Sad, Sad World -

Sad, Sad World - As much as I biff on Steve Perry, he's at least worth mixing it up with. The guy is rational. I think he's wrong about a lot of things, but he's rational.

But I worry about the City Pages' Brad Zellar.

I'm not sure what to chalk this piece from his blog up to (you'll have to scroll down - his archive links don't work); solipsism, the eternal self-absorption of the eternally single. The word that jumps to mind: embarassing.

At least he starts with the key admission:

I don't have any kids myself,

It goes downhill from here.

but that's precisely because I know how dangerous they are.

"I'm not a neurosurgeon, but that's precisely why I know everything about operating on the brain..."

Dangerous and erratic. Dangerous and erratic and cold blooded. Every dark impulse known to man can be found in the heart of the average five-year-old.

No more so than in the heart fo the average solipsistic thirtysomething alternative writer. Five year olds have fewer inhibitions and even less artfulness about expressing the dark - or the light sides, for that matter - of their personalities.

Children are instinctively militaristic, and people spend years trying to civilize it out of the little bastards, but it's hopeless.

"Little bastards". Charming.

Children are inherently fascinated with the dark side of everything; it's how they learn to deal with the dark sides that seem, more and more, to surround them as they become more aware. To try to make this into some sort of all-encompassing social commentary is absurd.

Kids have a sophisticated understanding of vengeance and the consequences of messing with the man. They know what happens when they don't do what daddy tells them to do, or they for damn sure should. That conflict of fearing the man and wanting to be the man is at the heart of the military instinct.

This is claptrap.

Kids are taught the "consequences of messing with the man", usually inheriting from parents who learned them in turn from their own parents.

Look around and see if I'm not right on this point: the adults who most enthusiastically embrace war as a spectator sport are those who are most in touch with their inner child.

Read: Mr. Zellar has a friend that reflects this notion. Mr. Zellar is extrapolating. serving up the extrapolation with a healthy dollop of his own preconceptions of the world - and of the children he's never had to raise..

But enough dicking around. I'll get right to my point: as always, honesty is the best policy with your kids. And if this war isn't a coachable moment for the entire family, I don't know what is. Your children need to understand that there are no longer any non-combatants in this world, and the sooner they learn the rules of engagement the better off we'll all be.

Spoken like a person who's never had to care for a person outside of his own turtleneck in his life.

Because America's youngsters are born gun crazy and trigger happy, but they have the battle ethics of the Fedayeen. Hand a kid a gun and I guarantee you they'll know what to do with it. Guns are to humans as litter boxes are to cats --all right, that's a terrible analogy, but what I'm trying to say is that weapons are part of our wiring. Put a pistol in a kid's hand and see how long it takes for them to point it at their mother's forehead and pull the trigger.

It's called "curiosity", and "testing boundaries", and modelling behavior. It's quite normal - a Masai kid will do the same with a pretend bow and arrow.

Show me a kid who doesn't like to blow stuff up and slay God's creatures and I'll show you a panty-waist with a long, tortured life ahead of them.

Show me a writer who makes such gross and (let's call a spade a spade), bitter generalizations about children, things he has no clue about, and I'll show you someone with a hidden axe to grind.

So, look, parents: relax. Let your kids watch this war to their heart's content. Trust me: they'll get a big kick out of it. There is, of course, always the chance that some particularly fragile children will be freaked out by what they see, and perhaps even permanently affected. I can assure you, however, that in such instances the problem is with the child and not with the war. Neurosis is inescapable in this day and age, and like pretty much everything short of sexual gratification it should be first acquired in the home. So: don't sweat it. War or no war, you're gonna have some stiff therapy bills down the road. That's your problem.

I'm pondering two possible responses here:

• Facing a world peopled with the likes of Brad Zellar would tend to assure that.
• "Daddy? Is this what they call 'tranference?"

We continue:

As your kids watch the televised war, of course, they'll likely have questions about what they're seeing, and you must be willing to answer these queries truthfully. There's not a damn thing in the world wrong with telling your kids that we're killing a bunch of belligerent foreigners and that America's going to be a much better place without them. Believe me, your children will understand.

Or, better yet, tell them the real truth.

They'll understand even better than you do. Kids get this stuff, they really do. "The bigger the gun, the bigger the fun" is one of life's earliest and most useful lessons.

While it no doubt made a great-sounding theory down at (I'll guess) the First Avenue one night, it has no bearing on how real children react. But what would I know - I'm just one of those benighted slob that's raised/is raising three of them

Your kids are also sure to encounter protesters, but, again, simply tell them the truth about these odious characters: these people are hippies and vegetarians who've never done a damn thing but run America down, and you can boil all their babble down to one word: hogwash.

I'm saving that lesson for their first encounter with Brad Zellar's writing.

Brad! Time to up the Zoloft. And since you would seem to live in Uptown or Dinkytown or Loring or some other child-free haven, you might think of meeting some actual children, rather than dreaming up kids who resemble manifestations of Eric Budd or Edvard Munch paintings.

Y'know. Most of them.

Posted by Mitch at April 3, 2003 10:18 PM