Green Oasis

This is too much! The opening theme of Different Strokes set to alternate music.

(via kottke.org)

If you ever want to bet on the outcome of America’s Funniest Home Videos (you know, the one that used to have Bob Saget from Full House, America’s dirtiest comic), I have a secret that seems to allow you to pick the trifecta more than 50% of the time. Always put the videos into these categories which have been ordered by cuteness:

1. babies
2. children
3. animals
4. everything else

That’s it.

For example, if the videos are of a cat, a boy, and trash cans floating down the gutter, then the boy will win, the cat take second, and the trash cans will come in last. If two videos fit into the same category, use your best judgment about which one is cuter. The cuter one usually does better.

I know you’ll be tempted to further adjust your prediction based on your own judgment of how humorous the videos are. Don’t.

THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THIS PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM PROVE INEFFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF USING THE PROGRAM.

I must regretfully announce that I will not be running for President. I know this will disappoint my ardent supporters, but you should know that I’m the kind of guy to face facts. My political consultants tell me that I could never be elected President. There are many reasons why, but I want to focus on just one. I’m 5’6″ (1.68m).

The average male height in the U.S. is slightly over 5’9″ (1.75m). Only 11 out of 43 presidents have been under 5’9″. None of those short Presidents were elected after 1900. The taller candidate has won two-thirds of the elections since 1900. Only three presidents have been as short or shorter than I am. Based on my height alone, I will never be elected President of the United States, especially in the age of televised debates. I might as well be Dukakis.

To add insult to injury, I probably make less money and have fewer interested potential mates (if I were on the market) all because I’m short. But I guess I’m getting off topic.

Before anyone accuses me of harboring a Napoleon complex (actually, he might not have been that short), I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to elect me President, date me, or give me a raise because I’m short. I’m not bitter. (What’s a short guy got to do to get respect? Conquer Europe?)

You, my fellow Americans, can’t help it. You’re not thinking rationally. It’s biological. While you believe yourself to be making rational decisions about the candidates to support, you are subconsciously influenced to choose the one who feels more like a strong troop leader. We’re not as far as we imagine from our prehistoric existence as apes in Africa.

So rather than waste our time and energy, let’s all go vote for our favorite tall man with good hair.

Our oldest daughter asks us to tell her a story as part of our bedtime ritual. Last night, she wanted to tell me a story after I finished telling mine. She and I collaborate on our stories. I pause at certain points and ask her what a character should say or who they meet and so on. She asked me who I wanted the main character of her story to be. I thought it would be fun to hear a story about a crocodile.

The very first thing my precious little girl had the crocodile do is eat a baby! I stifled an involuntary chuckle at this unexpectedly violent plot twist so early in the story. My daughter went on to tell a gruesome tale (which would surely make international headlines if it were true) of this crocodile hunting and eating baby after baby after baby. I lost count of the babies who ended up down his gullet. The crocodile apparently didn’t like the taste of diapers so it looked for naked babies. It also preferred dead babies. Luckily for him, he found one in a trash can. With each baby ingested, the crocodile got bigger and bigger until finally fell over in torpid, satisfied exhaustion. The story ended with the crocodile playing with a ball as if this was just another day.

I wasn’t horrified so much as shocked that my four-year-old child had come up with such a cruel story. In trying to find the seeds of this story, I’ve thought of two candidates: the story of Abiyoyo, a giant who eats people, and Spirited Away where one character swallows other characters and gets bigger and bigger.

Some parents would reflexively ban these stories from their household. They obviously taught my daughter violence. Instead it made me think about the horrifying things that happen in fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother swallowed whole by a wolf, the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters pecked out by birds, Snow White’s stepmother forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes at her daughter’s wedding until she dies. These brutal tales were the stuff of childhood not so long ago.

Is the lack of violence in our modern children’s stories a sign of our enlightenment or of our separation from the brutal facts of reality? Life is an act of violence. Each living thing exists at the expense of some other living thing. Each life ends in death.

Yet we try our best to hide from these facts. Gone are the days when we slaughtered our own animals, or sat with the corpse of our recently dead in our own homes. The violence that we see in our entertainment is idealized, pornographic violence. The problem with what we watch isn’t that it is too realistic, but that it isn’t real enough. It obfuscates the realities of death so that it can be more appetizing and entertaining to our paradoxically effete yet brutal tastes.

Are we doing our children a favor by isolating them from death and violence, and therefore from life? Obviously overexposure would also be bad, but there must be some middle ground where children can come to terms with death and violence from the safety of their beds under the supervision of loving parents. It seems that children are more prepared to deal with death than we may imagine.

My wife and I watched parts of To Catch a Predator last night, the one where guys chat online with people who they think are underage, arrange to meet with them for sex, and arrive only to be greeted by all of America sharing their most shameful moment. I cheered the television crew on months ago when I first started watching this show, but something strange has started to happen. I don’t think the producers of the show wanted me to, but I started to have compassion for these sexual predators.

As chance would have it, I heard on the radio yesterday that this television program caused a man to commit suicide.

Louis William Conradt Jr., of Terrell, Texas, a Dallas suburb, was suspected of being one of those men, except he didn’t show up at the house. That didn’t stop the TV producers and police from showing up at his, though, and as officers knocked on his door and a camera crew waited in the street, Conradt shot and killed himself. (Associated Press)

The radio hosts, the kind that are paid to act like brain-damaged teenagers, related this story, basically said good riddance, and danced on his grave. Their callousness elicited my compassion. Wouldn’t someone mourn for this destroyed life?

I’ll openly admit that I have ephebophilic tendencies. I gather from the term “jailbait” and popular humor that I’m not alone in the adult male population.

I and most of those who are similar to me choose to abstain from acting on any attraction we feel. We know it’s wrong to prey on an adolescent’s inexperience. We shrug off the attraction and go on with life. I don’t lose sleep over it because I’m not ashamed. I chalk it up to being a human being and forge ahead.

There is so much hatred and fear surrounding sexual predators these days. It sells an awful lot of commercial airtime. Sometimes it’s easy to forget who sexual predators are. They are not some alien species. They are our neighbors, our friends, our brothers, our husbands, our fathers… our sisters, our wives, and our mothers. They are us. We are them. They are human beings who cross a perilously thin line. Are the rest of us so different?

We seem to be afraid to acknowledge that pedophilia (for example) is one aspect of human nature—an aberrant and harmful one—but human nonetheless. Whatever it is that separates a pedophile from a non-pedophile is uncomfortably thin. We prefer to think of them as aliens rather than see their humanity, rather than acknowledge the thin ice below us. There but for the grace of Fortune go I.

As I watched the news crew publicly shame those men, I allowed myself to see something that I hadn’t noticed before. I watched as their hopes and dreams died. The weight of what the future held for them made some weep, some get physically ill, and some just sit dumb with shock. These were weak, stupid people, not inhuman monsters. The show put a human face on sexual predators.

I want to protect my children above all else, but I am not insensible to the suffering of these men and the tragedy of human frailty.