The Little Engine Who Took His Place in the Underclass

I was driving around with friends not long ago, observing the usual suburban desolation—the endless dun-colored houses, drab block businesses, offensively bland signage—and one of my more sensitive friends was like to throwing up over the difference between when he was a kid and now. There was a lot more nature in the mix then, he opined; even the corporate stuff of his youth was more playful, colorful and inviting: winged horses on gas stations, bears on brake shops, big-ass doughnuts dipping into the sky. He pointed to a Dunkin' Donuts; he pointed to an oil-change shop, an Arco station, a toy emporium: all had signs duller than John Ashcroft's underpants. (I'm making an educated guess. No one without top-security clearance gets in his underpants.)

“What's a kid going to feel when he's looking at that? It's like looking at homework,” he complained.

“Naw, he'll get excited by the bright-red color, or he'll imagine something fun in it. Kids can be fascinated just by dirt,” retorted another friend, who has the sort of boundless optimism peculiar to those born into wealth.

“I'm just glad I grew up when I did,” my first friend said. “What's a kid going to see in the present that's going to give him any hope for the future?”

I chipped in then, with the sort of boundless optimism peculiar to those who like hearing the sound of their own voices. “You know what I like about the present? It's so handy.”

Years from now, when standards have slipped sufficiently for my genius to be recognized, people will hear the wisdom in these words. The present? There it is, right there in front of you. Unlike the past or future, it's the only moment you can experience directly or have an effect upon. It's the moment kids live in, the one we've largely slipped out of—otherwise, we wouldn't be making the world such a dreary, fear-ridden place.

I don't have kids of my own and probably won't at the rate I'm going, so I can rhapsodize about them from a safe remove. Even just viewing them from a design perspective, what remarkable devices they are! You simply put some oatmeal in them in the morning, and they run all day, jumping, crawling, skipping, singing, shouting, coloring, imagining, etc. And who came up with this idea: right when they're young enough to fall down a lot, they're short enough that they don't fall very far.

I helped a friend pack to move the other weekend. I've done this with plenty of friends, but I realized this was different because I hadn't before helped move someone with kids.

Books are always a bitch—they weigh a ton, and there are so many different sizes they're hard to box up efficiently. But that is nothing compared with packing kids' books, which are shaped like dinosaurs or diesel locomotives and have wheels or bulging, wiggling eyes or a built-in voice chip that starts talking when you touch it—and continues talking, growing more muffled, as you pack it away in the box, like the victim in a Poe story.

There sure are a lot of kids' books! They're expensive! And parents have to buy every one of them for their kids!

And between their colorful pages, at least, the world isn't yet so drear. Maybe that's why parents buy so many of them, enough to build a wall between the kids and the world we've made for them to inherit.

Perhaps it would be kinder in the long run if the books prepared them more for that world. Given that our society has only grown more stratified over the past 20 years, with the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the middle class in between vanishing; given that over the same two decades, the percentage of your income required to send a kid to college has doubled, and Bush is cutting student loans while growing the deficit, is it time for a book called The Little Engine Who Dutifully Took His Place in the Permanent Underclass? Should elephants and tigers be introduced to kids in books of imaginary animals, since they might well be extinct by the time kids reach adulthood?

I just saw one of my nieces in a school musical called Wally the Rat, which was sort of a Waiting for Godot with rodents. A stage-full of kids sit around waiting for Wally the Rat to show up, chorusing, “Where is he? Where is he?” and he never does arrive. The point of this, which somehow eluded Beckett, is that you know Wally is around somewhere whenever people are being hurtful or impolite. Every kid sang, every kid had lines to speak, and it was neat to see all that cooperation and bright-eyed hope in one place.

These are the kids the politicians always talk about, the ones they insist they're so concerned for. “We will leave no child behind” the president has said a time or two, yet the Pied Piper of Hamelin might have claimed the same.

And, boy, Bush and his men sure are concerned about youth when it's a no-brainer crowd-pleaser like going after kiddie porn. But will kids smell a rat when their future is being sold down the river to polluters and profiteers, when the environment and social fabric have been torn up for the sake of a buck, when our vision of their future involves spending more money to imprison them than to educate them?

It's easy to complain, yet not so easy to offer solutions. I did a column on the Middle East a few weeks ago that wasn't exactly brimming with solutions, aside from the long-range, touchy-feely one that we U.S. citizens ought to become more even-handed in our regard for the opposing sides, and even that was enough to have some readers branding me a Jew-hater.

To the contrary, I think humanity would be in a sorry state were it not for the moral, civilizing influence of Jewish philosophers and artists—from Baruch Spinoza through Lenny Bruce—and I think that is part of Israel's problem today. If they had seized their country back when everybody else was doing it—before about 1900—they'd rule it, no questions asked. But Jewish thinkers have played such a large part in advancing humanity's regard for decency, truth and reason that it's harder these days to subscribe to the self-serving lies that conquering nations traditionally used to justify their acts.

Whose land is it? You could go back to when creatures first crawled from the sea, and they'd still be arguing over it. My guess is that most Israelis and Palestinians just want to get on with living, and it's the assholes on the extremes who keep pushing things to an ugly head, whether it's with pipe bombs or U.S.-made helicopters, and it's with those folks in mind that I'd like to propose A SOLUTION: douse the whole region in Ecstasy, and keep it doused. After a few weeks of rubbing up against one another and exchanging moist endearments, then let everyone come out of their group hug and sort things out. I typically wouldn't ever recommend dosing anyone without their consent, but it's a better option than all the munitions we send over.

Just in case Lost in OC is your sole source of Middle East news, I'd like to note an update: while I cited the initial reports of as many as 500 dead in Jenin—and Israel subsequently refused to allow the U.N. investigators it said it welcomed to do their jobs—credible human-rights organizations have thus far substantiated only 54 deaths. There are claims of more dead buried under rubble and of Israeli refrigeration trucks hauling bodies away, but Amnesty International and others are now doubting it amounted to a massacre, though they are claiming instances of war crimes. Though downsized, there's still more than enough murder and misery to go around.

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