I mentioned, here, Jennifer Senior—mostly her journalistic accounts of the social science relating to human happiness. She's also the author of a book about parenting called All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting. She took the title from a chance conversation she had at a playground with a new dad who, when she asked how he found fatherhood, replied that it was "all joy and no fun at all." Well do I remember wanting—yearning—to be left alone on the playground bench while the kids played, but of course someone's unhappy every other minute, and then they want to be pushed on the tire swing, and then someone falls and gets hurt, and then, and then . . . no fun at all. I think the "all joy" was mainly the guy's way of acknowledging how he knew he was supposed to feel.
But the playground was no match for the peculiar, numbing torture of children's TV programming. The worst show ever was Caillou, about this Charlie-Brown looking boy and his perfect little kids' world, the loving parents, the doting grandparents, the friendly townspeople, and, above all, the grating jingle:
I'm just a kid who's 4,
Each day I grow some more,
I like exploring on Caillou!
So many things to do,
Each day is something new,
I'll share them with you on Caillou!
My world is turning, changing each day,
With mommy and daddy and finding my way!
In the typical climactic scene, Caillou visits, say, the fire station, where the firefighters invite him to climb aboard their biggest truck and toot the horn while working the steering wheel. They tell him he'll be a great firefighter one day, if he wants. They give him a fire helmet and everyone beams and laughs. After he's climbed down, his proud parents embrace the little egghead as the theme song kicks in. He's just a kid who's 4, each day he grows some more, Caillou!
I suffered this vivid flashback while watching political news on TV. It seems that Herschel Walker, the Republican US Senate candidate from Georgia, has gone on some field trips to police stations and the nice cops gave him "badges" that he now displays to anyone who'll listen to a potential senator's version of show-and-tell. Well, it's probably better for him and his campaign that people are talking about his toy badges rather than his secret children, the women he's beat up, and the abortions for which he's either advocated or paid. His official position on abortion is evidently that he's pro-life except in those cases where he's the one who knocked her up. Our country has a population of 330 million, a hundred of whom are members of the Senate, and there's about a 50-50 chance that he'll be one of them. Feeling small for having been nauseated by Caillou.
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