ROWN THE BERENSTAIN BEARS
By Charles Krauthammer
August 18, 1989
Email the author
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.

This is all going to get more extreme. And it should. We are living in extreme times. The harm that is being done to all of us by the people in the American government is extreme. To imagine that Mexican immigrants should happily cook for and serve meals to people who enable a man who is determined to demonize and persecute them as subhuman criminals is far more outrageous than the idea that those enablers should not be served in restaurants. I do not believe that Trump administration officials should be able to live their lives in peace and affluence while they inflict serious harms on large portions of the American population. Not being able to go to restaurants and attend parties and be celebrated is just the minimum baseline here. These people, who are pushing America merrily down the road to fascism and white nationalism, are delusional if they do not think that the backlash is going to get much worse. Wait until the recession comes. Wait until Trump starts a war. Wait until the racism this administration is stoking begins to explode into violence more frequently. Read a fucking history book. Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant. When you aggressively fuck with people’s lives, you should not be surprised when they decide to fuck with yours.

There is the potential of violence coming to the US all right and the left doesn't know what will hit them when it comes.

Can we get back to talking about how retarded most of Deadspin's writing staff is?

https://deadspin.com/weird-fs1-segment-say-what-you-will-about-joseph-stali-1827108965

This is one of the weirder videos you'll see. Such equivocating tone and language for a guy that literally killed like 10 million people and never really gave a shit.

They still think they're going to win. They haven't even considered the fact that they're losing. The fact that Hamilton Nolan, who to be fair has always had this streak, is saying "WELL we are just going to use violence to accomplish our goals" still assumes that there is an eventual conclusion where the left accomplishes their goals. This arrogance makes no sense to me. About a year and three quarters since the election and the left still doesn't get it. They are not the majority, not even the plurality, and if they cant win free, fair and contested elections what gives them the idea that can successfully stage a violent insurrection? Its not the 70's anymore. The state security apparatus is all over these people and will track them down instantly and viciously. Its not even a matter of Left vs. Right at that point, whoever actually resorts to bombings and assassination will be deliberately putting their heads in the guillotine and begging the government to drop the blade.

Somehow the left got themselves worked up into an absolute frenzy over innocuous family separation, it is very likely that it is a passing fad. Much like Charlottesville and the "RISE OF THE NAZIS"--wound up being nothing but had the same fever pitch of screaming as this does now.

Surely there is a middle ground between assassinating reprehensible Trump underlings and treating them with the extreme reverence of a king's court.

Yeah this is some pretty heavy whining by the right. If I saw Sarah Sanders on the street I wouldn’t be polite to her. I’m sure she’ll survive.

Surely there is a middle ground between assassinating reprehensible Trump underlings and treating them with the extreme reverence of a king's court.

It’s based on me thinking she’s a lying piece of shit human being.

Yeah this is some pretty heavy whining by the right. If I saw Sarah Sanders on the street I wouldn’t be polite to her. I’m sure she’ll survive.

If your politeness with someone you don't know is predicated on whether you agree with them politically...wow.

That's the job though. Jay Carney and Ari Fleischer told just as many lies, the volume simply wasn't turned up to ten when they were doing it.

I heard on the radio this morning that Pam Bondi, the attorney general of the state of Florida and her boyfriend were cornered yesterday by 4-5 young thugs who called her a C*NT and dared her boyfriend to do anything about it. They threatened both her and her boyfriend with bodily harm and threatened to rape her. Bondi has a bodyguard who was out getting their car at the time.

Clearly the left is trying its best to provoke someone to respond to their threats in a violent way. Sooner or later this is going to happen and someone is going to get hurt or even killed. Some guy with a Trump shirt or hat on is going to get hurt or killed and the left won't admit that their evil is behind it or say that the guy deserved it. This happened after Trump got elected and it is getting worse than that, now.