https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1989/08/18/drown-the-berenstain-bears/a3a07642-8095-40df-8512-502ed1090361/?utm_term=.ec95cf6e67f6
Quote:
ROWN THE BERENSTAIN BEARS
By Charles Krauthammer
August 18, 1989
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I hate the Berenstain Bears. If you don't know what I am talking about, consider yourself lucky. If you do, you too have suffered through volume upon volume of the life of the insufferable Bear family (generically labeled Father, Mother, Brother and Sister), the eponymic creations of Jan and Stan Berenstain. I know I speak for thousands, perhaps millions of other parents who share my hostility to these lumbering cuddlies but who cannot say no to a child who begs for just one more dose. The Berenstains make the begging easy: the back cover of some volumes are thoughtfully filled with full-color covers of the others plus the cheerful admonition, ''Collect them all!'' It is not just the smugness and complacency of the stories that is so irritating. That is a common affliction of children's literature. The raging offense of the Berenstains is the post-feminist Papa Bear, the Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman. Consider, the well-known ''Berenstain Bears Forget Their Manners,'' wherein Mother, fed up with rudeness, sets down a new set of family rules of conduct. Each commandment is accompanied by a penalty (''wash dishes, empty garbage, beat two rugs'') for those family members who dare transgress. Papa glumly acquiesces to the new maternally mandated regime. But he proves incorrigible. Long after even the kids have reformed, he continues his slovenly, craven ways, spending much of this tome mopping up around the house to pay off his doltishness. Mother Bear too is a creation. Every adult will recognize her as the final flowering of the grade-school prissy, the one with perfect posture and impeccable handwriting. The one the teachers loved. The one who disdained your baloney sandwich and pulled fruit salad out of her lunch box, minding her cholesterol in 1958. The one you always dreamt of drowning. Well, she grew up to marry Father Bear Berenstain of Bear County. And now you have to visit her every night. The reason is, of course, that kids love them. My boy, 4, cannot get enough of these bears. Every night at bedtime I offer him a list of stories that I might read him. I bid: ''What will it be tonight, Daniel? Aesop's Fables, Ulysses and the Trojan Horse or the adventures of Ferdinand Magellan?'' ''How about 'The Berenstain Bears and the Sitter?' '' he replies. Bears it is. The bedtime reading ritual has made me something of a connoisseur of children's books. First, there are the books that are mere subsidiaries of larger conglomerates. Sesame Street, Charlie Brown, the Berenstains and the even more infernal Care Bears fit this category of book, which is, in truth, just part of a much larger universe of movies, videos, audio cassettes and little cuddly things that you are encouraged to buy. These books are to be burned early. Should even one survive, you are hooked, a corporate dependent for life. These conglomerates, by the way, put in question my most basic political principles, since I cannot deny that socialism, whatever its faults, does not permit such things. Then, there are the award winners. Do not come near these books. The pictures are illegible, the stories unintelligible. These books are exactly what you would expect a committee of artsy adults would think is good for children. These books are easily spotted by their minimalist art and their baroque story lines, pint-size versions of the nomadic anti-plot you find in a New Yorker short story. Kids take to this stuff as to spinach. Best, in this as in everything, are the classics, fairy tales of the Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk variety. Bruno Bettelheim, among others, has quite eloquently elucidated how these parables -- by not flinching from the great existential terrors of life: death, betrayal, abandonment -- enrich the moral imagination of kids in a way that their insipid modern variants never do. I have a confession to make, however. Much as I love the stories and much as I think Bettelheim right, I have trouble reading them to minors. Too gory. In some, it seems, every other character is either eating or being eaten, a cannibal's feast. I know, I know: by loosing elemental fears that every child shares (among which being eaten ranks high), and by finally permitting fear to be conquered by good, these stories give a child the experience of triumph and transcendence. Fine. But I still find it hard to report an eaten grandmother to a 4-year-old. Call me squeamish. So I do what any normal parent would do. I edit. It is, of course, of no use. Invariably, Daniel has already heard the story once before. So when I attempt to turn ''chopped off his head'' into ''knocked on his head,'' I am met with a loud ''You made a mistake, daddy.'' He may be illiterate, but he don't forget. ''Of course,'' I reply. ''How silly of me. 'Chopped off his head.' '' And the feast begins.
Truly one of the great thinkers of our time. When not crusading against cartoon bears, he sold the public the war in Iraq. The world is better because he's dead.
You might as well throw on the pussy hat. You're completely compromised.
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