Lessons from Our President

I originally published this here because it started out as a post about buying Al Capone new books. It got picked up in a trending topic on Twitter last night and I got a couple hundred hits in ten minutes, 3 pieces of hate mail (two were really nasty, but my favorite was "You call me ignorant for keeping my child home and you named your kid Al Capone."), lots of positive comments, and probably some really confused people who ended up on my other blog thinking it was about censorship, Obama, children's literature, etc and discovered that really it was an isolated post buried among 1 million reasons I think I have the cutest baby on the planet. So I'm reposting here as well...

Those who know me, know that I feel very strongly about discussions of appropriateness and children (and their books). I write about* children's books for a living. I can honestly say that I have one of the best jobs in the world, yet on days like today I get very frustrated.

This morning President Obama spoke to school children directly. Our local newspaper ran an article about the speech and posted the entire text of the speech online and still parents went ballistic. They called school board members, they kept kids out of school, they declared it propaganda, they demanded alternative assignments, they filled the newspaper comments section with hateful and racist comments. All of this name calling and hate speech because the President of the United States wants kids to stay in school, pay attention, live up to their potential, ask questions, watch less tv, work hard, and never give up. If this is brainwashing, I'm okay with these messages.

What I'm not okay with is parents who try to take over the schools because they don't like the President. I'm not okay with teaching kids that it's okay to skip school if you don't like the person who is talking. I'm not okay with teaching kids that you don't even have to listen if you don't agree with a person. I'm not okay with teaching kids that it's okay to make up your mind before you know the whole story. I'm not okay with teaching kids that it's okay to disrespect the President, their teachers, or other adults role models. I'm not okay with teaching kids that there is only one right way of thinking or one right answer to a problem. I start every semester by telling my students that I will never ask them to agree with everyone's point of view, but I will ask them to listen and treat each other with respect. It makes me sad when I see parents who use children as an excuse to perpetuate intolerance, disrespect, and hatred.

If Al Capone was old enough to understand and watch television, I would have hoped that he would have watched in school and we would have watched again as a family after school. Since he's not old enough and won't be any time soon, I went online and bought books that are often banned or challenged by people who feel that they have the obligation to protect children from the harmful ideas like diversity. Unfortunately, he won't be able to grow up and say that he remembers when he listened to President Obama at school, but maybe he will grow up being open minded enough that when classmates or their parents try and close down conversations with narrow minded, ignorant rhetoric, he will fight back. Hopefully he will never call our President by hateful slurs because he doesn't agree with his ideologies. Hopefully, he will never make fun of a classmate who's skin or family or religion or ability is different from his own.

We can't afford to buy Al Capone all of the books that I would like him to read, but today I added a few more to his library. Here's what I got him in honor of all of the ignorant parents who think it's okay to breed hatred and intolerance in children.

• The Family Book--because families come in all different shapes and sizes
• And Tango Makes Three--because some of those families have two mommies or two daddies
• The Lorax--because recycling is a good thing and we should take care of the environment
• In the Night Kitchen--because naked baby butts are not bad
• Halloween books--because Halloween is not the work of the devil

Obviously, this is a mishmash of books. Diversity and tolerance cannot be taught in a single book, but when children grow up with images of diversity, hopefully they do not turn into close minded adults.

*For those who don't know me well I do NOT write children's books, I write about them. I teach critical analysis of children's and adolescent literature to future teachers.

Child Actors: Terrorized or Talented

The Today Show did a story this morning about a recent controversy over a NYC public service announcement about smoking. The controversy, according to the article, isn't about the message of the psa as much as it is about whether or not the boy in the ad is really acting or whether producers actually made him cry. Here's the full psa.



I really wish this had happened back at the beginning of the semester when we were discussing Shirley Temple and child actors, but I still find the arguments really interesting. Personally, the ad is very had to watch, but then again a lot of the stop smoking psa are hard to watch. According to the story, viewers were flooding DHS with calls about the appropriateness of the ad. Most of these complaints claimed that the ad was more too emotional, both in the sense that it "manipulated viewer's emotions" and the sense that the boy's emotions were too powerful to be acting.

This begs the question how old does someone have to be in order to act and/or manipulate their own emotions. I've babysat for plenty of toddlers who are quite capable of turning tears on and off. If we are going to make the argument that this child is too young to act in this way, then theoretically, he would be too young to be acting in another (happier) situation as well.

I find it interesting that while crying or upset children appear in movies and on television shows, the real objection here seems to be to the use of the child body to manipulate adult behavior. No one seems to be concerned about the welfare of the child actor when the child cries over the death of a pet in a movie. So why is this child actor so much more traumatized?* The comments about the story reveal that maybe this isn't really a case of a traumatized child or the impossibility of child actors.

The newsvine comments on this story quickly shifted away from outrage about the kid crying and toward outrage about the ideological content of the psa. One person noted:

So, if I don't have kids, I don't have to stop? Thanks!

And several other objected the idea of the psa in general:

What the hell is the government (any level of government) doing wasting our tax dollars to advertise! Friedman can kiss my a**! I dont need a nanny from the government taking care of me based on his vision of what is best!

I'll spare you the couple of other thousand comments about whether or not smoking (first-hand or second-hand) really causes cancer, what the government should or should not spend money on, and what products should or should not be taxed. There were even some comments that made a case for legalizing marijuana.

While I'm not sure that I can quite defend Donny Deutch's claim on the Today Show that

“Kids are very good actors. Maybe sometimes they make a kid cry, but if it saves 20,000 lives for five seconds of crying, I’ll take it.”

The outrage, at least from the internet comments, seems to actually have little to do about the actual child. The outrage instead seems about using the child in an ideological way.** Nearly all of the adults who have commented on the psa talk about the manipulation of the adult audience through the image of the crying child. While I will admit that the narrator does address the ad at parents, a think are far more interesting discussion would be about the manipulation of child audiences through images (however constructed) of children, but that will have to be a blog post for another day.

*The comments that objected to the child being made to cry, claimed that this would traumatize the child actor. I don't think I buy this extreme either, as by that theory any child who was ever told no or had something taken away would be forever traumatized. A television producer (stranger) who takes away a toy to get the child to cry might actually be less traumatizing than an older sibling who takes away a toy.
**Clearly the people who raised such objections have never taken my children's literature class or they would have realized that the child is always used ideologically.

Superheros

I'm a little disturbed that this guy just happened to have a Spiderman costume on hand, but this is a very cool story.

Fox Spreads Herpes

I'm not a huge fan of the Colbert Report, but last night I was waiting to take my next dose of cough medicine and watched part of an episode. I probably would have changed the channel, but Colbert was doing a story on how herpes was being spread quickly on college campuses due to the prevalence of playing beer pong. Colbert's "report" was actually not about herpes or beer pong, but really about how the whole story was a college newspaper joke that got picked up and spread by the national media (aka primarily Fox News). Here is Colbert's take...

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Beer Pong Herpes Outbreak

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
Joke of the Day

I'm always a sucker for ways of using pop culture to "teach" source evaluation, but I'm also really interested in the ways that some stories get spread while others don't. One blogger who talked about the spread of the article notes that it is probably the combination of adolescent, sexuality, and alcohol. He correctly points out that these three things are included in many urban legends, but are also strong enough social concerns that can lead people to miss the urban legend in badly written satire.

Sadly, Fox News won't allow me to embedded their original newscast, but thanks to the miracle of Youtube, here's their story. My favorite part of this is that they offer tips for "safe beer pong" while on Spring Break.



In addition to being a much funnier and more current example of evaluating sources,* I really like it as an example of the anxiety we have over adolescent sexuality, specifically as it relates to travel. You'll note that Fox News seems to be working under the assumption that beer pong is something that only happens in the tropical, debauchedness of Cancun or Daytona Beach. This story is in fact not much different than the numerous warning of violence linked to drugs and prostitution threatening Spring Breakers in Mexico. The original State Department advisory warns primarily of drug related violence, although when discussed by the media this story generally takes an advisory against frequenting areas of known for prostitution and morphs it into a warning about females being sold into prostitution.

I'm really intrigued with the ways that both the beer pong and Mexico warnings place risky adolescent behavior in remote locations and use the "holiday" to talk about taboos that are clearly issues the other 51 weeks out of year. I write a lot about how these taboos are so strong that they often have to be dealt with in the adolescent road trip novel in order to physically, geographically, and emotionally distance the behavior from adolescence, but I find it even more interesting that this pattern seems to becoming common for the media as well.

*My previous example is a series of stories about Al Gore inventing the internet and the ways that narrative was spread and expanded by "reputable" sources. Sadly, for most of my composition students, this example is too dated for it to be funny.

Analyzing a Pantagraph Letter

I'm not quite sure why I continue to read the comments section of the Pantagraph, but I keep finding myself periodically clicking "most commented" just to see what the latest scandal is. Right now, there is letter to the editor title "Insurance Companies Encroaching on Freedoms." Since State Farm bashing seems to be a favorite topic of the commentors, I clicked on the article to see what the issue was and because I generally can't resist a letter to the editor that has freedom or right in the title.

The letter starts like this:

I have to take time out of my schedule next Wednesday to attend mandatory traffic court. What is my horrendous crime you may ask? I did not have the most recent piece of paper in my car verifying that I was covered by auto insurance.

How did we get to this point in our society? I was originally stopped by the police because my passenger was not wearing her seatbelt. Oh no!! Thank goodness another criminal has been convicted and properly punished.

I like how she buried that she was actually pulled over for a seatbelt violation in the second paragraph, but at this point I was trying to figure out how this was an insurance company's fault. Maybe they misprinted her cards, maybe they failed to send them in time. But no, she follows with logical acrobatics that are impressive even for a small local newspaper.

Who is responsible for these laws anyway? The insurance companies. Their lobbyists have convinced our lawmakers to punish people whom they have judged make their profits go down.

Uninsured drivers must be gold mine that can't be tapped without the creation of some laws. So in order to force these people to get insurance, we developed seat belt laws? Clearly, no one but insurance companies thinks that seat belts are a good idea and everyone knows that the easiest violation to spot while driving your own vehicle is the use of a seat belt. I knew that there was a seat belt conspiracy.

I am still trying to figure out what this has to do with freedom, since last time I check the constitution didn't protect the right to drive, nor did it call traffic court a cruel or unusual punishment. I'm pretty sure driving would be classified as a privilege, but then a helpful commenter explained everything:

FollowTheConsitution wrote on Jun 26, 2008 1:07 PM:

" Catching Wild Pigs

You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in The last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity. ....continued... "

At first I thought maybe the poster was trying to use the derogatory pigs/cops reference, but that wouldn't make sense. Unless he/she is drawing an analogy that cops are being domesticated by insurance companies, but didn't police forces develop first. I understand that he is describing the gradual reduction in freedoms, but of all of the issues to pick--seatbelts, really?

Clearly all of the talk about the war, the economy, the enviornment, etc, has been misguided. I leave you with the "wisdom" of the end of the letter:

Land of the free? Hardly! We have lost our ability to make choices for ourselves and our families because businesses like State Farm and Country Companies aren’t making enough money to suit them.

The Great Seat Belt Conspiracy of 08 must be exposed!