DADWAGON

A high-profile Russian talk show–Channel 1’s пусть говорят (Let Them Talk) with host Andrei Malakhov–dove yesterday into the (still!) ongoing Russian baby yoga controversy. Their star guest? None other than former DadWagon interviewee Lena Fokina herself, freshly escaped from the revolution in Egypt and, I have to say, still looking ridiculously fit for a 50-year-old.

I’m not sure what Lena thought this show was going to be, but Malakhov brought together a distinguished panel of writers, psychologists and cranky grandmothers, paired the panel with a somewhat irritated audience, and spent nearly the entire 45 minutes letting everyone rip into her and her unorthodox yoga. (Follow DadWagon on Facebook or at the Twitters)

This is fascinating to me, because when I was calling around–maybe all my friends in Russia are hippies?–I found a pretty deep level of tolerance and understanding for tossing babies around. Even those that didn’t support her outright at least got all defensive and attacked Americans for being fat (a conversation I never tire of having with foreigners!).

But on this show, with new videos of Lena and her acolytes at work and priceless cutaways to horrified audience members, Lena was attacked in large part for being the foreigner, for having an un-Russian style of exercise. She had her supporters, but for the last 20 minutes of the show, she is completely stonefaced, sometimes on the brink of tears or past it.

In the end, I felt sorry for her. She had that same stubbornness that came through in our interview, that sense of genuine injury and disbelief that someone would question her practice. But I do have to wonder: if the Russians turn on her, where will she go from here?

Below the video I’ve offered a few highlights, by timestamp

1:30 Lena starts things out with a somewhat muted live baby yoga demonstration–a new 6-week-old baby, not Platona! She’s smiling, confident, but the cutaways to audience members portend the shitstorm headed her way.

4:00 Malakhov asks Lena how she reacted to the “shock” of the western media (that’d be us and Gawker’s baby-yoga-sleuth Maureen O’Connor). “There’s no time to react,” says Lena dismissively. “We had training, swimming, diving, to do.”

5:20 Lena gets the biggest applause she’s gonna get the whole show. Why? She said she has five children. In a country that has been reduced to offering cash and cars for having babies, that is worth applauding.

7:30 One of the experts tells Lena, “I just don’t see what’s useful.” She shoots him the same look that I felt like she was shooting me through Skype when I made similar points. The look says: just because I’m into yoga doesn’t mean I won’t tear your head off.

10:40 An angry woman in the audience says, “The baby can’t say anything [against baby yoga]. Go ahead, try. Ask him.” Another rough look from Lena, who waves off the woman.

11:20 Another big expert walks on, and tears into Lena again. “As a doctor, as a pediatrician,” he says, “I ask, ‘Why?’ Tell me, why is this necessary?”

14:20 Malakhov shows the YouTube parody, Baby Yoga with Cats. Lena looks humiliated. I think she’s going to cry, but she doesn’t.

16:00 Irina Danilova, a pleasant friend of Fokina’s who helped me set up the original interview, brought out her older kids to show that kids do survive daily Baby Yoga. With Lena dazed on the couch, it’s Irina who does the bulk of the defending from here on out.

29:22 Lena’s not without her defenders. Another mom/ally comes on and chides the critics: “Our babies all swim. They’re never sick. We never go to the clinic,” she says. “We never give them medicine.”

32:37 Evgeny Volkov, a “member of the International Association for the Study of Cults,” has an odd critique of baby yoga. He calls it a “deception” multiple times. I don’t know Volkov, but in my 2007 Time article from Russia, I describe the peculiar role of anti-cultists, who are essentially pro-Kremlin propagandists who are trotted out from time to time to attack anything that isn’t Russian Orthodox. Like, apparently, baby yoga.

35:50 A little girl speaks up in defense of baby yoga. Lena finally loses it. Tears.

38:00 Yelling. At this point I’m rooting for Irina and Lena to hit back, just to even things out.

38:26 A new psychologist comes on, with the worst attempt at a smile I’ve ever seen, even for a Russian. More yelling. The show ends with an anemic monologue from the host, and with Lena, moist-eyed, still looking quite shocked and wounded. Sigh.

(For more DadWagon: there’s Facebook and then there’s Twitter)

Some studies just shouldn’t be done. We know in the abstract that humans are basically constantly swimming in fecal bacteria. Can’t we leave it in the abstract? No, apparently. “Science” had to go looking for more details. First came reports that iPhone screens are bacteria farms (perhaps because the guys at College Humor keep playing Angry Birds in the bathroom). Now another everyday item, shopping carts, have been swabbed. From MSNBC.com:

Researchers from the University of Arizona swabbed shopping cart handles in four states looking for bacterial contamination. Of the 85 carts examined, 72 percent turned out to have a marker for fecal bacteria.

The researchers took a closer look at the samples from 36 carts and discovered Escherichia coli, more commonly known as E. coli, on 50 percent of them — along with a host of other types of bacteria.

“That’s more than you find in a supermarket’s restroom,” said Charles Gerba, the lead researcher on the study and a professor of microbiology at the University of Arizona. “That’s because they use disinfecting cleaners in the restrooms. Nobody routinely cleans and disinfects shopping carts.”

The study’s results may explain earlier research that found that kids who rode in shopping carts were more likely than others to develop infections caused by bacteria such as salmonella and campylobacter, Gerba said.

I am against the tidal wave of sanitizing gels, wipes, and cleaners that have flooded the lives of children. I understand that to rail against the fecality of modern living is to fight an endless mind battle in which victory can only be achieved by becoming a weirdo in a hazmat suit like Michael Jackson.

But this sounds awful. Can someone remind me that it is actually OK for kids to leave the house?

This past weekend, the New York Times Magazine published the final installment of “Cooking with Dexter,” the father-and-son-in-the-kitchen column written by Pete Wells, who also edits the paper’s Dining section. For about two years, Wells had revealed the trials and tribulations of living with a precocious foodie—who once treasured baby vegetables “like very quiet pets”—and did so with admirable patience.

I have to admit I didn’t read the column often, but I always winced when people I knew would complain about it. To them, it represented the height of New York yuppie food obsession, the entitled transference of haute bourgeois values from one generation to another—and in the very public eye of the Times, no less!

I mean, I get that argument, but as a dadblogger, I also understand that, once you’ve decided to make your kid the subject of your writing, you have to make the most of your material. If the kid likes food, well, then you write about being in the kitchen with him; if it’s Little League, then you write about baseball. What else are you going to do? The kid is going to be into whatever he or she’s into, and that’s what you can write about. You’re stuck with it.

In a similar vein, another NYT Magazine piece caught my eye. It’s one of those back-page “Lives” columns, by John Moe, who hosts “Marketplace Tech Report” on public radio and whose daughter Kate was born with dwarfism. The story, however, is less about Kate and more about Moe’s fears about how the world—specifically, mean teenage girls—will treat her:

Kate goes to a school in St. Paul that teaches grades 1 through 8 (she’s a second grader), and when I was there for a parent-teacher conference a few months ago, I noticed the older girls traveling in packs, whispering, laughing with mockery at whichever poor victim they were savaging at the time. I didn’t know these girls, but I didn’t like them.

Next afternoon, I was riding the No. 63 bus home from work. At the stop after mine, five pretty, well-dressed teenage girls got on and sat right behind me. I wished I hadn’t forgotten my headphones that day because I didn’t want to hear the horrible things these girls were inevitably about to say.

As it turns out, the girls are perfectly lovely—almost unnervingly so. Consider this exchange two of the girls apparently have:

• “Sometimes I don’t think I’m as racially sensitive as I should be.”
• “Well, we all have to work on that. But it’s a huge step to recognize it.”
• “Thanks!”

Okay, sure, well, I’ll buy that. Although it sure doesn’t jibe with the teenagers’ conversations I’ve heard in the New York subways, virtually all of which have been so brain-bleedingly annoying that I’ve seriously considered sending my daughter to Switzerland for high school. Although I’ll still probably have to ride the subway here. Maybe I should be the one to go to Switzerland while Sasha’s in high school. What I’m saying is: If you like to imagine human beings as fairly intelligent creatures, stay off the subways between 2pm and 4pm.

Finally, there is Gawker, which this morning informed us (“us” meaning men) that we are all about to get more depressed:

According to a new article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the rate of depressive disorders among men in Western countries is likely to increase greatly—possibly catching up with that of women, who are are currently twice as likely to be diagnosed with a depressive disorder.

Why are we depressed? Because we don’t have traditionally male jobs, because we’re much more in touch with our shitty feelings, because we can’t keep our families happy, because life sucks.

If it makes you feel any better, the journal article just means we’re going to be diagnosed as having depression a lot more, not that you’re going to be more depressed than you already are.

I got this from my good friend, and sometime DadWagon guest contributor, Gabe. It’s from a television show whose house band was known as the “Banana Splits.” Four singers, each named Leegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorky, if Wikipedia is to be believed. But to me, this is just a small item of videographic evidence of why all Sixties children are batshit crazy…and kinda groovy. Enjoy.