No need to look for alternative universes in a distant galaxy, for one exists across the Pacific in that weird and paranoid place between Canada and Mexico known as the USA. Apart from seeing the rest of the word as full of baby-killers and communists and Islam, it appears that communism has infiltrated the USA as well.
How? Through Sesame Street.
Yes, that blandly liberal show for kiddies is really a ‘vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum’. So says the fair and balanced Ben Shapiro in his new book, Primetime Propaganda, tellingly subtitled, The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV. Apparently, Sesame Street and shows like it have ‘secret, political messages’ that have shaped the social, economic and foreign policy of the United States. News to me, since every time I hear about US foreign policy or watch TV, I come across ever more right-wing crap. Alternative universe is the only viable explanation for such an idiotic argument.
31 May, 2011 at 3:09 am
The idea that children’s entertainment could have a subversive content might be idiotic but not so idiotic as to prevent academics writing about it.
For example
See also http://www.enotes.com/secret-gardens-salem/secret-gardens
Humphrey Carpenter distinguished between two groups of writers of classic children’s literature:
“the destroyers (Carroll, George MacDonald, Louisa May Alcott, and Charles Kingsley), who ridicule adult values, especially faith in institutional religion; and the Arcadians (Potter, Grahame, A. A. Milne, and James M. Barrie), who invent coherent, attractive alternate worlds.”
In the preface to Victorian fairy tales: the revolt of the fairies and elves by Jack David Zipes linked the development of children’s literature with political movements (see page xxv)
“In a period when first Christian socialism and later the Fabian movement had a widespread effect, these writers [Carroll, MacDonald, Wilde, Grahame, Houseman, Nesbit] instilled a utopian spirit into the fairy-tale discourse that endowed the genre with a vigorous and unique quality of social criticism which was developed even further by later writers of faerie works such as AA Milne, JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, and TH White.”
While there is nothing particularly Marxist about Tolkien and CS Lewis, there is a case to made that AA Milne was consciously subversive.
See “Is the rural utopia in A.A.Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories an escapist apologia or subversive satire of the ideology of post-Victorian England and the British Empire?”
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research-specialisms/JeremyLatham.pdf (note the reference to your friend Eagleton)
If you wish to explain the concept of the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry to young people then I can’t think of a better place to start than A, A. Milne’s ‘Bad Sir Brian Botany’ (Now we are six 1927).
http://bestuff.com/stuff/bad-sir-brian-botany-aamilne