DemocratDad

Thomas the Tank Engine, Anti-Semitism, and the Sex Pistols

A friend told me a few months ago that she won't let her son read Thomas the Tank Engine stories -- or watch the TV series -- because of the anti-semitism contained within them.

That caught my attention.

I had been watching Thomas and Friends on TV for over a year (maybe once every two weeks or so) with George first, and now Cole too. I had found the episodes mildly entertaining. They mostly functioned as an opportunity for me to get up and do the dishes while the boys stayed on the couch.

Sure, I had noticed that irritating catch-phrase, "You are a really useful engine!"

And come to think of it, certain values -- industriousness, respect for authority, devotion to duty -- seemed to underlie the stories.

And, well, now that you mention it, Sir Topham Hatt, the bald, black-top-hat-wearing Chairman of the Railway, has a kind of obsessive, ruddy-faced concern for the status quo...

But what of it?

For a few months I scoffed at the idea that the series is "anti-semitic." My friend's comment seemed in line with the regrettable tendency for political pundits, when cornered, to compare their adversaries to Hitler. But her comment continued to nag at me.

So I started thinking about the show in its particulars.

Written by an Anglican minister, the Reverand W. V. Awdry, beginning in 1943, for his son Christopher, these stories have a modest, typically English concern for the trivial concerns of everyday life. (Orwell wrote marvelously about how the English character, molded by the familiar details of small town life, resists the dangerous lure of abstraction, in his essay, England Your England.)

But everyday life in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine comes with a difference. It is hyperclean, without regrets, unreal. Watching the episodes of the TV series "Thomas and Friends" you will notice immediately a kind of utopian dream in the clouds and greenery that introduce the Island of Sodor. We enter an idealized place, where everything can and will be resolved within the span of a single episode.

Bridges may need repairing, helicopters may threaten the trains' self-image, Cranky the Crane may dump a crate of fish on a newly-washed train (usually James). But everything is manageable. It's all good for a laugh.

There's certainly something clean-as-a-whistle and safely conformist about this island and its inhabitants.

Then too: the lines of authority on Sodor are unmistakable. Sir Topham Hatt's word is supreme. The trains are encouraged to run on time, avoid risks, help others, and most of all, obey.

Vanity proves wasteful. Paranoia proves unfounded (rest assured, that red hot-air balloon will not take business from the trains after all; it will merely provide another attraction on the island!).

Kafka would have a lot to say here. The Kafka of Sodor would grapple with all those sticky, ugly little concerns which are otherwise pushed under the oncoming trains. But Sodor has no Kafka. It has no subversive current running through it at all.

You start to realize that if only these primary-colored engines (Thomas, Percy, James... the whole gang) could just repress any vestige of unique personality, they would show themselves to be, at last, once and for all, "really useful engines."

On the surface all of this is harmless. And I don't worry about any damage I may have inflicted on George and Cole's psyches.

But it got me thinking: "Wouldn't it be great if just once a rainbow-colored, feather-bedecked engine came whistling down the track?" "Wouldn't it be great if this engine didn't have to justify itself by proving its usefulness?"

Which brings me back to the anti-semitic charge my friend made.

No, I'm not saying that Jewish people have a proclivity towards rainbows and feathers (though a visit to the open-air stalls on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on any given Saturday may suggest this surprising connection). But let's revist the arguments in 1930s Germany directed against the Jewish population of Europe.

Anti-semitism has always used the language of "usefulness." Relegated to minority status, and in most cases restricted from owning property, Jews throughout Europe developed roles outside of the traditional agrarian ones. They charged interest (gasp!) for money-lending, and their religion's reliance on the word of the Talmud led many Jews to find work in journalism, academic pursuits, literature and the arts.

Degenerative Art. "The Non-productive few." Pseudo-scientific concerns about hygiene (in the amazing documentary on the Holocaust, Shoah, the Nazis who are interviewed reveal their disgust for the dirt and disease of those in the ghettos -- which they mistake for a cause, instead of an effect, of their actions). It would all seem perfectly natural in the world of Sir Topham Hatt.

I don't mean to say that Sir Topham Hatt is a closet Nazi. I don't mean even to say that the Thomas the Tank Engine series is overtly anti-semitic. Or that W. V. Awdry was a Nazi sympathizer while writing children's stories for his son during the aerial bombardment of his country by the Nazis.

But the parallels are there. The conformist outlook in the series does match that of regimes (throughout history) which favor social control and work to restrict, or even criminalize, individualism.

What kind of values do I want my children to internalize? I would prefer individualism, thank you.

In the end, we kept our Thomas books around. I still read them to the boys some nights. But my dishwashing innocence is gone. I am now more aware of the need to balance out the conventional values of the Thomas books with the downright weirdness of my bedtime stories.

Less trains meeting their schedules.

More pirate ships which sprout orange trees from the mast...
only to be eaten in one gulp by a giant squid...
which then spits the orange seeds out, along with the rum-drunk pirates...
until they land, in a heap, orange seeds, eye-patches and all, on the shore... making an orange-flavored pirate rum cake.
Something like that anyway.

Let weirdness prevail in all of your bedtime stories.

For a taste of Thomas the Tank Engine (fittingly, an episode called "Escape"), see below.

For a taste of the subversive current running through England ("God Save the Queen / the Fascist Regime / That made you a Moron / Potential H-Bomb..." etc.), see here.

Obama's Example for Parents: It's Better to Hedge than to Lie

Telling the truth can be problematic. We all know that.

I propose that we take a personal example and a political example in turn, and see what they show us about the importance of having respect for the truth -- in life and in politics.

First the personal example:

My two-year-old, Cole, looks up at me, his face smeared with chocolate. His eyes fierce.

"'Nother cookie!"

I know what he wants. He wants another chocolate chip cookie, and dammit he shouldn't have had even the first one, because it is bedtime. And he's tired.

And now he is shouting for "'nother one," jumping up and down, pointing to the cupboard where he knows that, earlier in the day, we hid the tupperware containing the cookies meant for tomorrow's party.

Have you been there? Is this familiar? If so, then you may know what happens next.

I blurt out: "Cookies all gone!" It just comes out before I can check myself: "All gone!"

Cole glares at me silently for a moment. Then even louder than before: "'Nother cookie!"

"Cookies all gone!" I insist.

I meet his gaze, my eyes widening in that give-away, "Who me?" expression I always get when I'm bluffing. His eyes narrow into a suspicious squint.

And he gives up. He sinks to the floor, muttering about cookies. I scoop him up and head upstairs for pajamas, storytime, and bed.

But it sits wrong with me later. I lied to my child. I lied to Cole. He knew it. And he knew I knew it. It can never be made good, not ever... something is broken, lost.... (okay, I'm tired -- I get dramatic when I'm tired). I go to bed.

But in the cold light of day, I think it over. Outright lying is always wrong -- even trivial lies like that one.

It would be better, if I can handle it emotionally, to suffer the outburst, the tantrum, whatever the consequences. Pick him up and take him away from the kitchen. Do what I need to do. But don't lie.

Why do I say this? Because I believe that the most important thing that I can do as a parent, other than love my children, is to establish unquestioned honesty in my communication with them. Without this, I would quickly lose a sense of how to adjust to my children's changing needs. They would stop telling me what's on their minds, and our communication would be broken.

If I allowed the little lies, the little distortions, to build up into a kind of static in our communication, my children would gradually develop a more cavalier attitude towards my word. They would begin to assume that behind what I said is really only my authority and, worse, my concern for expediency.

Even if lying about the cookies worked in the short-term with Cole, it was the wrong way to go. I should have picked him up, kicking and screaming, and carried him upstairs.

*

So now I want to turn to a political example to show how we can get by without lies. It's hard to do, and we may as well turn to someone who has the motivation to lie all day long but the good heart that keeps him from doing it.

Barack Obama has many problems which trigger this same truth/expediency dilemma. Here's one of them:

Obama personally opposes discrimination of all kinds against gays and lesbians. Yet many people in the country have a prejudice against homosexuals, and they feel threatened at the prospect of gay marriage...

Obama knows that if he speaks out for full legal rights for gays and lesbians, which of course would include access to the institution of marriage with not only its privileges but also its symbolic value, he would instantly lose many potential voters. This is true in the Democratic primaries, but even more so in the general election.

So what does Obama do? He hedges.

How do I know this? I saw him do it.

On February 19 this year I went to hear Obama speak at a fundraising event in San Francisco. There were about 80 to 100 people there. He was asked about gay marriage (or "marriage equality" as I recall the questioner phrased it).

In that small setting, without ever saying so outright, Obama made it very clear that his decision not to support gay marriage was based on political expediency. In an attempt to get us to understand his predicament, he drew an analogy.

He mentioned that under the miscegenation laws which existed in the 1960s (before Loving v. Virginia in '67) his own mother and father could not have married in many states. And so he understood personally the importance of "marriage equality".

But then he drew the audience's attention to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. in the early 1960s -- those same years leading up to Loving v. Virginia -- on issues such as voting rights, employment discrimination and education. He told us that he had asked himself many times, if he had been in King's position in 1963, would he have "leaned" on the issue of miscegenation -- or would he have postponed it?

His answer of course was that he would have put it off -- even if it meant that his own parents' marriage would have remained illegal in many states.

This pragmatic argument -- coupled with a rueful mention of the mixing of the term "marriage" with religious traditions in many people's minds -- was the best he could offer. In effect he was saying, I can't do this now -- I can't even say anything more... We have to wait.

Strangely, his tone was so personal and thoughtful that, from what I saw, he won the crowd to his side -- at least in the moment.

It helped that he finished his answer with a direct look at the questioner and then a scan of the audience as a whole, saying very clearly, "I will continue to listen to my gay and lesbian friends on this." It almost felt as if he was winking at us in some solemn way (I can't say it, but I am with you!).

What impressed me about Obama's answer at the time was that he did not lie to us. Admittedly, he did not say outright what he hinted: that he personally opposed discrimination of all kinds, including marriage. But he didn't say that he was opposed to gay marriage either. He did a dance in which he managed to avoid lying while avoiding the truth.

As I said, he hedged.

*

This, I think, is the way to go as a parent (when you can't just tell the truth -- which remains the first and best option). It feels dodgy of course. When your kid looks you in the eye and demands "'nother cookie!" it is hard to worry about finessing the point. But finesse is exactly what you need.

If you say, "We're not going to have any more cookies!" in the melancholic tone of "All gone cookies!" for example, you have avoided lying.

You child may get confused. But he doesn't glare at you, knowing that you intentionally used words to express something untrue.

There is a difference, and the difference is a matter of respect.

That's why I am determined to avoid outright lying to my children on any point, however small.

I know that in the teenage years it's going to get a lot more difficult to trick my children with tone. The art of hedging will have to become increasingly advanced.

Perhaps I'll just have to face more temper tantrums...

But come to think of it, with a relationship based on telling the truth, perhaps, even when the truth hurts we will still be able to look each other in the eyes and resolve to disagree. We will have learned to have that kind of mutual respect.

(I'll have to get back to you on that one in about 10 years -- I can hear those of you with teenage children saying softly, "Good luck.")

Down in LA

I spent the weekend and the early part of this week in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I was down in LA attending a filmmaker's convention on Saturday and Sunday. And then I met my family (who drove down in the our minivan, which George calls the "supermobile" because it is red) in Santa Barbara on Monday.

So I apologize fo the lack of entries on Tuesday or Wednesday. But we're back! Please write comments to any or all posts. I would love to begin to generate a conversation with other parents as well as those interested in the politcs.

Best to everybody,
Tom

Parents' Love for Their Children and Elastic Time

Love makes time elastic.

We may know it from the experience of love we have with for our parents, our siblings, our friends, and sometimes, if we're lucky, in our romantic relationships.

When we think back, there may have been a moment... an hour? a night? a week?... which seemed to stretch to infinity, as if we had slipped somehow between two strokes of the second hand and lived there, forever, in that heavenly suspended state.

We all know such times.

But when we have children, this elastic nature of time takes over. The clock melts.

And though for a year or two after we have our first child we may think it will pull itself together, click back, resume its old hard clock-like form, it never does.

Parents have to adjust to living in elastic time, all the time.

For a couple of years after becoming a parent, when people who don't have kids asked me what it's like, I used to play this change down, out of concern for their feelings.

But then I realized that I need to share my experience as truthfully as I can. So now here's what I say to my single friends when they ask me what it's like, this whole being-a-parent thing:

ME: "Do you know how you feel when you've just had a truly great date with someone? When a fantasy of True Love has you in its grip, and your brain has released the appropriate neurotransmitters and hormones to support this feeling, and you can hardly sleep for thinking about that person?

FRIEND: "Uh... yeah. Yeah, sure. I know that feeling."

ME: "And then it's the next day, and the doorbell rings, and you walk down the hall to open the door, the blood rushing in your ears, your heart beating faster, and you open the door, and a crisp triangle of sunshine hits your feet, and cool air sweeps into the room, and you look up to see that person's face, and you realize that he or she really does exist in all his or her particularity? And you feel like you're in heaven."

FRIEND: "Yeah...?"

ME: "Well that's about how you feel when you have children. Only constantly."

I mean, yes, we get irritated. And yes we read the newspaper instead of building another "really weird" vehicle with that Tinker-Toy set, despite their protests. And yes you have to tell them that you won't go back in the house one more time to get the yellow rainboots when they are already wearing the red ladybug ones which will do perfectly fine.

But underneath it all, there is that constant rush of love which melts time.

Virginia Woolf describes this strange effect of love on time well in her novel Orlando:

"But Time... though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation..."

She goes on to say that when her protagonist, Orlando, thinks of love, "his whole past, which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe."

For those parents reading this, isn't this an accurate description of the feeling that comes over you when you think of your child?

It's a disorienting experience. Its infinite nature dwarfs the minutia of everyday. And yet we still have to deal with the minutia. There are still calls to answer, deadlines to meet, sippy cups leaking milk on the stairs, broken hot water heaters in the basement which need repairing.

So how do we reconcile the person we are now, our experiences flooded with the elasticity of time, with the person that we used to be?

I say we don't. Maybe we need to get used to the elasticity. Quantum physics suggests that "time" may only be our perception of one linear path through something that already is. Schrodinger's Cat is neither alive or dead until we open the bag to see.

So in one sense the entire universe may be contained in one split second. We may be on to something, and the love we have for our children allows us to sense it, even with the feeble perceptive capability of an earth-bound mammaliam biped.

I say, let's stop thinking about this perception of the elasticity of time as surreal. When we see Dali's melting clocks we should say, "Ah, they have returned to their natural state at last!" And give our kids more hugs because we know secretly that it won't last forever.