I ran across this lovely site recently. Some guy named Jeremy Silber has written a children’s book called “Why Mommy is a Democrat.” The goal, apparently, is to drill into some 2nd grader’s head that Democrats are the best thing since sliced bread and, indirectly that Republicans are, well, not so hot.
Now I’m a democrat, and a pretty liberal guy (but pro-life). And I’ll debate political issues with passion and fervor, (in real life, that is. I hate online politics) but I hate that this guy is indoctrinating kids. When you try to tell kids what to believe, that’s not okay by me. Kids young enough to read this book have no business even knowing what a political party is.
Anyway, since this is a pit:
FUCK YOU, SILBER!
Also, the guy claims that his cat’s a “lifelong democrat.” I think we all know that cats are libertarians.
It’s dumb but I don’t see it as insidious. I don’t think it’s as disturbing as some of the books that are designed to brainwash children religiously. Parents are always going to try to tramsmit their own ideologies to their children. This is just one more version of that.
I’m gonna guess the book doesn’t even mention Republicans. I could be wrong, of course. This is a dorky idea and I don’t like it, but parents can do worse damage their kids’ brains than the author of this book ever could.
Mommy Squirrel does appear to be protecting her children from a big, scary elephant in the second illustration. I don’t see any way to interpret that other than as a ham-handed attempt to equate the party symbol with the concept of a “threat.”
Besides, on the “about the book” page, it says that it contains “numerous subtle (and not-so-subtle) satirical swipes at the Bush administration and the Republican party.”
I assume you feel the same way about Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor For Kids.
I love that my son sent me a bumpersticker that says “Republicans for Voldemort.” That’s all kids really need to know. Too bad I don’t have a car to put it on.
Speaking as a liberal, I think it’s fine to instill real values and beliefs in kids. Be kind to strangers, seek out truth and tell it too, The Golden Rule, all that stuff. Teaching them which political party is Noble and Good with a children’s book at a very young age? Stupid.
There apparently is a Jeremy Zilber who has some academic credentials and a couple of publications to his credit, the most prominent of which analyze the media’s treatment of minority congressmen, and there’s also a piece available on the web in which Zilber says something nice about the late Paul Wellstone. However, there’s nothing until this new project that screams Democratic partisanship.
The site itself is bizarre, from his page of testimonials from what seems to be a random collection of names to his conviction that his cat is a Democrat. But the really weird stuff is in the sample pages. The Democratic Party is like your Mommy, who makes you share your toys, go to school, and who keeps you from seeing the elephant up close? This is supposed to sell the Party to children? The artwork is even stranger. Are the walking couple, he with the hat and cigar, she carrying a poodle, supposed to be Republicans? Who are the bench-dwellers? Why is there a prominent sign on the school proclaiming it’s 160K admission fee? When did the poodle transform into a bouquet of roses? Why’s the bench-dweller who wears a cap and overcoat on a bright sunny day still hanging around?
I can’t prove it, and I may well be wrong, but I think this is either the most spectacularly ill-conceived effort ever, or it is a spoof. If anybody wants to get all conspiratorial about it (I don’t, especially), this administration has paid higher-profile writers with decent reputations for objectivity good money to promote their agenda. Or, what’s a solid eight minutes of outrage worth to the Fox network, anyway?
It never ceases to amaze me how absurdly authoritarian a country has to be compared to the rest of the industrialised democratic world for its “liberals” to say things like that.
Between this statement and the one you made in Pjen’s thread in GD earlier, you’re really going off aren’t you, fucknut? At least we don’t have the cops watching us on CCTV everywhere we walk down the street and have political speech we don’t like banned as in Europe.
I have to agree; that was a pretty unnecessary swipe, SentientMeat. Considering that in the past few days we (the UK) have decided to ban smoking anywhere in “public places” (which in our enlightened liberal viewpoint also apparently means private clubs), and voted for an ingloriously nebulous offence of “glorifying terrorism”, despite not having a working definition of either word, it can hardly be claimed that either side of the pond has a monopoly on political contradictions. Particularly when you’re making that sort of generalisation based on one person’s caveat on his personal political views. The OP might very well be liberal on all other issues. One would imagine that’s why he used the word, “but”.
Hey, open a thread on CCTV, hate speech or smoking and I’ll be there attacking authoritarianism with the best of them. But I apologise to TSIB for my irrelevant observation. I don’t apologise to Neurotik except, insofar as an individual can apologise for his country, to say sorry for edging towards becoming the 51st state of Dumbfuckistan.
Political indoctrination is creepy as fuck. Sure, it’s perfectly fine to instil your values and beliefs in your child. That’s your job. These books have nothing whatsoever to do with that. All they do, in simplistic language and imagery children can associate with, is demonize the other party. That’s all a child will really get out of these books – it’s not like you can boil concepts like social reform or fiscal responsibility down far enough that a child could understand it, so really all you’re left with is: Democrat good; Liberal dumb. Cookie?
And what good is going to come of that except to raise political affiliates who probably won’t even understand exactly why they vote a particular way? It’s brainwashing the impressionable. Nothing more.
I just had an amusing thought. You know how when kids get to be teens and they’re supposed to rebel against their parent’s standards etc?
Well, I think that the kids who were in scared into thinking that liberals like to eat dust bunnies and grab ankles will go over to that side, and the ones who were suckled on the Democratic party is you Mom gambit will declare Mom to be Joan Crawford and move right.
You don’t need to apologize to me. I just think Europeans like to slag the US as “uncivilized” or “profoundly racist” because it makes them feel better about their own serious deficiencies - especially in the area of race relations and civil rights. Europeans have an idealized view of their own “civilization” and always have. After all, it was their mission to civilize the world and carry the White Man’s Burden for hundreds of years. Their attitudes of moral superiority have never left - even while they were helping Israel build nuclear weapons and currently lobbying to loosen restrictions on weapons sales to brutal dictatorships like China.
Europe and Europeans are just as amoral as the US and just as deluded by illusions of their supremacy in the area of “civilized behavior.”
