The Purple Menace: Barney the Communist Dinosaur

Communism will never destroy America. But as Generation Barney matures, we look back at the dangerous legacy of communism’s top entertainer.

Throughout the 20^th century, popular entertainment was never just that. Thanks to the Legion of Decency, a kiss was never just a kiss, and a knowing smile had deeper meanings in the early part of the century. Later, better messengers proved to be the forms entertainment directed towards the youth.  Superman and Captain America battled every single public enemy and moral outrage of the age; the most enduring ads (Disney’s I like Ike, Duck and Cover) were conveyed through animation.

However, no other children’s television program in America was as iniquitous and reprehensible as Barney and Friends. The PBS Kids’ TV show about an anthropomorphic purple dinosaur doubles as a pinko commie propaganda machine promoting communism and socialism and exposing young and malleable minds of millions of American children to these dangerous and subversive ideas.

Before we started pointing fingers, let’s see what Barney brings to ‘preschool’ children, its targeted audience group. There were accusations that Barney promotes denial and ill-prepare the children for the existence of unpleasant realities. Many scholars and psychologists detest and denounce the show for it. However, children don’t go to these TV shows to learn about real life, so we need to bring the conversation about Barney to what it is within instead of what it is without.

Firstly, there is unhealthy eating. Barney consumes only peanut butter jelly sandwiches, while his girlfriend Baby Bop eats macaroni and cheese and pizza—the staples of American diet. The promoting a diet of peanut butter jelly sandwiches to preschoolers is unacceptable but mac and cheese and pizza—that is just downright wrong. The young minds are easily impressionable; in the age when we should be promoting healthy eating and well-balanced diet, the show was a slap in the face to many a nutrition expert.

Then came his theme song: “Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination”. The show was first aired in 1992, right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Choosing an extinct animal and reviving it may not directly suggest communist revival but Barney was originally meant to be red. Yes, red—like communism whose fossilized remains it came to symbolize. The production team claimed that red as a primary color would attract young childern’s attention, and only after a child psychologist warned that a bright red dinosaur could be perceived as threatening, color purple was chosen.

Thus like the Soviet Union, a purple Tyrannosaurus Rex remained an unnatural entity. Two additional lines from his theme song added to his unnatural, dishonest nature: “Barney shows us lots of things/Like how to play pretend” and “Barney can be your friend too/If you just make-believe him!” I don’t know what the producers (or the children who ‘imagined’ Barney to life) were smoking/drinking.

Children who grew up with Barney will remember a slew of his most famous songs. Apart from ‘I Love You/You Love Me’ with its hippy, free love message (another fossil from the 70s), all of his other songs and episodes promote communism towards young and defenseless children.  [‘I Love You/You Love Me’ song was not so innocuous either. Entirely devoid of musical value, it was used by the U.S. military in interrogating terrorists. It is probably a thousand times worse than waterboarding.]

Barney asks children to clean up after themselves. Although it might probably have been a great idea for parents to implant in their children, his actual lyrics are terrifying. “Clean up, clean up everybody everywhere. Clean up clean up everybody do your share,” sounds like a quote copied from Big Brother. It had been the propelling idea behind Stalin’s collective farms and Pol Pot’s killing fields. A world where everyone do the same ‘share’ instead of maximizing utilities and profits by outsourcing is not an idea espoused by anyone since Adam Smith. It is downright socialist.

The next message cements Barney’s stance as the premier agent provocateur of communism. “Sharing is caring” had been his message. In addition to becoming the tag-line of online piracy, the quote shed light into the minds of Barney’s creators (and its masters in Kremlin). Sharing is a communist idea; it leads to a society whose very norms inhibits the personal growth and motivation. How can a person be motivated if his society promotes sharing instead of gaining the benefits through his own exceptional work? It was the flaw with Peter Singer’s model world. In addition to that cheery, idealist society where everyone receives the same wage and the benefits, sharing leads to a brave new world where state-sanctioned theft was promoted. That is Barney’s world. That is Marx’s world.

The best example of this line of thought was epitomized in the song “Peanut Butter and Jelly”. “First you take the peanuts/And you crunch ‘em,/Then you take the grapes/And you squish ‘em,/Then you take the bread/And you spread it” were the lines directly taken from the song. Peanuts symbolize farmers and landowners. Grapes symbolize not only bourgeois class but also religion. (Grapes have been an enduring symbol of faith, fertility). Barney is promoting a society where we oppress  farmers, landowners, bourgeois and even religion. To do what? To take the bread and spread it. Ambiguously pronoun there brings back uneasy memories of breadlines behind the Iron Curtain.

“Communism will never destroy America,” proclaimed many politicians. But now as Generation Barney matures as and many who were directly related to Barney show becomes the icons of showbiz, we see America’s sudden turn to the left—nationalizing banks, healthcare, increasing taxation, etc. Those communist, socialist and nihilist ideas ingrained when these kids were little were definitely showing. Are we headed towards a Kleptocractic world where the rule of the jungle (viz., Sherwood Forest) is not only allowed but also sanctioned? It is time to expose this communist conspiracy. It is time to condemn Barney.

The Tale of Two Deaths

Twin obituaries to a generation’s face, and its voice — by someone who doesn’t belong to that generation.

Yesterday, I started to write this obituary of Farrah Fawcett. For an actress who made her name during one season of a popular TV show, Farrah’s shadow was long and her stride bold. I didn’t have that iconic poster of hers, but her face itself was iconic–it was the imprimatur of a changing generation, the symbol of a shifting trend and perhaps the face of the 70s, 80s and even 90s.

Indeed, hers was the first face of an actress I remembered from my childhood, which is surprising because I grew up in the 90s. Maybe I saw her in reruns of Charlie’s Angels–I don’t remember–but both my parents were already remembering her with nostalgia and esteem by the 90s.

Public memory was more divided on another celebrity whose death delayed this obituary. Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, who died yesterday at the age of 50, was also a larger-than-life figure. To some, he was an unparalleled genius but to people in my immediate vicinity, it was a matter of secondary importance.

This summer, I am living and mentoring a dorm of highschool sophomores and juniors, who broke the news of MJ’s death to me. It was one of those “you know where you were when…” occasions. I checked online but no major network (CNN, BBC, NYT) has called it yet. Several gossip sites were already proclaiming his death, but it wasn’t on wikipedia yet. That didn’t prevent the highschoolers from ‘celebrating’ his death with his songs. Gathering from their words, Michael Jackson with his almost extraterrestrial transformation, his fantasy Neverland ranch, his molestation charges, his eccentricities was merely a caricature, a bete noir we all love to hate.

Then, there is the older generation. I am not talking about those born in 70s and 80s, to whom Jackson was the voice of the generation as much as Farrah Fawcett was its face. I am talking about even older generation–that of our parents, to whom Michael Jackson was an usurper–the usurper of that ‘rightful’ iconicity occupied by Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles. Sandwiched between these two generations, I personally showed very little liking for Michael Jackson’s music; when I reached the music-listening stage, his once unique cords and choreographies were already trite.

Inside the Actors Studio, James Lipton asks ten questions complied by the French philosopher Berhnard Pivot to every guest. The last question is, “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?” Neither Farrah or Jackson appeared on the show, but both would be glad to hear ‘You did make a difference’ from the lips of the Almighty. That is what a lot of people were saying this morning, and afterall, Vox Populi, Vox Dei.

OMG, Omegle…!

In the age of ‘Net, moral degradation can come from anonymity and privacy. I report from that last frontier.

Last week, a friend sent me a link about www.omegle.com, an online chat website which pick ‘another user at random and let you have a one-on-one chat with each’ anonymously, according to their website.

Omegle has an entry in wikipedia (so it might be a pretty big deal, right?), and was mentioned in a New York Times article. So, against common sense and my better judgment, I started using it. It went lackadaisically uneventful for me after a few minutes, but my friends—they are less fortunate. They were assailed by raunchy messages in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Dutch—which says something about the general social ineptitude of people in those countries, and also about what people do when anonymity is handed out to them.

Out there, it is like the chatrooms in the fledgling day of the Internet minus collective monitoring. Now, it is one-on-one and proposals for cyber-sex apparently galore in multitude of languages. It is like Babel mixed together with Sodom and Gomorrah.

We fear a day when governments will track our IP addresses and take away the last semblance of online privacy and anonymity. With websites like facebook and twitter, we are moving towards less private world in which everyone can see and judge us for what we are. Through Omegle, anonymous blog posts and comments (and perhaps even Second Life) we veer towards another extreme—an underground anarchistic world where cowards, perverts and hackers hide behind their monitors.

As we navigate the happy medium between these two extremes, we must also be aware that our online personae live in an ever-evolving world. In an age when etiquette, decency and accountability are fast evaporating, privacy and anonymity can be the last things we can hold on to. Yet, this too shall pass. In the future, when we—the facebook generation—become the employers of the next generation, how could we look down upon our employees who had put up incriminating pictures/stories on their websites?

Maybe we could, but let us not be hypocritical but be be public, frank and accountable.

Up: Pixar’s Wonderful life

Their latest offering is part farcical, part tragic. It is a story only Pixar can make so appealing.

It is a long overdue movie from Pixar. They have conquered land, sea and space. Their latest hit—succinctly titled Up—soared into air and certainly lived up to the expectations. Although it didn’t break the milestones set by Wall-E, it reaffirms them. Wall-E is a pretty hard act to follow, but Up is 9/10, if Wall-E is 10/10.

Pixar loves to place familiar characters (superheroes, fishes, robots) in unfamiliar situation. Up is no different—it is a heartwarming story between a grandfather-figure and a little boy. However, instead of the little boy living vicariously through his older counterpart as we saw in countless movies like Princess Bride, it is the other way around: Carl Frederickson, a curmudgeonly square-figure modeled after Spencer Tracy lives vicariously through his long-dead wife, Ellie and a boy scout he inadvertently acquired.

Up probably is the least serious movie Pixar had made in a long time. Dogs that talked through collars, a man nearing his 150^th year living in an isolated corner of the world and a house uprooted and lifted by balloons. I personally didn’t like some of these aspects—and a lot of people in the theatre I went to were puzzled by them—but these aspects dim in comparison to Up’s overarching themes.

With its stunning visuals or silent grandeur, Wall-E beats Up, but Wall-E’s parable on love and environmentalism loses out to Up in the profundity of message … and Up makes its message within the first ten minutes too.

A musical number that chronicles Carl and Ellie’s lives is part elegiac, part allegorical. Up is about life—life we live in the shadows of our heroes, life haunted by our memories, life constrained by our ideals, desires and cravings. Like the house Carl so uncannily carries on his back like a snail carries its humble abode, our past life—Pixar noted—is sometimes a cherished memory and sometimes a daunting burden.

One of Carl’s cherished memories that will come back to haunt him was that of his and Ellie’s hero, explorer Charles Muntz. It is comedic when we saw a similar story in The Incredibles, but in Up, it is heartrending. Carl’s stoic, taciturn but cynical features betrays little of his disappointment but we who have lived through it realize the deep ramifications behind his facade.

That is why the story of Russell, whose familial situation was never fully explained, was simultaneously intriguing and tragic. It is oft said not to judge someone without knowing them fully, but in Up, Pixar showed us how we are not only a Greek chorus in the story but also unwitting participants. It is the story of our lives—maybe it is vicariousness without empathy, but in being vicarious, we become empathic too.

Well done Pixar. I won’t be amazed if Up is It is a Wonderful Life of tomorrow.

Democracy’s loss is our gain…

A Machiavellian Primer: How we will lose the battle and win the war in Iran

American people don’t vote in large numbers; turnouts are depressingly low. It may be a collective action problem, but the Americans just don’t have to vote in numbers. They know their country is in good shape, and they know—so does Gallup—that a few voters can make educated choices.

However, when people do go to polls in unprecedented numbers, it is only to vote out an old flawed government. A referendum on the existing government, a large turnout is a sign that many people are angry with the old government. That is why it is surprising that last Friday, people elected the old government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, despite a large turnout.

Or did they? I am not going to dwell on the ‘irregularities’, we can create something productive, something useful out of this rigged election. Yes, Machiavellian it may seems but we are jolly well going to get a profit out of this god-send (or should I say Allah-send) opportunity.

As Washington begin its proposal for negotiations with Tehran, we all know that the power lies with the ayatollahs and not with the elected officials. Ahmadinejad is an irrational, but ironically enough, predicable character. Using his past words, the U.S. can get a win-win situation out of his second term—if Ahmedinajed negotiate, it can lead to a peaceful Middle East. If he does not, he is repudiating his (doubtful) words on rapprochement with the West and he also risks losing the confidence of now-already-sour Iranian people.

However, on the other hand, with Moussavi, we lose our biggest card—Ahmadinejad himself. The megalomaniacal president calling Israel’s annihilation is someone we love to hate. He is our Hitler. His bland opponent is more unyielding than Ahmadinejad on the nuclear issue, and lacks the support of the ayatollahs. Negotiating with him will lead us nowhere.

Speaking of the ayatollahs, now that they themselves are advocating for an electoral investigation, use the UN to send overseers. If they allow it, it is a step towards transparency. If they don’t, it is as good as a signed admission that the election is rigged.

Well, actually, it is rigged—we know it. The Russians know it and the Chinese do too. Should we be trumpeting this fact and alienating not only the ayatollahs but also the people who still pride that theirs is at least a ‘democratic’ country compared to many others in the Middle East? Instead, we should use the diplomatic brokering to convince the Europeans—France, Great Britain and Germany in particular—that their conciliatory approach towards Iran is not actually working, and that nations like Libya or Iran could never be democracies through negotiations.

Elsewhere in the world, Ahmadinejad’s win is a god-send card. In Iraq, it is their ‘Red Scare’ card. With President Obama’s troop withdrawal plans, the Iraqis should cast aside their religious and ethnic differences and come together as a nation—and a US ally at that. A hardliner regime in Iran can help this. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia–which don’t want a Shia (Iran) bomb–this election puts a leverage on their leadership. Now, with Ahmadinejad’s win, they have to try their best to aid US in containing Iran. Reciprocally, the US can use ‘nuclear proliferation’ card with China and Russia even more strongly now. In Israel, Netanyahu–with his hardliner agenda–is smiling. The US can now finally explain why undemocratic Iran or its irrational leadership threatens Eastern Europe and therefore necessitate a missile shield. The Russians won’t buy it, but they will have to live with it.

When the mullahs of Iran deliver a lemon, we will not only to make lemonade out of it, but also shove it down their throats. Mills of God grind slowly but …