You Don't Care That Your Children Hate You

Remember the V-chip? In the 1990s there was oh-so-much hand-wringing resulting from a shifting view of children from well-behaved, polite, innocents to dark, conniving, little fuckbots who would huff paint or gasoline as soon as kill grandma.

At the time, it seemed like every generation of parents' revisionism reinvented for the mod nineties. The internet laid waste to whatever sense of control parents thought they had over their children (just as, it should be pointed out, the locomotive, the telephone, the automobile, the speakeasy, the dance hall, integration, and multiculturalism had for previous generations). Though, truth be told, most American parents don't actually exert, or show much interest in exerting, real influence on their children, anyway.

From the idea that children are little grownups--thanks, Puritans!--some Americans still apparently believe in reasoning with children, equalizing the power dynamic so as to not "exploit" or "coerce" the little fuckers (of course, they haven't considered the ethics of coercing children into doing what they ought). Other parents take the opposite approach: they're children, for God's sake: let's let them run wild! We bumbled through all right (except, not so much--look at your terrible kids!), so they'll be fine, too. Molested, fucked-up sociopaths, addicted to instant gratification, but ready for that white-collar job college will buy them.

I truly believe most people like children in idea form; they just don't have any interest in actually being around them in real life. Add in that most people are hopelessly self-absorbed and emotionally numb, and it sums up as utter indifference to one's offspring.

Odd little pop-culture reminder of that (to reintegrate the technology thread): the local cable company is running ads to promote its new digital content. Once again, the tech worm has turned, and now subscriber X can press one button and access tons of free content due to the miracle of stretched-glass cable bundling (or, fiber optics, as the nerds are calling it). Due to the excessive amount of information now available to the viewer, and the advanced recording, search, and sorting functions of digital cable, the cable company wants you, purportedly-responsible parent, to know that it thinks you are doing a bad job raising your kids.

The ads all start the same way: some schlumpy hausfrau/meister is looking at the camera, talking about a favorite show and saying something like, "hey, that last episode was awesome--dramatic tension and great plotlines, etc. whatever, blah." and then the camera pans to some character you'd instantly identify as an archetype from any number of shit cable dramas (contradicting, I guess, the original assertion that the viewer just saw a great episode of one of them--I mean, they all use the same fucking characters!): the junkie, the mobster, the chainsaw massacre-er. Then the viewer/parent, says something I would never have expected. After heaping praise upon the cast of the viewer's favorite show, he/she then says (sternly!), "But, you're too _____ for the kids...so I'm going to have to block you. Sorry!" and then the "adult" goes about its merry way, having fulfilled its duties as a parent.

Except, of course, that it hasn't. The "parent" in this scenario has just allowed the cable company to raise its kids; and worse, the "adult" has changed its behavior and in fact denied itself the pleasure of watching its favorite show because the kids might see it. And how, pray tell, would they see it? I'm guessing because either A: this parent is a shithead who lets the kids have TVs in their rooms; B: the parent doesn't know how to tell the kids to piss off when adult programming comes on; C: the parent archetype, scariest of all, just really doesn't give a flying fuck what the kids are into, as long as the parent has plausible deniability ("I blocked the violent/sexy show...what more could I do?").

The bottom line in this case: fuck anybody who uses a remote control as a substitute for parenting. And they said punk rockers were just angry wankers--this is an instance where parents are being encouraged to almost literally "phone it in"!

The other example also comes from TV--yes, dad, I watch a lot of TV. It's like it's my job, as a very unfamous but funny person once said in his senior thesis. Anyway, the idea that parents have removed themselves from the position of responsibility that is, well, parenting, is reinforced for me whenever Mrs. Me watches one of those godawful real estate shows (for example, House Hunters, wherein some schmoe looks at three houses and picks one to buy. It's just as thrilling as I just made it sound).

(One gloss: it seems that gays and single people use dogs as child-substitutes, and this is extreme wishful thinking. Who started the abortive thought-fart that dogs are like children and if you can raise one you can have the other? Was it Meg Ryan? In the aforementioned real estate shows, the first sign of trouble is that adults with dogs always pick the house with the best features for the dog instead of what they, the humans, actually need. It's as though they can't imagine not being a slave to what they project their animal to want. Kind of like when parents bend over backwards for their children even though the kids didn't ask them to (and even if they did ask, it's the parent's job to determine how things shake out. The word is "no," and it works if you put heat behind it.) Also, can I point out that dogs live about 1/8 as long as humans?)

The case in mind, however, has no dogs. No, in fact, it is about two really fat people and their children. The couple buys a house (on another, anonymous TV show) and proceeds to have a crew of real workers (who look suspiciously like Latino immigrants) tear it apart, inside and out.

(One unrelated query: why, on these shows, is there always somebody using a large sledgehammer to knock out a sheetrock wall? I've never seen that happen on a real site; it's the worst possible tool for taking down a wall that's still got sheetrock on it; it looks stupid, probably because it IS stupid. That's all.)

Forget about the inside, but the house had a deck and a pool in the backyard and the new owners tore them out. But they have kids? What the fuck? Wouldn't every kid in America love to have a pool in his backyard? Well, yes. But--and this is far, far from the first time this has happened on this type of show--the parents' sole and determining thought about the pool was, "we don't want our kids to accidentally fall in. It's too dangerous."

Ahem. And, while your precious little angels are drowning in the back yard, where the fuck will you be?!

There are only two ways the objection to having a pool can be understood: either these parents (and the scores I have heard make this same argument) never instilled the fear of God (in the form of "Mom" and "Dad") in their kids--which would make it sufficient merely to say, "don't go near the pool," and voila! problem solved--or else they don't watch their children. So which is it: are they big pussies whose words have no weight (their own fault), or are they terrible parents who don't care enough about the kids to watch them (also their own fault)?

Maybe it's time to forbid these assholes from having children. Perhaps America could vote on couples' right to conceive, using our digital remotes.