The people of our day must be about the dumbest raisers of children ever to change a diaper. While we're visiting Canada, that bridge between the follies of the United States and the follies of Europe, my son has watched a few of the children's programs. The cartoons are little animated soap operas full of cute kids with big sparkly eyes, learning to share, and get along, and try new things, and talk about their feelings, and so on. They are as cloying as a bowl of sugared honey with corn syrup on top. They are as sickly sweet, and as intelligent, as the hymn I heard last week at an outdoor Mass, some silly old hippity-hoppity thing with "Allelu, Allelu" in the refrain. Not one hearty laugh or hearty punch to the belly in a one of them. Of course, they are politically correct, to boot.
And that has made me long for the real thing: a funny (and not vile) cartoon. Even that lowly medium of art and good humor has been smashed to flotsam in the general wreck. Where have you gone, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Jay Ward, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and especially you, you madcap defier of physics, you elongator of the imagination, Chuck Jones? Never shall I forget the penetrating insight and poignancy of such lines as:
"Atsa matta fo' you! A rabbit she's-a good luck!" (Christiopher Columbus, to mutinous sailor)
"Why for you bury me in de cold, cold ground?" (Tasmanian Devil, to Bugs)
"O Bwoonhiwda, you'we so wovewy!" (Recitative of Siegfried Fudd)
"Thar's something Ah say thar's something a little bit eeew about a boy who's never played baseball before." (Foghorn Leghorn, on the little genius Eggbert)
"I'm going back there -- on account of I am greedy." (Daffy, about to return to the Giant Fudd's castle)
"Sure, I know. But ain't they all witches inside?" (Bugs, walking off with a buxom bunny, newly transformed from that old lady who tried to eat Hansel and Gretel)
"I'm going to blow it up. It obstructs my view of Venus." (The Martian, on Earth)
Chuck Jones gave us a real world in those cartoons, Martian tar-aliens and all. You're going to have enemies. Cats eat birds. Pride goeth before a fall. So does stupidity. Better not stick your shotgun down a hole. A skunk in love is as bad as a Frenchman. The race is not always to the swift. Perseverance does not always pay off. A fist is sometimes better than reason. If you step off a cliff, you will not fall until you look down. Males and females are males and females. If Leopold Stokowski shows up at your recital, better check his conductor's license.
Too violent, they said about Jones's cartoons; as if children could not tell the difference between a barnyard chicken with a boomerang and a thug down the street, and as if wickedness would just melt away under the warmth of niceness. But a quiet and velvety corruption can kill. In this same Canada, a homosexual kindergarten teacher is suing for the right to use books to promote same-sex "marriage" in his classroom; and the Canadian Supreme Court, combining a lust for power with absolute doltishness, ruled that the school district's decision to forbid the books was unconstitutional -- because some of the opponents expressed themselves in, O horror! religious language. And another homosexual teacher is pushing to require the inclusion of "Queer Studies" in the curricula of every school in British Columbia, including even private and religious schools. Of course such wisdom shows up every day in the United States, too.
So there it is. The little kids can't handle a dumb bald hunter tracking a cartoon bunny. "Sh-h-h! Be ve-wy quiet!" But they have to handle -- you fill in the compound-noun gerund. They can't handle it if the underdog rabbit reverses the cannon against Sam the bad guy, but they can handle all the tawdry little perversions of a tired and silly generation. Guns, heavens no! Unless it's the revolver in Teacher Timmy's pocket. Thus do we reverse the advice of Jesus. We raise our children to be like ourselves. We are as wise as pigeons, and as innocent as snakes.
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