11 March: "Kermit the Frog ‘gets’ my existential/social crisis"

This post is about the stifling of revolutionary consciousness. On its face it deals with a puppet that figures in bourgeois children's entertainment, a preposterous green frog that speaks platitudes in a nasal voice meant to soothe young children who have turned to television to escape the loveless disciplinary embraces of their parents. Carles dispatches the notion that this "lovable" character of Kermit can be anything other than a capitalist-roader stooge with this lucid analytical passage:

Sometimes I wonder why the characters from childhood educational shows are such relevant figures in our lives’. Maybe it’s bc they represent ideals which parents feel comfortable ‘outsourcing’ to fictional characters. These creatures have a better chance of conveying these critical themes to us than our parents who are not ‘vulns’ enough 2 talk 2 us about life/issues. 95% of kids find ‘miscellaneous creatures’ to be easier to talk to than elders like parents, teachers, or civic/community leaders.

The bogus statistic, the sociological generalizing, the psychotropism of the late 20th century middle-class family, the evocation of humanist idealism within the explicitly commercial context of children's television, which function mainly to generate design ideas for commoditized toys -- all this conveys the brilliant parodic mode in which Carles conveys his most trenchant insights. In case the point was missed, Carles then wryly associates Kermit with a "Collective" to underscore the irony with heavy chalk.

Analyzing the signature tune through which Kermit indoctrinated children in the impotence of the Reality Principle, Carles notes that the frog "starts out singing about his ‘desire to stand out.’ He wishes he could have a different skin colour/be a different person on the outside. He feels ‘ordinary.’ He is sad. He wishes he could be unique. We all just wanna be special, yall." Through these narcissistic psychological leanings does pre-revolutionary consciousness peter out into garden variety egoism. "In the second half of the song, Kermit starts to accept the fate/circumstances that God and society have assigned him," Carles notes grimly. The reality principle returns with a vengeance: "These are messages that our parents wish they were able to communicate to us."

His analysis of another degenerate slab of musical treacle reinforces the point:

Cookie Monster represents ur ‘desire for more of stuff that tastes/feels good.’ He has no self-control. In his song “C is for Cookie”, he accepts that something as simple as a “cookie” is “good enough for me.” This is a song about accepting that life might not be THAT meaningful, but maybe u should just be happy about small stuff, and stop trying to search for big lifechanges 2 make u happy.

Again the quietist bias in children's "entertainment" is plain. We are programming our children to accept life in preformed shapes, precluding the very possibility of conceiving resistance. Human species being is reduced to a vacuous hedonism in which life's struggles amount to cookie hoarding. That's how the revolution crumbles.