CSotD: Some of my favorite Muppets are colored
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Okay, here's why liberals lose elections: They're not afraid to make fun of each other for taking things way too seriously. Matt Bors, I'm looking at you.
When I heard about the Bert-and-Ernie petition, I assumed it was a joke and wondered why PBS took it seriously enough to even bother responding. And I thought the whole thing was stupid enough that I didn't bother looking into it until Matt's cartoon came up this morning.
Dear Lord, they were serious.
I'm not trying to be insensitive to the overall issue, but this is the kind of thing that gives political correctness a bad name, and these people deserve all the mockery they get, if only to try to keep them from mucking up the good things that sensible people are trying to accomplish in that area.
To some extent, it's a little late. The Muppets and Sesame Street began as a burst of colorful anarchy in the otherwise drab and overly earnest (no pun intended) world of educational television. Maybe you had to grow up with Miss Frances and Ding Dong School (or watch a little of that YouTube link), to really understand what a breakthrough this was.
Miss Frances — who had a doctorate and knew her stuff — was a forerunner of calm, gentle children's programming hosts like Fred Rogers, Captain Kangaroo and the Friendly Giant, and there's value in having kids exposed to the poetry of Vachel Lindsey.
But that's not the acquisition-of-basic-skills mission that Sesame Street was brought in to fulfill.
Well, it didn't take long for the experts to drag Sesame Street back from the edge of fun and to abandon its original mission. They banished the falling baker counting segments, took off the flashing numbers and tried to make the Muppets more diverse by adding Prairie Dawn so there would be a female Muppet. (And if you click on that Prairie Dawn link, you'll see what it means to take something way, way too seriously.)
This wasn't mission creep. It was a complete change of purpose. But when the popularity of the show was co-opted to teach social values rather than basic skills, the Muppets became secondary to the human cast, a reversal of the way the show was originally set up.
And it works as long as you're simply using the characters to lecture the kids, as much as lecturing kids works in any context. Elmo can prattle on in that nails-on-chalkboard faux-child voice of his about values and good choices and whatever other preachy hogwash they're selling just as efficiently as a human kid, and he won't blow his lines or look off-camera at his mother while he's doing it.
But you can't use Muppets to model diversity.
One problem is that puppets are exaggerations, so that diversity can quickly become stereotyping. How do you depict blackness or being Asian or Latino through a Muppet without slipping quickly into Steppin Fetchit/Charlie Chan/Jose Jimenez territory?
There have been minority puppets, notably Lester, the dummy half of the classic Willie Tyler and Lester ventriloquist act. It would have been strange to have an African-American comic with a white dummy and almost inescapably offensive to reverse it. But note that ventriloquist teams have a kind of father/son older/younger dynamic, even when the dummy (as in that linked clip) talks about adult activities. A gay ventriloquist act would, to that extent, be kind of creepy, for the same reason you don't see male ventriloquists with female dummies.
For that matter, how old are Muppets? Like ventriloquist dummies, they exist in a Never-Neverland of ambiguity. Are Bert and Ernie children or adults? Kermit has a job, he acts and talks like an adult, but much of his appeal to children is that he is of indeterminate age, as are all Muppets: Big Bird is clearly a child, but he's over six feet tall. And, come to think of it, a lot of the Muppets are only male because they are referred to as male, not because of any intrinsic characteristics of their own.
This lack of specific anchors in reality makes the notion of Bert and Ernie as a gay couple simply not work, just as it makes the notion of race hard to pull off.
I wish the experts had left Sesame Street and its Muppets alone, but I'm glad to see Matt Bors call out the people who can't see past their own earnest, humorless take on life.
And I won't stand on one foot waiting for some conservative cartoonist to call out the earnest, humorless fools on that side of the aisle, because it ain't gonna happen. There is no limit to the earnest, humorless idiocy you can get away with if you align yourself with the right, where criticism is considered disloyalty and commentators are expected to toe the party line.
It's gonna be a long campaign.
Maybe I'll just try to ignore it, at least long enough to read this brochure about tolerance that was produced by an agency of the Ecuadorian government.
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