Just last month, we learned that Santa Claus is a bad influence on kids because he smokes a pipe. In fact, the classic poem, ’Twas the Night Before Christmas, was revised to eliminate the pipe so that kids wouldn’t see a picture of Santa smoking.
Here’s the only moral I took away from that story — do not ask: “What will they think of next?” Because whatever it is, they will think of it.
And yes, “they” have now thought of it. Recently, it came out that superheroes are also a bad influence.
Sigh.
A University of Nebraska-Lincoln sociology professor named Lisa Kort-Butler has just published a study saying that superheroes give kids the wrong message about law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
After looking at 47 episodes of the animated Batman and Spider-Man shows from the 1990s and Justice League of America/Justice League Unlimited, Kort-Butler decided that superheroes teach that the police are corrupt or inept, that rehabilitation runs a distant second to punishment on the priority list and that it’s OK to be a vigilante if you’re a superhero with “moral authority.”
I always thought the only thing kids learned from superheroes is that it’s OK to go out in public wearing your underwear on top of your clothes. I guess that’s because I’m not a sociologist.
One of the wrong messages Kort-Butler cited came from Spider-Man, who complained on one show about his foe, Dr. Octopus: “I don’t understand why they can’t keep a creep like him in jail.”
What’s wrong with that? People say that all the time when someone who’s committed a slew of heinous crimes is once again released on parole.
Kort-Butler, who lives near a prison, tells her own kids that the inmates made “bad mistakes,” but that they’re not “supervillains” of the Lex Luthor type.
This makes me regret that I didn’t go into sociology.
Holy sociologists’ agenda, Batman! Kids don’t watch cartoons to draw conclusions about the criminal justice system. They couldn’t care less about analyzing the criminal justice system. They watch cartoons because they’re children, it’s a fun thing to do and their imaginations get stimulated.
All this to-do about analyzing to death the influence that the ordinary things of everyday life have on children — from a picture of Santa smoking a pipe to the Caped Crusader meting out justice in Gotham City — comes at a cost: the devaluing of imagination.
Consider this passage by Wendy McClure, a children’s book editor in Chicago, about her childhood fascination with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books: “And, oh my God: I wanted to live in one room with my whole family and have a pathetic corncob doll all my own. I wanted to wear a calico sunbonnet — or rather, I wanted to not wear a calico sunbonnet, the way Laura did, letting it hang down her back by its ties. I wanted to do chores because of those books.
“Carry water, churn butter, make headcheese. I wanted dead rabbits brought home for supper.”
Now that is the kind of intense imaginary experience all children have a right to enjoy, and it is one that is being so insidiously eroded by the creeping sterilization of children’s inner lives. This, that or the other thing must be withheld from children or edited or revised for 21st-century political correctness or sanitized to avoid them seeing, hearing or thinking about — well, fill in the blank because there is so much these days that is getting sterilized.
Let’s stop paying any heed to the sanitizers and the revisionists with their eternal fretting over what messages kids are getting. The only message is that freedom of imagination should never be sanitized out of existence.
