dora for president!!

separated at birth?

here's my latest column from saturday. :) read the original here.

Carpe Diem: Dora For President

By Kurt Brighton

If you have yet to experience firsthand the joy of owning your very own child, a test drive will quickly reveal to you the short yet complex list of their wants and needs.

While visiting family for the holidays, I got to take my nephew for a spin one afternoon and I have to say, I don't see what's so hard about this whole parenting thing.

I'm not serious of course. Like puppies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, children are great entertainment—as long as someone else is eventually going to claim them. Keeping one around the house on a permanent basis would surely get messy.

I caught John Alex—who is nearly 3 although he has the lung capacity of a veteran Broadway performer—on a particularly good afternoon. He was enthralled with his brand-new Dora the Explorer DVD, and I was able to sit on the couch and read, just tossing in the occasional over-enthusiastic response to what I surmised he might be saying. I could half-watch him as he squirmed around on the floor watching the TV, playing with his farm animal toy set and occasionally performing a grinning somersault at the sheer joy Dora and Diego bring him.

But as the DVD played on, and then for a second time, and I struggled to shut out the brutally repetitious, often moronic statements Dora would make (um, the bear is on the freakin' TALL MOUNTAIN, Dora. You just SAID so!) I found myself struck by a sad and unfortunate parallel:

The way this show is presented has an awful lot in common with the way we do politics in this country.

Nothing against the makers of the Dora show. I'm sure that clear, unambiguous repetition of simple ideas is exactly what the diffuse, near-feral brains of pre-school-aged kids need in order to begin learning, and more importantly, to begin thinking for themselves in logical steps.

But listening to the simplistic choices the characters asked and then immediately answered (“Is it the green one? Or the red one? It's the green one!”) I began hearing the cadences and stilted nature of politico-speak in their phrasing, and also in the limited palette of answers necessitated by the way the questions are put.

Rudy Guiliani with his 9/11 Tourette's Syndrome: “On 9/11, I personally 9/11'ed, and then freedom flag America 9/11 this great country 9/11.”

Hilary Clinton with the most stiff, awkward delivery style since, well, the last two serious Democratic candidates: “I am leader. I lead. In the Senate, I led. I will lead. Experience. Leader. One who will lead.”

Mike Huckabee's rote bible-thumping: “Jesus, yes. Dinosaurs, no. God—good. Me, like God. Me, God. Like you. Jesus. Worship. Values.”

These people, like Dora and Diego, don't really speak in complete thoughts at all. They repeat words and phrases that are meant to reinforce the words and phrases they've already spoken, planting not-at-all subliminal benchmarks that we are meant to latch onto without benefit of our critical minds. We are supposed to associate them with certain images, and they hope that these images will evoke certain feelings in us.

In a way, we're being trained. Trained to hit the right button, pull the right lever, picture the right image as we cast our vote for a candidate the reality of whom has little to do with those images.

Again, for a 3 year old, that might be fine, and even productive. For adults meant to
critically assess the relative views and potential for leadership that candidates may possess, it's ridiculous. But this is the only “dialogue” available to us as we approach the brutal stretch of primaries that will determine who will become our next leader.
We the public are not without blame, of course. Simple equals good. Us no like think too hard.

But the press and the candidates themselves are culpable in a much more concrete way, as both groups prefer to couch everything in a simple, yet dramatic framework that lends itself to endless speculation without any critical look at the underlying issues that are really important.

Speculation about pantsuits, haircuts and divorces.

At least Dora and Diego eventually get to where they're going. For us, I'm afraid we're already there. Welcome to modern politics, “Access Hollywood” style.