The Genius Of The Muppets

The Article: The Muppets and Moi by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian.

The Text: Some of us, for the record, have always played the music. And some of us, also just to clarify, never stopped lighting the lights. That’s because, for us in the cultural elite, we are always ready to meet the Muppets on The Muppet Show tonight.

When it was announced on Tuesday that US TV broadcaster NBC has commissioned a script for a new series of the Muppets, the reaction among critics, commentators and tweeters was, frankly, remarkable. It is rare that a four-decades old franchise can announce a return to TV and prompt such unabashed enthusiasm as well as a total lack of cynicism about quality control. Everyone loves the Muppets – that goes without saying. More surprising is how many people want them back, creating, satirising, karate chopping.

The Muppets are definitely having what Miss Piggy would call, with a proud tilt of her snout and a toss of her blonde mane, “un petit moment”. The Muppets, the latest Muppet movie, opens in America this week and magazines across the nation have enthusiastically taken advantage of this to feature the cloth-covered puppets on their covers, in all their anarchic glory.

That film, though, has been slightly gazumped by the extraordinary documentary, Being Elmo, about the man behind possibly the most famous Muppet not on The Muppet Show but on Sesame Street. This beautiful movie has reminded audiences, if any needed reminding, that the Muppets were always more than just clever satirists but an integral part of American culture and society.

When Eddie Murphy dropped out of hosting the Oscars two weeks ago, a campaign was instantly launched for the Muppets to take his place. “Can Muppets Save the Day?” read the headline on the LA Times. “If the position were chosen by popular vote, the beloved Henson creations would likely come out on top,” the journalist concluded. Sadly, the position is not chosen by popular vote and so the hosting duties went to another comedy throwback, Billy Crystal. But if the Muppets don’t at least get to present an award, Miss Piggy should karate-chop Crystal. Hiii-yah!

Here is where I should, really, put the responsible disclaimer: my love for the Muppets is not without personal loyalties. My mother used to work for the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW, now called Sesame Workshop), the non-profit organisation behind various Jim Henson shows. Incidentally, that is the coolest thing about me. It’s all pith from hereon.

She worked on Sesame Street (The Muppet Show was, in fact, produced in England, as all English fans of the show tell me within one minute of first mentioning the programme – that explains the extraordinarily high number of cockney singalongs). Yet it’s fair to say that I grew up in a household predisposed to watch all things Muppet-based. When I think back on my childhood, one of the first tableaux that comes to mind is me, my sister and our parents watching Sunday night screenings of reruns of The Muppet Show. It’s a vision that seems so inspired by a 50s advert for TV sets that I’d doubt it – if my family didn’t have a habit of making Muppet Show references to one another, if not on a daily basis then certainly on a weekly one, from Miss Piggy chasing her “Kermie” around, to the Mahna Mahna song. That Sunday night ritual, with my sister and me laughing at the slapstick gags, my parents laughing at the satirical ones, was as comforting as being tucked into bed later. It was like being told that everything, in the end, would turn out just fine.

But in all professional and personal honesty, I cannot imagine that if my mother had worked on, say, The Magic Roundabout, I’d have loved The Muppet Show any less.

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The Truth About Pepper Spray

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The Right’s Absurd Fight Against Children’s Entertainment

Picture this: a United States where school cafeteria workers lackadaisically dump “vegetable” paste onto the mystery meat du jour while 9-year-old janitors wipe up the debris in an effort to showcase their budding work ethic and sanitary savvy. A United States where smiling creatures of the puppet and Pixar ilk have long been collecting dust as a consequence of their blatant and shameful promotion of Marxist collectivism, environmental responsibility and intercultural tolerance. A United States where the only remaining puppets are the ones on Capitol Hill.

Sound a bit far fetched? That’s because it is. However, as hyperbole seems to have the growing conservative base in a veritable chokehold as of late, that is precisely where the right wing wants the United States to be headed.

According to more vocal members of today’s GOP, the children’s movie “Cars 2” wrongfully and absurdly pits the oil industry as its villain and “Happy Feet 2” is not a children’s film about pirouetting penguins but rather the United States potentially bailing out Greece amid its financial crisis.

Trading Hollywood for the Hill, in his efforts to repeal “stupid” child labor laws and encourage hard work presidential primary hopeful Newt Gingrich wants to dole out extra mops instead of extra credit. Meanwhile, the GOP-led Congress recently bowed its head once again to food industries in deeming pizza sauce a vegetable while the nation is in the throes of a childhood obesity epidemic.

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The Failure Of Elite Education Institutions

The Article: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers by William Deresiewicz in the American Scholar.

The Text: It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

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Time For A Wintery Mix

Holiday Mix 2011 by Heavy Accents.