Screeding is Fundamental
Every once in a while, I discover a product or a news story that, in a better world, would clearly be satire.
The latest such find? Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!
This delightful tale is quite possibly the only children’s book ever to get a back cover blurb from Grover ”Bipartisanship is another word for date rape” Norquist.
According to the publisher, this ain’t exactly Goodnight, Moon:
This full-color illustrated book is a fun way for parents to teach young children the valuable lessons of conservatism. Written in simple text, readers can follow along with Tommy and Lou as they open a lemonade stand to earn money for a swing set. But when liberals start demanding that Tommy and Lou pay half their money in taxes, take down their picture of Jesus, and serve broccoli with every glass of lemonade, the young brothers experience the downside to living in Liberaland.
Boy, it almost makes me wish I had kids so I would have someone not to read this to.
(Via Bookslut)
9 Ripples from “Screeding is Fundamental”
Brandon says:
August 23, 2005 at 11:08 am
You could, if you wished, NOT read it to your cats. (Or, buy a copy and put it in their litter box.)
ninjanun says:
August 23, 2005 at 1:08 pm
And then we wonder why so many young Republicans (or any conservatives, for that matter) are so insistant that They Are Right. When you’re indoctrinated at an early age, you take certain paradigms for granted, and never question where they came from.
Train up a child in the way he should go...” and all that stuff.
It would be interesting to see what a “Help! Mom! There Are Conservatives Under My Bed!” edition might look like.
Kevin says:
August 23, 2005 at 2:08 pm
I especially enjoyed the bit about the broccoli. Just wait until the kids that Tommy and Lou hire to work the stand form a union. I’m almost tempted to pick this thing up and write a sequel.
Thomas says:
August 23, 2005 at 5:08 pm
I would like to point out that Conservatives are not the only ones who insist that they are right all the time...this “us and them” approach to the mechanism by which our country is supposed to be run disturbs me greatly and is one of the greater reasons for my own distrust of partisan politics. Partisanship breeds hypocrisy. George Washington knew it too, he warned heavily against the formation of political parties during the early years of our government. We would all be in better shape if we could really be as open minded as we all like to think we are...sure a person’s set of ideas and beleifs may generally be opposite of yours, but if you label them as “conservative” or “liberal” and therefore write them off as being wrong, then you chance missing out on something that may, in fact, be great. Step back, see the bigger picture, and remember that we all have the same goal in common: to make America great.
Brandon says:
August 23, 2005 at 7:08 pm
Thomas,
I find my self generally agreeing with your comment. Yet, I’m not sure that simply labelling an individual as ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ is by default writing them off as wrong.
I think we use the terms you refer to out of convenience, that’s all. It’s not that some folks aren’t as polemic as you describe--I’m just not convinced that the mere labelling of someone insists that they’re wrong.
And, I’d say that Zalm, here, has done a pretty good job at understanding these things. (As many of us with more conservative parents whom we love have become adept at doing!)
zalm says:
August 23, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Thomas,
I think you make an important point, and I’m glad you took the time to offer your thoughts. I hope that you’ll forgive us for having a little fun and heaping some snark on a product that is so clearly begging for it.
I like your point about partisanship. But I don’t know that it’s so much the hypocrisy that bothers me as it is the fact that a two-party system dramatically limits our political choices and encourages people to invest themselves in an identity that at many points may be in direct conflict with their interests or ethics. Maybe that ends up looking like hypocricy a lot of the time.
More and more, it seems that party unity is trumping personal, constituent, institutional and even national interests. And that’s extremely troubling. If you think Washington would be upset by today’s political climate, imagine how pissed off Madison would be.
As for the rest of what you had to say, I agree with that too, but with the caveats that Brandon raised. I don’t think it’s the labels themselves that are bad. We all need categories and heuristic devices to understand our world. What’s bad is the writing people off. What’s bad is turning the labels into epithets.
That’s what bothers me about a book like this. Even if it’s done as a joke, it’s still teaching a child at an early age that applying certain labels to people allows you, or even demands that you write them off. And that’s awfully difficult to unlearn.
(Even though I’m upset by this, I’m sure I’m not immune from doing it myself. And I hope you and others will speak up when I’m being unfair.)
Thomas says:
August 25, 2005 at 11:08 pm
I understand where it is that you guys are both coming from, and I understand that labels are somewhat of a necessity for the pure purpose of understand who it is we are and who it is that we are not, but when the labels begin carrying a connotation..thats what I had a disagreement with.
My comment in regards to hypocrisy were directed towards ninjanun’s post..his “us and them” attitude disturbed me. To me, it seems as if he is writing off all people with conservative ideals as being wrong. This philosophy is just as easily applied to liberals, and this in turn becomes the sort of tired, childish bickering that it drives me crazy to see slathered across the media. Just a thought though...l
I agree, partisanship is strangling our political system slowly and dividing our legislatures on issues that could be solved easily if it were not for the simple fact that Republicans are always expected to disagree Democrats and vice versa (any sort of concession would be viewed as weakness across the board, and therefore a major disadvantage in the constant power shuffle in Washington).
zalm says:
August 27, 2005 at 2:09 am
ninjanun is actually out of town for the weekend, so I’ll see if I can field this without doing her too much of a disservice.
I don’t want to make a huge deal about her comment, because I think she wrote it quickly as a bit of snark about a rather absurd product. But since you’ve come back to it and have treated it seriously, I’ll try to respond in kind.
Perhaps what you’re objecting to most is that she said any conservatives, rather than some or certain conservatives. I would agree with you that painting with such broad brushstrokes promotes the very “us vs. them” attitude that she decries. (Although reading it again, I really wonder if she meant to say many and mistyped.)
However, a poor choice of words or inaccurate typing doesn’t negate her point. And I think her point was about humility. I’ll hopefully be writing more about this soon, but I think that to have a vital democratic conversation requires us to be open to the idea that we might be wrong. And it seems to me that what she was trying to describe was an influential subset of conservatives who reject that ethos. It’s how we end up with a president who is unable to think of a single mistake he’s made.
Are there similar people on the left? You betcha. I live in Berkeley, so my eyes are wide open to that. But they’re not nearly as powerful at the moment as their counterparts on the right.
Anyhow, to return to the point of my post, any parent who would read a book like this to a child only makes matters worse.
For some reason, it sounded a lot funnier the first time I told it.
ninjanun says:
September 9, 2005 at 1:09 am
Thank you, Zalm, for so eloquently expressing my frustration behind the snarky comment, and for doing so in my absence.
Thomas, you raise very good points (along with Zalm and Brandon) which I in no way disagree with. My comment was purely spur-of-the-moment snark, and as a former conservative Republican, I still hold by my statement that many young conservatives/republicans often insist they are right, to the point where they can’t even look rationally at opposing viewpoints without demonizing their opponant. I’d write more about why I think that is (purely from my own experiences growing up, and my friendship/blood ties with several conservative republicans), but I don’t think this post warrents that much discussion. I can see how my parenthetical statement in my orignal post can be taken as a blanket statement about ALL conservatives, but that’s not really how I meant it. Sorry for the confusion.
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