Cube started an interesting discussion on American television, the use of puppets, cartoons, and the history, in a sense, of the avatar (the avatar isn't just some notion from the Indian word for "god" in the American context, of course).
I started writing an answer and it got so long I had to make a new post. I know he was talking about something else -- the way avatars and cartoons flatten us culturally. But I want to look at the political undertow here as well.
You're going to wonder how I go from a discussion of avatars all the way to complaining about communism, but it's relevant.
Cube writes about how he didn't like the repetition method for learning (that's really all it was, when they had all those "advertisements for the letter 'P'") -- and he didn't like the flattening of all of us as well. I would submit that multiculturalism as a political concept not just technology (although that, too) was responsible for the flattening -- a flattening that occured in rebellion to what was seen as the white dominant culture's flattening, but a flattening that was no better in the end.
As I said, I never liked Sesame Street and did not expose my kids to it unless I sat and watched it with them and interpreted it. Not only did I think the mindless and cutesie repetition jags were stupid -- I felt it was much more important to sit with the kids and show them a book and read to them rather than plunking them down in front of that "teacher". But I also didn't like some of the culture. To me, it was profoundly subversive to try to imply that the ghetto street in the inner city was somehow some sort of cultural center of gravity (that came about because of the fascination of the left with the black revolution at the time).
And ghetto it was. It was the life of the stoop. It was not expensive brownstone row houses with fancy little cafes. It was a conscious bid to try to a) idealize the ghetto as some kind of cultural engine (jazz, Harlem, the Black Panthers and black nationalism, the civil rights movement); b) emphasize an indictment of the white man c) to reach inner-city children who were a challenge for educators at the time -- despite Head Start, despite various "Great Society" programs, children weren't learning to read.
If it truly was a national TV show that was really reflecting "all children" or "most children" it would have been set in a suburban home because most Americans were living in suburbs and small towns by then, not urban inner cities. The 1950s saw to that! So there was an essential "Big Lie" about all this that I found really untrustworthy. They didn't set the show in somebody's back yard in suburbia to convey their lessons (like Barney did). They didn't set their show in a sort of make believe village with things like the post man or the milk man, but without any sort of cultural meme like "the stoop" or "the garbage cans in the alley" (like Blue's Clues). They made it seem as if "we were all on the street now" with the "brothers". Black Panthers finally tamed and domesticated lol.
And yes, I get it. Puppets. Avatars. Evil corporations buying out creative people with puppets. Yeah, I get all that, I totally grok it. But don't forget before the Sesame puppets, there was Capt. Kangaroo, same producer. And before that, was Kukla, Fran, and Ollie and before that -- lots of other stuff, you know "human civilization" and "cultures from around the world" LOL.
Here's a good example of how Fran wove the ad for the gadgets (the washing machine of that era) right into the show:
And remember Sheri Lewis? Lambchop? Didn't you adore Lambchop?!
Lewis was born as Sonia Phyllis Hurwitz to Abraham Hurwitz, an education professor at Yeshiva University, according to Wikipedia. So she came from a very literary family interested in education. And was a skilled puppeteer, ventriloquist and dancer whose acts adopted a lot of the old Odessa vaudeville tunes.
I remember as a student in the Soviet Union going to numerous cheap shows and plays and acts which the Soviet Union was very good at subsidizing and putting on for the masses, and sometimes feeling as if I was watching Sheri Lewis and Lambchop or Kukla, Fran and Ollie or a Disney cartoon -- because in part, that's where they got their routines.
It's fascinating to see the blending of traditions on her show: bluegrass meets vaudeville lol -- great stuff!
Historical footage of vaudeville. Vaudeville was about educating the middle class, as you can read on Wikipedia and other sites -- it was about sanitizing bawdy culture and removing liquor and creating more tame entertainment for the masses.
Kukla is the Russian word for "doll" or "puppet"; there used to be a show called "Kukly" on Russian TV that parodied leaders and was cancelled; now there's another famous Russian TV show called "Mult lichnosti' (a play on the term "kult lichnosti' and the word for cartoon, which is "multik")
Yes it seems that it parodies the Russian leaders. But.. after you laugh 100 times watching this wildly popular youtube in Russia from last New Year's, you realize, oh, it's reinforcing in fact the national myth, that these people are in power because they "clean up corruption", etc.
This perfect example of it makes use of the Odessa-type vaudeville routine widely used in Soviet culture too.
Some of the culture of early Soviet as well as American television emerges from secular Jewish culture and East European culture.
It's interesting to follow the career of Solomon Mikhoels, murdered by Stalin, for example. Says Wikipedia,
"Yiddish theater, most notably Moscow State Jewish Theater directed by Solomon Mikhoels, also played a prominent role in the arts scene of the Soviet Union until Stalin's 1948 reversal in government policy toward the Jews"
The most famous multi-cultural scene in Soviet television was this, from the 1936 movie, Circus, written by Alexandrov, the famous writer Isaac Babel and others, in which Mikhoels has a cameo scene:
It was written at the time of the Nazi uprising, and the Soviet anti-fascist efforts.
If you don't know Russian and the Soviet Union, it might be hard to understand what is happening here:
The white Russian actress had a lover who was black and gave birth to a racially mixed boy -- later there is an attempt to blackmail her over this. She was ostracized from the circus, but the audience then rallied behind her. First, a Russian woman sings a lullabye, then hands the boy to a Ukrainian man who sings in Ukrainian, then another man who sings in Georgian, then another etc. etc. through various nationalities and then the last one in line is Solomon Mikhoels himself, who, with a bespectacled partner next to him, croon to the little boy in Yiddish.
More on his career -- he had an enormous influence on world culture, both as a supporter of the Soviet project and its victim.
So the unedited version contains Mikhoels himself holding the baby and crooning a Yiddish song to him -- Stalin later purged this scene from that 1936 film when he purged Mikhoels - he was assassinated, as were other Jews in the Doctors' Plot and so on.
There has been some ambivalence about Mikhoels, and some leftist secular Jews who did not want to portray communism in a negative light, so they also played down what happened to him. You can read about this history here -- on the one hand, some Jews found the Soviet Union a utopian hope (they had been massacred under the Tsar) and a positive thing, and thought that Soviet government would save Yiddish culture; on the other hand, the Soviet leaders turned out to be antisemitic themselves and murdered a lot of Jews as well. This part of history doesn't always come out.
For example, some years ago, I was shocked when I went to an exhibit at the Jewish museum in New York on Chagall, part of which had an exhibit about Mikhoels, that simply said he died in an accident and didn't explain he was killed by Stalin, which by then was an indisputable historic fact. Chagall's teacher, who was Jewish, was also killed in 1937, and one has to wonder what happened to him and who is responsible. I found the silence on Mikhoels appalling, and wrote a letter of complaint to the curator.
Another typical style for the anti-fascist Soviet propaganda cartoons. The Soviets borrowed from American Disney, of course, but who influenced whom?
Well, we're a long way from Sesame Street, perhaps, when we traverse the road from Soviet culture and the Soviet film and television industry, but I think there are connections. And my point is that it is a certain sensibility, a certain cultural stance that gets conveyed -- a culture of secularism, a culture of multiculturalism, a positive culture, but one that has its flaws and pitfalls, one that in fact contains within it the seeds of hatred of nationalities simply for being nationalities; one that scrubs out some nationalities as insufficiently "instructive"; one that is opportunistic. Remember, before we had "multiculturalism," we had another national myth: "the melting pot". Canada had a myth that was different: "the mosaic".
Before multiculturalism got started in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, it had a very, very long run in the Soviet Union, and the borrowings of that culture were made directly by the American left, with figures like Paul Robeson.
In one sense, the notion of the secular, multicultural society is one I largely agree with, and largely support as a good thing. What, you'd rather have Balkan and Caucasian wars? Yes, secularism is necessary in a multiethnic state. Otherwise, you get the Holocaust, or quite frankly, the Gulag (Stalin was no better).
There is a lot to be said for the values of internationalism. And there is an enormous amount of positive contribution to America's essentially insular and provincial culture -- which needed it -- from the secular Jewish cultural trove in the internationalist movement.
But there are areas where I obviously disagree. And the failure to condemn communism -- even communism that harmed their own secular leaders -- that I refuse to endorse. And it leads to an overall leftism that I find unacceptable that tends to lie about things that don't fit the picture, or to use stealth methods on certain things that aren't acceptable to the mainstream. This topic is nearly impossible to raise because of the legacy of Hollywood communism and McCarthyism. I don't care. It needs to be raised. You don't have to be for firing people from their jobs much less killing them if you are critical of their celebration of an ideology that in fact was all about firing people from their jobs and killing them! Otherwise, it would never have been at issue!
In any event, this is not an academic piece, it's a blog with my subjective impressions. Some one else might come along with their Ph.D. thesis and prove me wrong. But I do think the avatar, the puppet, the cartoon in the hands of the American children's television educators is a highly politicized and not at all wholly beneficial phenomenon. Again, I submit that by glorifying the ghetto, they glorified the unattractive violent ghetto culture inevitably, making it appear as if it was "a norm" to live in a poor tenament house, and absorbing this lesson more than the advertisement for the letter "P" -- we can be bad, and they will cater to us; we can celebrate a low culture and dysfunctional culture, and they will cater to us.
Children's television writing on public television was a leftist cultural revolution. It was one that obviously arose counter to mainstream cultural propagation like the 1960s sit-coms which featured lovely white-bread white families like the Cleavers or My Three Sons. But interestingly, when the 1970s mainstream television writers set about, under pressure, to try to make TV "look like America," and include more blacks, they developed stories like the Bill Cosby Show that featured a doctor and his wife in a suburban home, not a ghetto street with a stoop.
Angela Merkel (originally from the GDR, a communist country that featured multiculturalism as a Soviet cultural norm) ultimately declared multiculturalism (as practiced in Germany, anyway) as a "failure". The Turkish and other Muslim guest workers aren't "assimilating" and Germans are unhappy.
Where is Solomon Mikhoels when we need him now, to croon to the dark-skinned babies?!
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