on the fortieth anniversary of sesame street, i have a project for its producers: count how many times you counted from one to ten.

some things i wrote about ss over the years:

(1) The truly dark age of the cartoon, however, extended from around 1970 to 1985. The chaotic anti-authoritarianism of Daffy and the Yippies atrophied into a grim political correctness. Sesame Street, though not a cartoon, was the model of the new children's programming: devoted above all to affirmative action and sledge-hammer didacticism. Soon every children's program was conceived as a piece of moral or educational training rather than as an entertainment. Childhood became as a pure training-ground for adulthood, and there was to be not a moment's surcease from the improving messages.

(2) Children's video in the seventies and eighties became an utter blank, a politically correct insipidity, a mindless parade of friendly tokens. The Care Bears, Sesame Street, and Barney taught moral lessons that no one could possibly disagree with, or else they muttered the numbers 1-10 thousands of time as if that were "educational."

(3) If whining out the numbers 1-10 for the 5,243,291st time were entertainment, Big Bird would be Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. The first generation of kids raised on Sesame Street responded by becoming the hardcore neo-nazi skinhead punks of the early eighties. They shot heroin and loved mindless destruction, yet they were the merest amateurs at nihilism. The second generation understood that resistance was useless, and with a frozen Big Bird smile, Al Gore welcomed them all - regardless of race, creed, religion, ethnicity, class, gender, disability, learning style, sexual orientation, age, or the size of their buttocks - to the Pure Void.