DADWAGON

So the nag of the north, David Walsh, is out of business. For 15 years his Minneapolis-based non-profit has been calling out the media for propagating material that corrupts children. He once got the video game Grand Theft Auto recalled. He believed that screen violence corrupted our youth. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

I am, actually, not completely negative about his mission. He was not nearly as bizarre and sanctimonious as L. Brent Bozell’s Parents Television Council, which decried the liberal porn-peddlers in Hollywood for ruining “every last acre of innocence”. From the PTC’s mission statement:

Television is the most powerful medium in the world. It can be a wonderful way to educate, inspire, and entertain America’s children. Sadly it’s doing the opposite and undermining the positive values parents are trying to instill in their young ones.

This is, of course, horseshit. Television, outside of Sesame Street and a few other islands of intelligence, was never a great way to “educate, inspire, and entertain America’s children.” Many people have made the case better than I, but it bears repeating: How about we don’t let kids watch so much TV? That way, the kids don’t grow up to be idiots, and nobody gets to tell the adults that they have to watch the morally virtuous Joan of Arcadia instead of the nihilistic Coupling. And the rights of stoners and others who want to watch morally suspect shows during the day remain intact. Walsh, to his credit, didn’t want kids to watch TV. But he flirted with pseudo-science in his rush to raise the alarm about kids and the media.

It’s a weird fight. On the one hand, you have the well-funded entertainment industry protecting its turf. On the other hand, you have the news industry, which is all too ready to amplify the message of Walsh and the other Cassandras harping about the dangers of media. It’s the kind of showdown that you wish both sides could lose.

Because I have too much free time, and because my imagination tends to work in the weirdest of ways, I often dream up nightmare scenarios involving myself and my daughter. The most common one goes thus:

My wife and I somehow die silently in our apartment, but Sasha survives—at least for a few days, during which she crawls around the pad, crying, growing ever weaker, playing with her toys, and slowly starving to death without ever seeing another human face again.

Good morning, Dadwagon readers!

There was one thing I wanted to do last month in Berlin after I was done with all the smoking, drinking and glamrocking: buy wooden toys.

Unfortunately, they don’t come cheap. If you look closely at the picture, taken at a Berlin toy store, you can see the €19.99 price tag. That’s almost $30 for a single rolling duck. For that price, you could probably get an entire Asbestos Barbie Dream House or whatever they’re making in the roiling pot of ethnic rage that is China’s toy industry.

But I bought anyway: a traditional wooden jumping jack called a Hampelmann for the boy (I think I had one of those when I was a kid), and a wooden shapes puzzle for the girl.

Nancy Gibbs over at TIME has a nicely anthemic piece this week that defends the classic toys against the latest fad, Zhu Zhu Hamsters. I haven’t seen these allegedly lead-ridden toy rodents. I love their names–Chunk, Pipsqueak, Mr. Squiggles, Numnums–but I don’t sense a lot of staying power. Here’s Nancy with a brief rundown of the provenance of the classic toys and games:

The best toys transcend, their survival a testament to their purpose and power. The Babylonians played board games; the ancient Greeks had yo-yos. The Chinese were flying kites 3,000 years ago. Crayola crayons were first produced in 1903. In 1916, Frank Lloyd Wright’s son John, inspired by the way his father had built an earthquake-resistant hotel in Tokyo, invented Lincoln Logs. And many great toys are accidents or improvisations, a serenade by kids whose first drum set is a wooden spoon and a tin pot. Play-Doh was invented as a wallpaper cleaner. In 1943 a Navy engineer trying to smooth the sailing of battleships found that a torsion spring would “walk” when knocked over. If you stretched all the Slinkys sold since then end to end, I’m told, they would circle the earth more than 125 times.

It does make me wonder if there are any new classics out there. Has anything been introduced in our lifetimes that can stand up to Legos or the rest of the canon (not counting the electronic innovations, like Tetris or the Wii)? Why does each shopping season bring a newly hyped toy that falls into obscurity once the marketing budget fades (remember the Furby)? I hate to get all cranky about it, but to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen:

Mr. Squiggles, I grew up playing with the Hampelmann. The Hampelmann was my friend. Mr. Squiggles, you are no Hampelmann.

As I’ve said before, my wife and I are trying hard to instill good habits in our son: social, behavioral, moral. Dietary, too: We want to raise neither a vegan scold nor a future Twinkie murderer. And then something like this comes along: Ladies and gents, I present to you this box of crocheted soft-toy donuts.

I don’t know if I’ve ever had such a bifurcated reaction in my life. If I saw my little guy stuffing one of these in his mouth, I’d about have a heart attack from the cuteness, and also at the horrified realization that I was setting him up for a future actual coronary of his own. My inner righteousness has come up against my inner Homer Simpson. D’oh.