Reading PC into children's lit
Well, JU isn't up yet but I have some stuff to say...
It's the start of a fresh new movie week and already controversy.
There's this apparent uproar over "Curious George". And of course it's coming from the animal rights lunatics and other assorted libs. And then there's the complaint that the Man in the Yellow Hat represents imperialism. Link
For the politically correct Bay Area parent, the "Curious George" children's books are a minefield of cultural horrors through which to tiptoe. Imperialism. Animal abuse. Bad parenting.
Puh-leeeeze, George's defenders say. They're children's books, whose charm has not dimmed -- 25 million books and countless swag sold -- even if ideas about political correctness have evolved since the first George adventure was published in 1941. Sometimes a speechless, mischievous monkey is just that -- a monkey, not a metaphor. Besides, George's tales are no more un-PC than those of that royalist warmonger, Babar.
Both camps are wondering how "Curious George," the animated movie that premieres today, will translate details of the popular series of children's books for the more heightened sensitivities of 2006.
The Curious George oeuvre was the work of the husband-and-wife team of H.A. and Margaret Rey, German Jews who escaped France with the first book's manuscript as the Nazis invaded. Most of the seven stories they wrote feature the antics of a monkey whose sweet curiosity gets him in trouble until he's rescued by the nameless Man with the Yellow Hat, George's keeper/parental figure/pal with bail money.
To some, that's the core of an unhealthy relationship.
"The books are really irresponsible to me. It's sickening, really," said Robin Roth, managing editor of www.arkonline.com, an animal welfare Web site.
Start with the Caucasian, gun-carrying Man with the Yellow Hat venturing to Africa (imperialism alert!) to harvest wildlife for a zoo (animal repression alert!). Continue with George being unsupervised and allowed to smoke a pipe and huff ether (bad parenting alert!), and it's a wonder there aren't pickets already forming around movie theaters.
Roth, a high school English teacher in Los Angeles, writes on her animal rights Web site that "Curious George" reveals "the sinister side of a corrupt wildlife trade with perilous roots in Western imperialism." When the mischievous George is sent to jail, "the picture of the forlorn little primate alone in his cell conjures haunting images of countless monkeys lingering in laboratories, suffering silently and alone."
These people need to just get a life and come to terms with what they are doing. Basically throwing a hissy fit over a kid's book.
Pretty soon they are going be saying that Elmo is a Republican just because he's red and acts like a child.