The small town of Wynnewood, Okla., might seem like an unlikely setting for a magical realist tale involving tigers, polygamy and blood feuds. But the bizarre reality of Oklahoma has never matched up to its homogeneous image in popular culture.
You could be forgiven if the state conjures up images of the musical Oklahoma! and the character . The truth is that .
As an Oklahoman and the author of a , I was bored by the show. As soon as Joe Exotic appeared on camera and stated, to no one in particular, "Let's go blow some shit up," I felt like I'd seen this movie before.
Oklahoma has the dubious distinction of being ranked among by Guns & Ammo magazine as well as .
The state's health . And the state has a long and sordid history of grifters and scoundrels who have found the state's red dirt to be fertile soil for all manner of dubious schemes.
The story of Joe Exotic is the story of Oklahoma, only with felines and sequins. The very foundation of the modern state of Oklahoma was born from an outlandish fraud, that, like Tiger King, might seem too bizarre to be real.
Outlandish fraud and murder
As the states around Oklahoma drew their legal U.S. boundaries in the 19th century, Oklahoma remained, by treaty, Indian Territory, a place owned by the Five Tribes - the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee) and Seminole - for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran.
Then a group of land pirates known as the . The Boomers engaged in skirmishes with federal troops as they tried to set up towns from scratch. They were repeatedly arrested and deported.
Finally, they succeeded in setting up a town. They sold certificates for land they didn't own. One group of Boomers called itself "Seminoles," deliberately sowing confusion about whether they belonged to the Seminole Nation; they did not.
Following the Boomers came the Sooners, who got their name by literally jumping the gun on a land run. . When the dust settled, the Boomers and the Sooners, who had illegally seized land, rebranded themselves as symbols of pioneer pluck.
Oklahoma became known as the . To this day, on football game days at the University of Oklahoma, fans chant "Boomer Sooner" when the university's football team, the Sooners, takes the field.
In the years that followed statehood, . The swindlers tried every trick in the book: some passed themselves off as Indigenous to take control of land. .
When those tricks did not work, some married into Native families and then proceeded to murder them. This was the case for the "King of the Osages," William Hale. .
900-foot Jesus
Other characters, every bit as weird as Joe Exotic, seemed to emerge out of the red dirt of Oklahoma later in the 20th century. There was Oral Roberts, the first true televangelist, who said he saw a vision of a 900-foot Jesus in suburban Tulsa. He then talked his followers into giving him enough money to build a gold-plated hospital that would combine faith-healing and western medicine. .
Cutting a respectable and influential figure was the strange career of the oilman Aubrey McClendon, who was partially responsible for luring-some would say stealing-the NBA team the Supersonics from Seattle and turning them into the Oklahoma City Thunder. For a while, McClendon's company, Chesapeake Energy, was at the centre of the natural gas boom in North America.
. He spent billions buying up leases and companies in what he called the "."
McClendon seemed to be the king of Oklahoma City when, suddenly, everything fell apart. The fracking revolution created a glut. The price of natural gas plummeted and U.S. prosecutors indicted him on conspiracy charges for price rigging. The day after the charges were laid, McClendon drove his SUV head-on into a highway overpass and instantly died.
Poverty porn
Just as weird and nefarious as Joe Exotic was the spectacular rise and fall of Oklahoma politician . While Joe Exotic's political ambitions were a front for self-promotion, .
Shortey became known for his crusades against gays, immigrants and drugs, and . (It's not a thing.) Shortey's career came .
Tiger King is poverty porn for people who like to see people make hot messes of themselves while feeling superior to the residents of Flyover Country. To them, Joe Exotic and his ilk are curiosities. Media critics across the political spectrum have noted the show
Oklahoma has a long history of well-funded Joe Exotics, who have found a niche for themselves, aided by deregulation, religious intolerance and ignorance at the highest levels of the state's political culture. That's not stranger than fiction: that's the true story of an American state.
Russell Cobb is associate professor of Latin American studies in the Faculty of Arts.
This originally appeared April 23 in The Conversation.