Oct 26, 2005
Book Review
Lessons For Little Dittoheads
Though I don't lean as far left as, say, a Howard Dean supporter circa 2003, when I read and hear about the Christian Right cashing in its political capital, and the Bush Administration bending over backwards to placate them, it makes my skin crawl. Of course, I generally try not to let my political leanings get in the way of my book reviews: who the hell wants to read that kind of tedium?
But in the case of Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed (Kids Ahead, 2005), the first in what promises to be a series by the pseudonymous Katherine DeBrecht, it's difficult if not impossible to leave my opinions out of this latest salvo (albeit a pathetic one) in the nation's current culture wars.
I'd have been just as happy to ignore Help! Mom!, as I do anything by Ann Coulter or Chuck Krauthammer, but for one thing: now The Right is attempting to indoctrinate children into its culture of free-market hate speech. True to form, however, the finished product expends so much effort on name-calling, it ends up a sloppy rehash of the same dribble you can find on AM radio any day of the week.
Tommy and Lou, two good ol' patriotic Christian (with a capital "c") boys, want to open a lemonade stand to save up for the swing set that their parents refuse to purchase for them. Dad says hard work is important for character, which sets up these good kids' first foray into do-it-yourself capitalism.
But then dark clouds appear. "Liberals" begin pouring out of the woodwork to tax, secularize, tax some more, regulate, continue taxing, and eventually just seize the lemonade stand for their own personal gain. Thankfully, it's only a bad dream that Tommy and Lou share, for they know that those bad liberals couldn't really do all these terrible things; at least not until they regain some political clout, that is.
Except DeBrecht gets a few of the details wrong during her liberal-bashing. Take her tax rates, for instance, a compelling subject for the 12-year-old, or 9-year-old, or whichever age (and that's patently unclear) this book is written for: The mayor of Liberaland takes fully half of the boys' lemonade money, rather than the standard 28 percent that Tommy and Lou's hardworking parents might pay, judging from the drawings of their modest home.
Or there's the guy from the LCLU (like the ACLU, but in Liberaland, get it?), who tells the boys that they have to remove the picture of Jesus from the sign on their stand. DeBrecht doesn't seem to get the subtle difference between posting a picture of Christ in a private business or in the statehouse, but then this book is about as subtle as Congresswoman Hilary Clunkton's pink pantsuit.
When that same Congresswoman threatens the boys with a law that reduces the amount of sugar in their lemonade because of a Senator who hails from Taxachussetts, it begins to come clear exactly how lacking in imagination Help! Mom! really is.
Like the vitriolic talkshows that crowd the airwaves, LeBrecht paints her liberals with a broad brush, promoting her book with quotes like "liberals oppose anything that supports religion, traditional families and the free market. Those institutions are obstacles to their goals of eliminating personal responsibility and establishing a welfare state."
And no, I didn't make that up. It's actually possible that all of us so-called liberals oppose her hypocritical, unoriginal, hate-filled and twisted stereotyping, but DeBrecht dismisses any criticism as liberal blather. For someone who's proud of her credentials as a Security Mom for Bush, she's quick to condemn the fund-raising tactics of the politicians in her story, yet she helped the president raise more money than any other candidate in our nation's history.
And one question, Katherine: if you truly support working hard and paying your dues, just like Tommy and Lou's family, why are you charging $15.95 for a children's book, printed in China, that you were too cheap to have properly edited?
Plaudits come from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who most definitely sees this book as education for the next generation of dittoheads. The back cover features praise from two sources as well: some other radio talkshow host, who writes that Help! Mom! "makes it easy to explain a complicated world." Um, liberals bad, conservatives good, taxes suck, end of story? The other quote comes from Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, a man who would like to do away with government altogether, and of whom New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman - not exactly known for his own liberal credentials - wrote after Hurricane Katrina: "I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town." Which in this book's instance makes sense. It's obvious by the way Tommy and Lou can't even write the letters of the alphabet correctly that their school system, starved for public funds, is failing them.
Chances are this piece of crap story might be headed to a bookstore near you. Like the LCLU, er, ACLU, I'm against banning books, but if you happen to find Help! Mom! in the children's section, let the management know that it's miscategorized: it should be restocked on the propaganda and hate speech shelves.
Joel Magalnick
Seattle writer Joel Magalnick has trouble separating his own laundry, let alone church and state.
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