Liberals under the bed

Shakespeare's Sister has come across a piece of Right Wing propaganda masquerading as a children's book.  It's called Help!  Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed! and it tells the terrifying tale of how two enterprising Christian boys set up a lemonade stand only to have Liberals swoop down on them, empty their piggy bank of half their dimes and quarters as "taxes," force the boys to sell a stalk of broccoli with every glass of lemonade, and, horror of horrors, order them to take down their picture of Jesus.

The cover illustration, done with all the artistry of the comic books visiting firefighters, cops, and health care workers give out when they visit grade school classrooms to warn kids not to play with matches, talk to strangers, or do drugs, shows a raging Hillary Clinton, a donkey (because all Democrats are Liberals and all Liberals are socialists and all socialists are commies), and a jowly, white-haired old white guy in glasses who is probably meant to be a college professor or a member of the Liberally-biased Main Stream Media but who looks to me more like that great Liberal ogre, a banker.

(On closer inspection the old white guy must be a college professor because I see that the donkey is holding a microphone, which makes sense, because it's the Democrats who control the news media, you know.  The old white guy still looks like a banker to me.  For one thing, he's wearing a tie.  When was the last time you saw a college professor wearing a tie?  I guess they still do in those Liberal bastions, the business schools.)

This is the kind of outrageousness you can't help thinking must be a joke or a hoax by some Liberals inspired by Jesus' General or a clever parody by the editors of the Onion.

Nope.  Apparently not.  It's real, and meant to be taken seriously.  I don't know if it's sincere.  It strikes me as a classic adventure in the American Entrepreneurial Spirit, exemplifying the motto of that great philosopher of business, P.T. Barnum:  There's one born every minute.

The author may think she's an angel ministering to sorely-tried conservative parents trying to defend their chidren's souls against the onslaughts of a ruthless, relentless, lubricious, and godless Liberal culture, but she and her publishers are good old-fashioned snake oil salesmen engaged in one of the main enterprises of American-style capitalism---identifying people's fears, hopes, dreams, and insecurities and selling them back to us in attractively colored and labeled bottles full of sugar and water.

I'm not going to bother here with lamenting the fact that the book, instead of helping conservative parents inculcate real conservative values like thrift, prudence, skepticism toward self-appointed world reformers, and a, guarded, respect for authority and tradition, gives them a means of innoculating the kids against creeping Liberalism with overdoses of fear and hatred.

It is worth pointing out, though, that by equating Liberals and Democrats with monsters the book is spreading the kind of eliminationist rhetoric David Neiwert warns that the Right is growing increasingly fond of and dependent on.  Personally, the book's title doesn't make me think so much of monsters under the bed as the Calivin and Hobbes collection, Something Under the Bed is Drooling, and Mercer Mayer's very funny There's An Alligator Under My Bed, one of our kids' favorites when they were little.  But I'm guessing that parents who buy this book don't let their kids have much else that isn't Preacher-approved propaganda and so for them monsters under the bed are monsters under the bed.

And I'll pause only briefly to shake my head over the way the book apparently conflates Christianity and making a buck.  I don't understand how so many conservative Christians manage to do that, seeing as how one of the main running themes of Jesus' teaching is that the love of money is the root of all evil.

I understand why many of their big-name TV star preachers preach it.  It explains to the fleeced flock why the hard-earned dollars they contribute to doing the Lord's work are going to buy their ministers 3000 dollar tailor-made suits and 3 million dollar mansions.

Let's leave all that aside for now.  The point I want to make is that the accusations the book makes against Liberalism are all true.  Even the broccoli.  Maybe especially the broccoli.

To be continued after lunch in my next post.

Update:  Continuation completed.  Part 2 is called  "Eat your broccoli! It's good for you!" snarled the evil Liberal giant.

Comments

[blue girl]

Isn't the old white guy with the tie supposed to be Ted Kennedy? That's who I thought it was.

[blue girl]

Here's a review from conservativemonitor.com:

In clear and steady prose, coupled with the high art of caricature, we are treated to the unremitting and stifling power of liberal policies as imposed on the dream of two boys. The resulting work is candid, fresh and educational. My eight year old daughter got hold of the book from off my desk. I generally get heavy tomes in the mail and she ignores them. But when she saw me produce this book from a USPS package she simply had to have a look at it. She read it once. She read it again. Then I read it to her and explained some of the nuances. She quickly grasped the terrible error of leftist ideas.

Ms. DeBrecht certainly understands children. For her explanations are obvious, but at the same time they prompt questions that make the child think more deeply about the issue under discussion. This book reads on several levels simultaneously. First, we have the story of the boys and their struggle. Next, we have the encroachment of the liberals. Finally, we have the effects of those policies.

Children like to read the same book over and over. Indeed, this my child did. So much so, that she actually mislaid it once, delaying my review. The book made a deep impression on her. It has helped her see the world as it is and not through the rose colored glasses the liberal left would impose upon her.

This is a great book for conservatives to help explain to their children why we must fight this ideological struggle with the left. Yet, this is not a work that dwells only on the negative. It also lauds hard work, cogent thinking and conservative ideas.

Highly recommended for children 6 years to adult.

I swear -- I never ever realized how truly scary I must be to society.

[Lance]

Son of a gun, bg, I believe you're right! It is supposed to be Teddy. I keep forgetting his hair's white now. I'm not used to thinking of him as an old man.

Thanks for posting the review. You have always scared the devil out of me, but I didn't know the rest of the country quailed at the thought of you as well, either. The eliminationist rhetoric Orcinus worries about is right in there, isn't it. I think a lot of us Liberals think of the phrase Culture War as a metaphor but the Right Wingers don't---for one thing they know that the outcome of a Liberal victory will be the elimination of their culture (kind of where I'm heading with this series of posts) so they're fighting back tooth and claw. That we want them educated into becoming progressives and they want us "gone" is the difference between us.

[Viscount LaCarte]

If they want to start a culture war, then they haven't missed a beat yet. Of all the bad news I've read today from the blogs, this one made me the saddest. It is just so stupid to continue to divide this nation...

[Linkmeister]

Anybody got Ghorbanifar's phone number? I need some serious weaponry here. Gotta protect myself from the idiots who spout that kind of nonsense.

[Kevin Wolf]

Hey, BG, thanks for adding the review to this neat post. One question, though, after reading this sentence:

"It also lauds hard work, cogent thinking and conservative ideas."

Anybody else see the disconnect there?

[Exiled in NJ]

See here my little children, don't let that bad government take your money unless it is to fund little Georgie's war. Better to tithe, tithe and tithe again to the kindly man on the television preaching to mommy and daddy.

[coturnix]

Oh, definitely Ted Kennedy. Saw that in the first 1/10th second before even enlarging the image.

[Mustang Bobby]

I wonder if they're planning a sequel: Daddy's Gone To War For Jesus and showing him in cammies with Hugo Chavez and Saddam Hussein in his gunsights.

[Lance]

(Note: My comment and the next one by Rana are both responding to a comment by Ed Thibodeau that somehow disappeared. I re-posted it below.)

Ed,

Actually, bookstore shelves are crowded with many more forms of liberal broccoli for kids than conservative spinach. Most of it isn't as blatantly partisan as Help! Mom! but it's still a form of political indoctrination and it's still intended more for parents than for kids. I don't like any books whose main purpose is to give grown ups a chance to lecture kids at storytime. But Help! Mom! goes a step further mainly because it is a piece of other forms of the Right Wing propaganda of the moment---the intent is to portray Liberals as monsters, which is to say, not human. Liberals are The Other.

Your post was excellent, by the way, thanks for the link.

Although I'd like to think that the reason for the low sales rankings of those stupid sounding Liberal bedtime stories is that Liberals just have better taste when it comes to children's literature.

[Rana]

Actually, no, they're not quite on a par with it. Yeah, they are kinda preachy and annoying*, but they do not demonize a whole class of people in order to do it (well, at least King and King, the one I've read, didn't). It's more like, oh, here are some busy-body spoilsports, let's ignore them and do our own thing.

Note the titles: it's King and King, for example, not Hating Homophobes or Those Evil Fundies. The focus is on the ways that the main characters respond to outside individual naysayers, not on caricaturing half of the population as troublemakers (including specific, real-life individuals and organizations, as the cover of the book obviously does).

One is preachy moralizing; the other is propagandistic demagoguery. Neither is great for kids; the latter is actively dangerous to adults. Which is, presumably, why it was written, then packaged in a supposedly nonthreatening "it's just a funny kid's book - don't you have a sense of humor?" format to fend off the critics.

*So I wouldn't buy them, because they are badly written, badly drawn books; there are much better gay-friendly, diversity-positive books out there to choose from.

[Rana]

Ah, Lance beat me to it, and with much more concision and grace.

*tips hat*

[blue girl]

Lance! You are confusing me...who's Ed?

[Lance]

Blue Girl,

Ed Thibodeau posted a comment here this morning that disappeared somehow. I must have goofed up something. Rana's first comment is in response to it too, so I wasn't imagining it.

I'm going to repost Ed's comment below. Hold on.

[Ed Thibodeau]

Blue Girl is right. The old guy is supposed to be Teddy Kennedy. It is just a very poor likeness.

By the way, did anybody read the "From The Publisher" snippet on Amazon:

Would you let your child read blatantly liberal stories with titles such as "King & King," "No, George, No," or "It's Just a Plant"?

Those are real books, on a par with Liberal Under My Bed albeit from a liberal point of view. Read more:
Help! Mom! There are Conservatives Running the Country!