Modern America Explained By Select Children’s Books (Or, Me Ruining Your Childhood)
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
It’s probably going to feel a sense of entitlement.
It must be a #millennial.
With its entitlement and designer vegan Brazil nut milk,
It’s going to want you to photograph it
Because it’s a clean eating Instagram influencer.
It’ll be so grateful that you captured its good angles
It’s going to clean the negative energy out of your home
By smudging with some v witchy Palo Santo.
Once the mouse has paid its karmic debt
It’s probably going to want a job because
It’s a #millennial and it has some actual debt too.
When it gets its first paycheck from doing social media
For your friend Susan’s cat grooming business
It’s likely going to feel existential angst
About working for a company that undermines and endangers its very existence
And doesn’t even pay well enough for it to go to Coachella.
Looking at its bank account will make the mouse want a drink.
And chances are, if it’s drinking,
It’s already breaking its first day of Whole 30
And it’s going to want another damn cookie.
Goodnight Moon:
Goodnight generic floral paintings from Cost-Plus World Market
Goodnight third succulent I’ve killed
Goodnight kittens locked in my room without a litter box
Goodnight mittens, and other dumpster piles of clothes on my floor that I’ll put away when I’m in a more stable emotional state
Goodnight mush on my side table that I will probably eat in the middle of the night because who leaves perfectly good mush to sit out and rot
Goodnight creepy old bunny woman in a rocking chair saying hush — that bitch better not eat my mush. Oh wait she’s just a figment of my consciousness reminding me of the incomprehensibly relative nature of time and why, if I fall asleep, I’ll probably never wake up again OMG I’m not going to sleep
Wait never mind, it’s cool, I’ve got this.
Goodnight stars! Goodnight air —
How Zen is that that I recognized the air when it’s totally intangible
Really manifesting gratitude here, amiright?
Goodnight cows jumping over the moon and all the other soporific fables that never made it any easier for me to let go of today
Goodnight to my fear of doing this all again tomorrow
Goodnight to my wish that naming every single thing might actually make me more present and relaxed
Goodnight to my need for closure and whimsy
Goodnight to my mysterious friend and guide who pours light into the darkness each night,
Goodnight moon.
Are You My Mother?
A negligent parent with good intentions abandons her baby before it’s even born. Baby Bird hatches and knows enough to intuit that its missing parent should’ve probably been present for its own birth. It doesn’t know enough to have depth perception, though. Believing that it can find its mother if it just searches hard enough for her, the baby bird jettisons from the nest and hits reality below with a thud.
With a vacuum of nourishing love in its heart, Baby Bird goes looking for mom in all the wrong places. “Are you my mother?” it asks a cat, who is naturally too much of a dick to even dignify the question with a response. “Are you my mother?” birdie asks a hen; close, but no maternal cigar. A menagerie of would-be moms is propositioned, but the preternatural comfort of a mother’s warm embrace is still nowhere to be found.
Finding no love in the life that Baby Bird encounters, it turns to technology — either for direction, or to fill the gaping hole where unconditional love was supposed to root and flower. The boat, the car and the plane are indeed not the bird’s mother. If it had asked Siri today, the story may have ended quite differently. Lo and behold, a construction crane — perhaps the same one destroying the bird’s habitat with such voracity that Mother Bird couldn’t even find enough twigs to childproof her nest — “Are you my mother?” Baby Bird asks, and the crane conveniently hand-delivers it back into its nest, just in time for Mother Bird to come home with some juicy worms and a blissful obliviousness to the trauma inflicted on her newborn.
Years later, when Baby Bird is going through some very expensive therapy after a lifetime of looking for love in some strangely mechanical and unfulfilling places, it learns that Mother Bird experienced the same thing when she was a baby. She was just doing the best she could. And as now adult Baby Bird mindlessly scrolls through its phone while perched next to a thrumming construction zone, it wonders if it will ever truly be able to break that cycle.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Top 3 lessons learned from “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”:
1) It’s acceptable to have a cupcake even after you had a slice of cherry pie
2) Hungry Caterpillar spent the day in an apple it was eating, therefore I see no reason why I shouldn’t bathe in a hot tub full of cheese fondue
3) Sure, Caterpillar allegedly felt better after eating a salad, but it’s probably because of the ubiquitous “Gwyneth Paltrows laughing while eating salads” propaganda, combined with systemic fat-shaming. Realistically, the thicc n luscious butterfly that caterpillar turned into is attributable to carbs.
Green Eggs and Ham
Sam I Am is the quintessential white male narcissist. “SAM I AM!” he announces to impassive strangers as though Christ hath risen again.
“Sam I am!” he harasses anyone who will listen
And anyone who won’t.
With all the panache of a used car salesman, cross-bred with the president of a frat and a dose of Shakeology-esque pyramid scheme,
Sam I Am DOES NOT understand the concept of consent
And he has specifically internalized that “no” means “yes”
Until you get the “yes” you wanted.
“Try my funky meat!” Sam I Am antagonizes a stranger. Target acquired.
“I don’t want that shit, Sam I Am” replies stranger.
“Yes, but have you thought about my funky meat
In this long list of weird places? BTW it’s green”
Sam I Am starts listing weird places and stranger isn’t sure what to do but is annoyed and kind of scared.
This continues for some time until Sam I Am wears down the stranger’s will
Ultimately quashing it by manipulating their fear of not being open-minded enough,
Since Sam I Am launched into a tirade about veganism and claimed
His funky meat was actually made of Soylent.
Sam I Am was recently confirmed as a Supreme Court justice.
Amelia Bedelia
Amelia Bedelia is *litrally* the anarchist queen of my dreams. Rich family hired Amelia Bedelia to do their dirty work, not realizing they actually hired a Marxist genius who answers every question like she’s being interviewed for a programming role at Google.
“Draw a bath” Madame ordered, and Amelia is like, “Gorgeous, I was actually hoping to spend some time on art projects today!” and paints a stunning still life of a bath tub. Fuck the patriarchy!
“Dust the furniture.” Okay well you know Amelia Bedelia is not here for this boujie $7,000 armchair, so my girl collects a tub of dust from out in the elements and pours it blithely onto the sofa.
“Dress the chicken” and I’ll admit, I was concerned when Amelia Bedelia pondered whether the chicken was a “he or a she,” but ultimately I think she recognized gender is just a construct and put the chicken in whatever best exemplified its clearly androgynous, chicken-soupy soul.
The bourgeoisie get home and are obviously pissed. That is, until they taste a bite of the lemon meringue pie Amelia Bedelia baked, because the best way to get someone to STFU and forgive you is through baked goods. Amelia Bedelia for president!
Berenstain Bears
It’s hard for me to talk about the Berenstain Bears because I still believe it’s a conspiracy that it’s spelled B-E-R-E-N-S-T-A-I-N instead of S-T-E-I-N. I thought they were fellow Jews, although reflecting in adulthood on how exceptionally fucked up they are, I’m actually relieved that they’re not. They’re definitely American though! The Berenstain Bears are like America’s original dysfunctional family. They’re like Rosanne as a children’s book.
Mama Bear does all the work but always seems like a tight-ass, Papa Bear sits on his ass until he gets swept up in moment of bravado in which he’s always clearly wrong but somehow never learns his lesson, and the children are spoiled demons.
There are literally hundreds of books in which basically every ailment that could possibly befall a person happens to the bears — except for maybe STDs but even then I wouldn’t be surprised. In one book, Papa Bear is doing jack shit and the demons won’t clean up their toys. The floor is no longer visible, and in the pig bear children’s defense, they apparently don’t have a receptacle in which to place their toys. Mama Bear is sick and tired of nagging the kids and busting her ass while Papa Bear probably knocks back Bud Lights (not featured in the books), so she goes insane and just starts manically throwing away all the children’s toys. Papa Bear eventually “comes to the rescue” and makes himself useful by building the ingrates a toy chest.
In the end of most Berenstain Bears stories, we learn generally to tolerate the assholes we’re related to, lower our expectations of ourselves and everyone around us, accept archaic gender roles, and embrace neoliberalism because in the end we’re all just greedy bears in ironic Merino wool flannels. America.
Strega Nona
Strega Nona: The divine feminine
Pasta flowing like milk and honey
A goddess creates
Something from nothing
Nourishing the people
With a delicious maternal warmth
Big Anthony has a small world
Hungry boy wants it NOW!
Safeguards are for sissies
He might strangle the world
With his inexorable limp pale noodle
But at least he’d have conquered.
Strega Nona saves the day, and puts Big Anthony in his place.
The Rainbow Fish
Brilliant Rainbow Fish sage shows us what a dazzling place the world is when we take care of each other.
Rainbow Fish: “Socialism is the only way”
Capitalism: “Quick, burn this book lest the children begin questioning the nature of this dystopian survival game show of a society! Or read them ‘Sam I Am’ to quell their ambitions of rebellion.”
