentially, they are the ones that wish they could stay blind. They want to go back to that place where everything is okay, where they could visit these tiger zoos and not think too much about it. So they’ve embraced the situation, horrors and all.
Then there are the people that reject Joe Exotic. They see a man who is so hideous, so much a monster, that they’ve cast him far away – and in doing so, they risk failing to see something important about this man:
The fact is, most of us like Joe Exotic whether we admit it or not. We may like him at an unconscious level – as so many of his followers did. After all, Joe has charisma. He captivates us with charm and performance. Joe excites us. And at a deeper level, there’s something about Joe that is critical to understand in order to understand his appeal:
Joe is the king of his own world. He’s a wounded king, yes haunted and disturbed, but he still rules his own world – and many of us hunger to live from that same space of mind. Joe lives from a state of freedom. The man does whatever the man wants to do. He’ll shoot his guns into the lake. He’ll build a zoo and play with tigers. When Carole bothers him, he’ll make an internet show and threaten to send her rattlesnakes in the mail (which he likely carried through with.)
As much as Americans glorify “freedom” most Americans don’t feel free at all. If anything most Americans feel stuck in a complicated web of work, debt and social pressures. Modern life feels like a trap. This stands in stark constrast the cultural sensibility that we are supposed to feel free, and the inherent truth that we are all free based on our own nature. We could walk away from our jobs. We could change everything about our lives and start over. So what’s stopping us? The consequences of our actions (of course.)
Most people make a decision to play it safe. They choose to give up some freedom if it means keeping a stable job, or stable relationships, or avoiding some other kind of consequence. Joe Exotic is not that kind of man. He damns the consequences. He set his whole world on fire and could care less if he burns himself to the ground with it. Joe will claim his freedom at the sacrifice of everything and everyone else. In a way this makes him a bizarre caricature of the American man, complete with shotguns, country songs, and sparkling jackets.
Whether we idolize or hate him, the truth is most of us want the freedom he lived with. That freedom comes from living in alignment with the inner king (or queen.) The king always knows what he wants to do. He sits in the heart. We may lose touch with the king at some point, when we spend so much time in a lost space of mind, making compromises to get by. But the king is always there. Even when he’s hidden, he never forgets what he wants.
The real challenge we face is how we can restore the inner king or queen and still preserve our connections to others. We need to have our freedom and preserve social wellbeing too. This is the great challenge of America. It is a problem we have always faced – One of the reasons America exists is to help the world resolve this dilemma between freedom and society. It’s a theme from the founding of the country. And it’s a problem that we have never solved.
Joe Exotic failed to solve this problem, and it ruined his life. The man is in jail now. His mugshots show the eyes of a man who is deeply disturbed at a spirit level. He left behind a series of burned bridges, all of his relationships in shambles. There’s no doubt the man knew greatness. He cast a light of great charisma and influence on all those around him. But under the manic elation of his rise to power, he never found real peace. He neglected his kingdom and it fell into ruin. Now it’s ironic: the tiger king is locked in a cage himself – probably for the rest of his life.
How will we remember his story? A man named Joe was once a small-time entrepreneur. Like many of his colleagues, he opened a roadside attraction, in the hopes that animals would draw a small sum of cash from passing travelers. Yet in the end, the biggest attraction became Joe’s life. The story and drama of zookeepers laid the foundation of a multi-million dollar TV franchise. We’ve almost all but forgotten the tigers themselves. The humans are the real circus in the end.
In watching these stories, we see a demented side of the free American man (or woman, in Carole’s case. That chilling hypocrite.) We have an opportunity to see something of ourselves. The truth is, there is some version of Joe Exotic inside all of us – especially this is true for Americans. Now it’s a question how we can honor that side of ourselves while also preserving the world around us. Our challenge compels us to save the king while preserving the kingdom. For in failing to provide for one, we risk losing the rest to the flames.