Today's reading: the HIV Muppet Controversy

[autographedcat]

Great column by Mark Morford in the San Francisco Gate:

"So it has come to this. It has come to an orphan HIV-positive female Muppet on "Sesame Street" in Africa. Let there be quiet and tragic applause.

It has come to the point where we can no longer avoid intermingling the worlds of sunny happy sing-songin' innocent Cookie-Monster days and brutal ravaging epidemic disease and deathly nights, and man is Big Bird ever confused and sad and lost.

But this is a good thing, this new character. Everyone says so, everyone with any sort of conscience or even mild awareness of the horrors of the AIDS epidemic senses this is probably the right kind of thing to do, even if it feels like it's not. "

Read the whole article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2002/07/17/notes071702.DTL&type=printable

Comments

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

The thing is that Sesame Street was NEVER about innocent dancing around. I really have to wonder what Morford thinks he's been watching since 1970. Sesame Street has had a mission from the beginning to introduce deeply controversial, even radical issues in a way which will teach the children a sense of tolerance and help the grownups come to terms with these issues in a nonthreatening fashion.

When I was growing up in the seventies, the human cast on Sesame Street included an interracial couple. No mention was ever made of it, nobody discussed whether or not there was anything wrong with it, they were just there. And by being there, they helped a generation like mine grow up treating such relationships as matter-of-fact, not even important enough to comment on... while the generation two up and six to the right from mine screamed about how it was terrible that we had to expose innocent children to such things.

In Egypt today, the Sesame Street version there emphasizes the radical, culture-shaking notion that it is important for girls to get an education just like it is for boys. It has the government's backing, or it couldn't do it in Egypt, but it's considered by much of the population to be just another method through which evil America is corrupting innocent Muslim kids.

There is children's television for escapism and there is children's television for education. Sesame Street was conceived from the first as an educational program, and specifically as an educational program with a heavy element of social and political education. They've been teaching kids, through the medium of songs and puppets, the kind of thing that make the adults scream in horror, since they were conceived.

I approve of the existence of children's TV that's pure escapism. I also approve of the existence of children's TV whose intent is quite purely and simply to teach the values of an age which has not yet come to the generation which, properly educated, will help make it come. A show doesn't have to be serious and offputting to be the second; it's just as okay to use muppets to make a point about AIDS as it is to use them to make a point about the letter A. Sesame Street was never what Mr. Morford thinks it was. That he does think it was, may have something to do with how well it taught him when he was a little boy, so that the values he thinks should be preserved unsullied are the same ones which shocked the columnists when he was a child.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

I more or less agree with everything you've said.

I had a feeling that posting that article woudl cause some people to say some interesting things, so it had the desired affect. One note, though -- I'm not really sure his article was so much about Seseme Street itself as it is the world we live in.

Still, thanks for the thoughtful reply. :)

Love,
-R

Today's episode is brought to you by the letters H, I and V ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, Mark Morford (who I've only been reading since last November, and who's writing I find to be a total delight and one of the highlights of my day, or three times a week anyway!) quite often writes with his tongue firmly in cheek, sometimes pretending to be a little more "upright/uptight" than he is in order to throw the next sentence into starker/funnier/more shocking relief. After all he did complete his article on the HIV muppet with

"In somewhat loosely related news, the creators of the Teletubbies are planning on introducing a new character to the
wildly popular toddler program next season, tentatively named Zonk, who will allegedly be a mullato lesbian dwarf quadriplegic encephalitic autistic scoliotic genius waterskiing dentally challenged philatelist with multiple STDs and a wandering eye"

I don't agree 100% with what he says (sometimes) but quite often I wish I did ...

... he likes to point out that people have (or would love to have) a "perfect-50's-TV" view of the world, politicians, religion etc. and then give the news story about the child abuse, the government accounting scams, the pedophilia in the Catholic church etc. That's just his style, standing as far to one edge as possible so that the news story on the other edge is that much further from the "established" reality and thus causes greater dissonance and greater emotional impact.

People want children to grow up slowly (hence teenagers and tweenies and all the rest), maybe because they remember their childhood as good (or as bad and want it to be better for *their* kids) and want that goodness to last as long as possible. In Victorian times the children of the poor weren't educated beyond absolute minimum requirements, worked down the mines or up chimneys or on the farm and going back further, getting married at 14 was fairly normal. Now you can't buy beer until you're 21 in some states ... oh wait, this is going to to turn into a long rant and I think I'll save that for another time!

But, basically, most people want their kids to grow up totally protected and to remain children as long as possible. But there's a real world the kids have to live in (guns in schools, drugs, teenage pregnancies, abductions etc.) and there is a necessary conflict. Sesame Street is one of the balancing forces, I think it is 100% correct to attempt this, whether it succeeds or not, because in South Africa 1 in 9 people are infected with HIV. This means that children are likely to be either infected themselves or their friends at school may be, and they need to know whether it is ok to hug them, to share sweets with them and what to do if they skin their knee or cut their finger ... you may know what is safe and what isn't, but the 3 to 7 year olds are the market for Takalani Sesame and they are the ones that need the education.