Sesame Street and the Obliteration of Reason, Part Two

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." (Anatole France, The Red Lily, 1894)

In 1896 the Supreme Court ruled against a man named Homer Plessy who had challenged Louisiana's law mandating separate railroad cars for whites and blacks, establishing the precedent for "separate but equal" that persisted until the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. The Plessy Court pointed out that prohibiting black patrons from occupying cars designated "White Only" did not constitute discrimination since whites could not sit in cars designated "Colored Only."

Years ago I was teaching a group of students who (luckily, as it turned out) were all Caucasian. I say luckily because we were discussing racism and one coed began to rant about "them": "We try to be friends but they won't talk to us." The other students looked embarrassed but seemed not to know how to answer these charges. When the coed paused at last after complaining "they always sit together in the cafeteria," I asked her, "And with whom do the white students sit?"

Her generalizations about "them" represent the lazy way to reach a conclusion, as in the blasé assertion that whites and blacks are equally racist. We call such an assertion "common sense." As a people, we adore common sense. It obviates any need to strain our gray matter over, for example, contemplating differences between white and black experience. It relieves us, in that case, of any need to ask ourselves whether oppression that leads to anger and hostility is the equivalent of anger and hostility that spawns oppression.

Going back to Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court conceived of "colored people" as "socially unequal," a condition they ruled could not be rectified by law. The law in all its majestic fairness gave people of color access to "civil and political rights" and that must suffice. By dint of black people's inability to function socially on par with whites, acts of personal discrimination were justified.

The argument against the erection of a cultural center containing a mosque a few blocks from Ground Zero falls into a similar logical pit. Muslims are "equal" in their civil and political rights, but they are socially inferior in ways the law can't touch. Therefore, they shouldn't erect houses of worship in places that non-Muslims don't want them to erect houses of worship. In fact, perhaps they shouldn't be able to erect houses of worship anywhere in the U.S. since protests against mosques have been launched coast to coast.

In the case of the New York cultural center, the line of reasoning put forward is this: Muslims slaughtered the victims of 9/11. Placing a mosque close to the site of the destruction amounts to gloating. At the very least, such a mosque would be offensive to the victims and survivors of that horrendous event.

The fundamental flaw in this position is the flaw of generalization. Like the coed, those who argue that Muslims seeking to honor their religion are "gloating" fail to perceive distinctions among people who differ significantly from themselves. If one of these things is not like the other, what is it like? Apparently, it's like everything else with which it shares any characteristic that is "unlike the others." So we see that, if some psychotics happen to be Muslims, Muslims are psychotic. And, if some psychotics argue that the Koran blesses their murderous impulses, we have to believe that, in fact, the Koran does bless their murderous impulses. After all, if  we can't have faith in what lunatics say, who can we believe?

Shouldn't we apply this logic to the Catholic Church, today in The Netherlands embroiled in yet another pedophile scandal? If so, we should believe that all priests are child molesters and, therefore, Catholic churches should never be built in proximity to children.

Obviously, such reasoning is ridiculous (at least, I hope that's obvious). But perhaps not. We soak up the ludicrous without blinking while our TV blowhards report it pontifically. On the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Glenn Beck declares that he, the Tea Party-supporters, and Fox-news devotees "started the civil rights movement." He praises America, God, and the military. Subsequently, Beck asserts that Obama is a "liberation theologist," "not a Christian." According to Wikipedia, "liberation theology is a movement in Christian theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions." In Glenn Beck's twisted parlance, Christ must have hoisted an AK-47, battled advocates for justice, and had only contempt for those whining slackers, "the poor."

That's Christianity with antecedents in the Crusades and the Inquisition. But Muslims are the terrorists?

Sesame Street and the Obliteration of Reason, Part One

As a toddler, my older son loved to watch Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. Worried that he'd get restless, I'd stand behind the sofa, praying for the man to "do something interesting." I found him about as riveting as televised chess. When I read his obituary, my reaction matched Dorothy Parker's, who, when she heard Calvin Coolidge had died, inquired, "How could they tell?"

Sesame Street followed Mr. Rogers on PBS. As soon as that show came on, my son would trot into the other room. I'd linger a moment, transfixed by its herky-jerky rhythms. The program whipped along like a fast-talking vaudeville act with one eye on the hook approaching from the wings.

What I didn't appreciate then was that Mr. Rogers left space for the children watching. When he lowered himself to tie his shoe, my son shadowed his movements, eager to experience what Mr. Rogers was experiencing. In retrospect, given the nature of television, their interaction was astonishingly personal.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not claiming that Sesame Street authored the short attention span. TV in general should probably be credited with spreading that disease. But Sesame Street hooked very young children on the gratification of mindlessly ingesting information.

Question: What is the most important thing a child should get out of education? Second Question: Whatever it is, does our educational system provide it?

Answer to the first question: The ability to think critically.

Answer to the second question: Not bloody likely.

Public education began, not as a project to enrich the lives of underprivileged children, but as a means of establishing a class of citizens equipped to understand orders and robotically willing to follow them:

Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, [Horace] Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially among fellow Whigs, for building public schools. Indeed, most states adopted one version or another of the system he established in Massachusetts, especially the program for "normal schools" to train professional teachers. History of Education

Standardized public education, evaluated through standardized tests and administered by standardized teachers scrubbed to neutral by a degree in education, ensures that too many of our children leave public school, with or without a diploma, pretty much incapable of thinking critically. Presented with an argument lacerated by illogic, well-behaved citizens nod in complacent agreement. Witness the success of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh (with bobble-head doll followers)—merely two out of numerous wildly popular media sources of gossip posing as news.

Hyper-credulousness led to the election of George Bush and currently makes Sarah Palin—also abysmally ignorant of foreign affairs—a potentially "viable" candidate for the White House. Hyper-credulousness also makes 24 percent of Americans imagine the current President is a Muslim. Damego More conservatively, according to the Christian Science Monitor, only 20 percent believe that, for the President, the Koran represents spiritual authority. Time Magazine reports that only 47% of Americans believe Obama is a Christian. The animosity toward Muslims reported in the same article makes these figures even more frightening.

Have we no sense of irony left? A President presiding over a Holy War against Terrorism (more about that in future), nevertheless, a supporter of the enemy? Not since the reign of Joe McCarthy have we witnessed such rampant paranoia.

Maybe These Colors Don't Run, but they sure tremble a lot.

Next week: Sesame Street and the Death of Thinking, Part 2

The Trouble With Gabby Eyeballs

Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott contains the following passage:

"Rae's eyes were red and swollen. They sat on the couch side by side, in silence, waiting for the doctor."

I posted this excerpt on the blog site of an agent who had written ardently about the invaluable contributions of modern literary editors: The Myth That Editors Don't Edit. Nathan Bransford responded by pointing me to a previous post in which he clarified the role of editors, who, according to him, don't have time to deal with minutiae. I don't really consider this an example of "minutiae" since my husband, reading the novel to me, and I laughed over it for several minutes and afterward repeatedly flipped back for more yuks. Eyeballs perched on furniture would seem to take something away from any suspension of disbelief.

Furthermore, I don't know about Bransford's dictionary but mine defines "editor" as the person who is "in charge of and determines the final content of published material."

Okay, so it seems grammar and syntax have slipped out of the realm of "content."  (Perhaps only vampires and serial killers qualify.) The humble copy editor, or reader, is the peon who actually scans a manuscript for errors. But why, if anyone is proofing copy, are more and more works of fiction blistered by distracting typos? One plausible explanation is that publishing house readers, like other workers in today's economy, find themselves too overworked to do that part of their jobs well. In short, like their better-paid bosses, they don't have time for the minutiae. Another horrifying (to me) but persuasive reason is that no one cares.

But shouldn't an author's editor and publisher protect her from the pratfall of positioning two eyes on a sofa, side by side, in silence no less? (I shrink from the alternative.) Are editors so pressed that they will not take a pen—electronic or otherwise—and circle such a mistake to ensure that it doesn't find its way into print? Ah, as the Bard would say, there's the rub. Why should anyone bother?

I scoured the Internet for reviews of Crooked Little Heart in a vain search for evidence that some readers had noticed this, or any of the other infelicitous bits of writing in the text. I found none. Her fans and critics lavish praise on Lamott's "poetic prose." Perhaps the death of the attention span has gutted us of the will to recoil from syntactic stumbles. Perhaps "txt msgng" has deprived us of the ability. (Next week: Sesame Street and the Demise of Thought.)

Todd Walton, successful novelist and short story writer, has a theory about "The Death of Literature" (Under The Table Books).  He argues that prior to World War II, publishing was the playpen of rich white males, entrepreneurs unfazed by the industry's lack of profitability. Like patrons of eighteenth century artists and composers, these rich white men published novice writers solely for literature's sake—or at least for their understanding of literature's sake, which in many cases wasn't too bad.

According to Walton, pre-WWII editors had permission to publish a first and even a second money-losing literary work. A few months ago, a successful literary agent told me that publishers today bark, "You want to stake your career on this?" at editors seeking to bring forth an iffy project by an unknown writer. Faulkner, whose first five novels did not sell well, would die in obscurity, had he been born a few decades later. Walton notes

By the early 1980’s the last of the “old school” of creative and dedicated editors, many of them middle-aged and older, had been replaced by legions of young women (21-27) who, to this day, are the “acquisition editors” for all the major houses, and who themselves last only a few years in their drudge jobs of buying books that fit the extremely limited parameters of acceptable corporate media. Books that are not essentially supportive of the status quo and instantly successful are promptly taken out of print, i.e. remaindered.

Blockbusters, hotly pursued through publisher auctions, are "page-turners," that is, editorially scoured of any passage that might give the reader pause. (This is the contribution Bransford notes.) But who reads Faulkner or Thomas Wolfe without lingering anywhere in the text? In fact, the definition of literature might well be fine writing that periodically inspires a reader to look out the window and reflect.

Walton argues that after WWII publishing became profitable, in large part because of the GI Bill (see his argument). Subsequently, the novel entered the realm of commerce and the capitalists descended, as vultures to carrion. The kingdom of rich white men disintegrated.

Like the financial markets, where a few are obscenely overpaid for the damage they do, publishing now invests megabucks in anticipated blockbusters, which, incidentally, not infrequently fail to deliver the revenue expected. This leaves little in the cookie jar for lesser work (lesser, monetarily, that is), and almost none for outright experimentation. If publishing finds itself, as it seems to, facing an increasingly bleak financial picture, it has only to look in the mirror for the origins of impending doom.

Why We Love Dreck

Between 1957 and 1960, ABC, with only two rivals broadcasting—NBC and CBS—featured a silly Western called "Colt 45." In it, a government agent, posing as a gun salesman, cuts a wide swath through swaggering desperados. Each episode opened with Wayde Preston, our hero, galloping up and flinging himself off his horse, heading to the saloon just as someone off-screen shouts, "Colt!" Preston whips around and fires several rounds. Then the camera closes in on his face, his eyes squinched, as if he's wondering, "Who'd I shoot?"

There's nothing as bracing as a make-believe world in which the villains invite execution by hallooing the executioner. That uplifting breed of hokum doesn't really exist anymore, or at least we don't receive it quite the way we did forty years ago. Oh, sure, dull sitcoms, hyper-energized by obnoxious canned laughter, riddle our television screens, and contemporary Hollywood movies are almost without exception dreck. But the Kennedy assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, Watergate, Vietnam, George Bush and water-boarding, all have jolted our collective consciousness out of a comfort zone that formerly permitted us to find the entertainment industry's Manichean world wholly credible. Our self-consciousness, if not our critical faculties, has increased in that regard. Most of us would flinch somewhat to hear the Swedish "Charlie Chan" (Warner Oland) call out for his "Number One Son," or Steppin Fetchit  (Lincoln Theodore Perry) drawl his sluggish "Yassuh."

Today's dreck seeks either to annihilate our longing for innocence or to re-establish our (literally mind-blowing) Garden of Eden. Take a gander at the New York Times Best Seller List.

Is there a Faulkner there? A Flannery O'Connor or a Henry James? A Toni Morrison or an Ian McEwen? Anyone who provokes reflection? Anyone whose work might survive the next decade? Only one book in the top fifteen aspires to climb out of the genre pit, Kathryn Stockett's The Help. But, as it turns out, The Help only seeks to re-erect the walls around our beloved Eden. Well, that and to make a few bucks. Quite a few bucks.

Stockett's hero, Eugenia Phelan, yearns for the comfort of her vanished black nanny's embrace. In tribute to that mythic woman, the grown-up Phelan sets out to interview black maids in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, for a book that will launch her career. One plot improbability piles onto another while Stockett plows through, milking racial myopia. 

It's a feel-good book that wallpapers over the viciousness it ought to expose. For example, Ms. Phelan has for many years been the uncritical friend of one of the nastiest racists in 1960's Jackson, which is to say, one of the nastiest racists on the planet. Ms. Phelan never interrogates herself over that association, giving it up only when the friend visits excessive disagreeability on her. But the black maids don't hold Ms. Phelan's lack of sensitivity against our ambitious scribe. After some perfunctory foot-dragging, they fall in with her risky plan to publish their trials and tribulations, with details that would surely unmask them. In the decades prior to the Civil Rights movement, such credulous black Mississippians would not have survived their tenth birthday.

Most egregious in this distortion of our terrifying national past, is Stockett's fantasy of a black maid who "bests" her employer (Phelan's racist friend) in a scandalous manner but is, as a result (voila!), fictionally released from further subjugation. Stockett has either forgotten or never learned anything about the Ku Klux Klan. A lynching victim needed only to be accused of having sassed someone with lighter skin to find herself in very deep doo-doo. Go ask fourteen-year-old Emmett Till about that. Oh, right. You can't. He's dead. Emmett Till Murder or  Schoolnet

The book ends with a chorus of "We-are-the-world" and the joining of metaphorical hands, leaving the reader with the distinct impression that racism was never quite as bad as some people like to think. It was always possible, with a little ingenuity, to assert your dignity. Right. I feel all better now.

For other POVs, see

Cal Review

Book Browse

Book Review "The Help"

Culture of the Maid

Next week: Editors who do not edit.