Of Barney and Banana
Pudding
(Cowritten by Jacqueline Schrader)
“Barney is a dinosaur
made of banana pudding...”
“No, Dad, Barney is
not made of banana pudding.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
And
so goes the ongoing debate in the Schrader house over whether or not Barney is
actually indeed made of banana pudding.
In one corner, me; in the other, four year old Xavier, who tells me that
I am wrong.
Am
I wrong? Listen close to the Barney
lyrics. The last line sound like,
“Barney can be your friend too if you cook and eat him.” Why would you cook and eat Barney if he
wasn’t made of food? Is not banana
pudding a food? I rest my case. Barney is definitely made of banana pudding.
Of
course, there are some very strong arguments to the contrary. Banana pudding is enjoyable; Barney is
definitely not. He is a little too
happy all of the time. Who do you know
who is always happy? Just once I want
to see Barney lose his temper. Imagine how the ratings would spike if, during
one of Baby Bop’s and B.J.’s moments of sibling bickering, Barney says, “Shut
up, you brats! Enough is enough! Geez!”
Just
suppose it was Barney instead of Willy Wonka at the chocolate factory. When Augustus fell into the chocolate river,
instead of the Oompa Loompas singing a poignant ditty, all of the kids would
break into song and dance. “Augustus
fell into the chocolate, but it’s okay!
He’ll be so tasty when he comes back to play!” I just don’t see it.
Another
reason why Barney can’t be made of banana pudding -- the kids don’t exactly
look like they’re enjoying themselves.
They don’t ever smile. If Barney
was really made of banana pudding, those kids would be edging near him,
smacking their lips. At least, that’s
what I’d do. Also, maybe while Barney
was singing (if he was made of banana pudding), some of those kids might sneak
off and start a fire to cook him. “Oh
Barney, come here”........
Okay,
I concede...Barney is NOT made of banana pudding. Unfortunately. No, much
to my chagrin, Barney is some geek in a suit who says really cloying
things...ALL OF THE TIME! I was
fortunate with my three daughters, because they never got into Barney so I
didn’t have to be subjected to it. I
thought I would make it through, but my son, yes, son, is into Barney. Thus, I must watch that annoying little
purple dinosaur sing and dance across my television screen.
I think one reason that Barney annoys me so much is that the little purple freak is always happy. “Barney I just chopped of my hand!” “Well, Tommy, that probably didn’t feel very good -- lets dance and sing!” There is no one that I know who is always happy. Sometimes, you are gonna be mad, and other times you are inevitably going to be sad.
Barney,
then, does a real disservice to our youth by not showing any other
emotions. If one goes through childhood
thinking that every problem can be solved by a little bit of singing and a
little bit of dancing, then that child will not be prepared for adulthood. Life is not all song and dance -- other
emotions are involved here.
I
speak from experience here. You see, I
used to have the Barney view of life -- all people are good, and all problems
are solvable by “talking them out”.
Amazingly, I held this naive view of the world well into my twenties. I would trust people, and then be betrayed
and stabbed in the back. How many times
must one say, “Et tu, Brute?” before one comes to the realization that all
people are not good and that all
problems are not solvable by “talking them out.”
I
have been told that I am too cynical. I
guess I am. It is hard not to view life
cynically when you have been walked on more times than a welcome mat. It is hard not to by cynical when you are
treated like a pariah, like Sheriff Bart on “Blazing Saddles.” (In the pie scene, the old lady knocks on
Bart’s window and brings him a pie, but tells him not to tell anyone that she
talked to him.) I have corresponded
with people by e-mail and telephone who refuse to acknowledge me in
public. I’ll be your friend, Schrader,
so long as nobody else knows about it.
The
thing about the “happy, happy” life-view of shows such as Barney is that when
you find out that the world is not so, it can be devastating. There is no worse feeling that I have
experienced than when I find that someone that I consider to be a friend is
going behind my back and betraying my trust.
I have had employees who I was willing to fall on my sword for, and who
know that I would sacrifice myself for, work the system to get my job and me
out. I have had so-called friends who
refused to respect my opinion and my beliefs because it was too hard; it is so
much easier to ridicule someone than to stand up for them.
Life
is full of bad people who do bad things.
Life is full of situations that cannot be solved by “talking it out”; in
fact, there are times that talking is the worst possible situation, that
confrontation may be the only way.
Think of all the battered spouses in the world; what has talking gotten
them? A beating to within an inch of
their life, that’s what. You can’t
reason with these brutes; you either have to run away or take matters into your
own hands. I once had an employee
threaten to kill me for disciplining him.
Now, this fellow is, well, a complete psychopath who lacks the capability
to reason. My solution was to be
vigilant and make sure I was never alone.
Fear will do that to you.
Interestingly,
the evangelicals I knew at the time did not agree with my approach. “You need to have Jesus in your heart!”, I
was told. “You need to forgive and to
embrace him with the love of Jesus.”
Yeah, sure. Someone threatens to
kill me and I am supposed to embrace him?
Are you nuts?
I
think that this is why the fundamentalists and evangelicals irritate me so
much. A simplistic view of the world is
not realistic. The world is a complex
place, full of complex people and complex situations. The world is complex because it cannot easily be categorized into
a simple binary structure of “yes/no”, 0/1, black/white. There are numerous “maybes”, decimal points
and fractions, and shades of color.
There is not any right answer to every single problem; all of the
solutions cannot be enumerated in one book, no matter how good the book.
When
I was nineteen, I lived by myself in the strange city of Springfield,
Missouri. (Home of John Ashcroft.) I remember reading a letter-to-the-editor in
the Springfield paper from an evangelical who was offended by a photograph of
teenagers dancing. Because it was
contrary to her Bible, it had caused her and her son considerable angst. My thought when I read that letter was,
“Lady, don’t send that boy to college, or he will need psychotherapy for the
rest of his innocent life. What he will
be exposed to will surely cause him angst.”
When
I went to college, it was the ones who lived in a simplistic idealistic dream
world who either couldn’t handle it or turned out it to be the “wild ones.” (If
you are denied something all of your life, then you are suddenly exposed to it,
human nature is to engage in gluttony with respect to it.) Those who had been exposed to a wider
world-view, the good and the ugly, the glamour and the warts, tended to do
quite well.
The
world can be a good and wonderful place.
It can also be evil and pure hell.
The best way to be able to prepare ourselves for the bad is to know
about it. The best way to understand
what is good is to have a point of reference, to know what is bad. We do ourselves a disservice when we do not.
If
only Barney were made of banana pudding.
A couple of bites, and he wouldn’t be so darn happy all of the
time. Fear would do him good. It might chill him out a bit.