CSotD: The Children’s Hour
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The Serendipitous Timing Award today goes to Jeff Stahler, for a piece done in advance but that struck home anyway. I got Wordle in 4 today and I don’t play Connections, but, like her, I was completely flummoxed by Trump’s latest social media post:
Yes, the leader of our nation has endorsed a theory that Joe Biden was murdered five years ago and replaced not with an imposter but with a robotic clone.
Makes me wonder if Jake Tapper signed a multi-book contract, because his next one will write itself.
Still on the topic of dire warnings, when I’m doing dishes in the afternoon, I get pummeled with ads for a warranty that will absolutely positively guarantee to probably fix anything that goes wrong with my car, though certain restrictions apply.
Like being gullible.
Once again, Arlo and Janis mirror my life. I got a TV junior year in college and never watched it much, since real life was much more interesting.
But when I got married, we had the TV set up in the bedroom with a timer that switched it on as an alarm clock in the morning.
Given then-wife’s work schedule, it came on during the last 15 minutes of Sunrise Semester and an interminable lecture series on Jorge Luis Borges, then went to the CBS Morning News, and we’d get oriented to the day’s news while we showered and dressed.
Except then-wife was pregnant and having some dire morning sickness that invariably struck midway through the first half-hour of the news, just about the time Marya McLaughlin did a light feature discussing the news with some puppets.
McLaughlin was a pioneering woman in journalism and then-wife had a journalism degree and was starting her own successful career in the field, but McLaughlin’s voice triggered nausea in her ever after.
Nothing personal. Just a reflection on the persistence of morning sickness.
Stephen Collins suggests that perhaps parents should unclench and remember all the hours they spent watching stupid TV when they were small, and I suppose for those who were young after the cable explosion, he’s not far off base.
But my own kids, who are around 50 now, grew up with local stations and a TV schedule that put kids’ shows almost exclusively in the after-school slot and on Saturday morning. As little ones, they watched a fair amount of TV, but were far from addicted to it.
However, there is this oddity: When I was marketing local TV about then, the ratings for Sesame Street were negligible, despite the clothes and toys being at Penneys and every child knowing every character on the show.
What it meant was that families chosen by Nielsen and Arbitron to set ratings were not marking down in their diaries what their kids were watching.
So the real joke in Collins’ cartoon is that — despite all the sturm und drang — parents didn’t much care then and they don’t much care now. Fortunately, I suspect the percentage of kids who veg out all day also hasn’t changed much.
And they all know the advertising catch-phrases. So did we.
And the messages that came with them:
Juxtaposition of the Day
I’m not nearly as worried about kids watching McDonald’s commercials as I am about what they’re being encouraged to take in by the current government.
Not only are the feds trying to cut off NPR and PBS funding in order to better control the messaging, but Oklahoma has dictated a new social studies curriculum in which kids are taught that the 2020 elections were fraudulent and Dear Leader should have been declared the winner.
However, parents there are reportedly using a tool devised by the book burners, and demanding that their children not be exposed to material that goes against their beliefs.
There’s hope after all. Keep on pushing.
And a related observation: I had a book of Aesop’s Fables as a kid, but it wasn’t specifically a kids’ book, because Aesop wasn’t telling stories only for children. His stories, as well as the folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, were intended for overall instruction which included kids.
I edited a collection of Cree, Blackfoot and Ojibway stories for kids, in the course of which I spoke to an educator at Rocky Boy reserve in Montana. She assured me that the collection was authentic, and added that the stories were traditionally told in winter, when it got dark early, and was cold, and everyone would be gathered together inside.
The stories were not specifically aimed at kids, but rather were intended for the entire society, and as humorous as the misadventures of Old Man often were, the stories contained morals that reflected the values of the society in which they were told.
True of Old Man, true of Homer, true of Aesop, true of Grimm, true of Scheherazade.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
In the native stories, Old Man was a wise fool, but in the real world, some fools are simply fools, and anybody who has ever encountered giardia, or “beaver fever,” knows the agony that comes from bad water.
We’ve made a lot of progress in cleaning up waters over the past half century, and there are rivers clean enough to swim in today that, a few decades ago, were toxic. But some still are, including Rock Creek, where RFK Jr took his grandchildren to swim.
Bad enough that the current administration is against the environmental regulations that helped clean up many of our lakes and rivers, but putting a superstitious ignoramus in charge of HHS and deciding that the Surgeon General no longer needs to be a qualified physician is beyond irresponsible.
Now we find that a key children’s health document these cuckoobirds rely on is full of bogus references.
Poison yourself, Bobby, but leave the kids alone. You clearly don’t know how precious they are.
But whoso shall cause one of these little ones who believe in Me to fall, it were better for him that a millstone were hung about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea. — Matthew 18:6
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