A pop culture critic for the New York Times is getting triggered by cartoons created for a conservative audience mostly because it appears she can’t believe that fathers could be interested enough in their children to become involved in their education and upbringing.
Culture critic Amanda Hess kicked off her Dec. 18 criticism gripes by briefly describing the Australian cartoon, “Bluey.”
Hess introduced “Bluey” as being “praised for its rare and complex depiction of parents” because one of the main characters, Bandit the dog, is an “exceptional father” for his puppy children and keeps house while mommy dog, Chilli, goes to work each day.
Hess was not altogether amused at a series that features a stay-at-home dad who appears to love his children. She found the family dynamic unrealistic.
“He is not only a good father — he is a fantasy, one crafted to appeal to adults as much as to children,” Hess spit at doggie daddy Bandit.
Hess noted that when she puts “Bluey” on for her child, she is being “very un-Bandit.” She explained, saying, “I am not engaged in focused play that follows my child’s imagination wherever it leads. I am cleaning. My son is staring at a screen.”
Hess went on to make a strange claim about her son’s cartoon preferences.
“My son’s favorite show is not ‘Bluey’ but ‘Mickey Mouse Clubhouse,’ in which Mickey’s parentage is irrelevant. He is a godlike figure who answers to no one. That is a fantasy for children — total parental obsolescence.”
Does Hess really think that her little boy is choosing his entertainment by evaluating which shows have no parents in it? Well, she clearly is a left-winger (unsurprisingly, she’s previously written for the leftist website Slate), so I guess that it really is possible that her son doesn’t want to be reminded that he has a mom when he’s watching his favorite shows.
Is it wrong to show family values in cartoons?
Hess went on to blast Bandit for being a parent who is there for his cartoon kids.
“So Bandit’s omnipresence is odd, and striking. He is like Mary Poppins, stitching together a family with creative prop work,” Hess wrote. “His closest analogues in children’s media are not other parents, but the fools and tricksters that children encounter when they are allowed to roam unsupervised. Bandit represents a parent freed of drudgery, one whose central responsibility is delighting his kids.”
All this is bad enough, granted. But Hess goes farther off the rails when she gets to the second half of her article and goes into blasting the Daily Wire’s new cartoon, “Chip Chilla,” featuring a family of chinchillas, which she noted is similar to “Bluey,” a family of dogs, because both have “weirdly present parents.”
Again, Hess is sure that there is no such thing as a “present” parent. Apparently, she feels that no parent is interested enough in their children to be “present” for them.
And as “bad” as “Bluey” might be for Hess, a similar cartoon on The Daily Wire is even worse.
In fact, when conservative commentator Ben Shapiro founded The Daily Wire in 2015 with fellow commentator and movie maker Jeremy Boreing, it was aimed at producing content that would drive liberals out of their minds. With “Chip Chilla” and Amanda Hess, that goal has clearly been met.
The Daily Wire cartoon is similar in many ways to “Bluey” in that the kids are home with dad. But in “Chip Chilla,” the dad is a home schooler — not just a house husband — and the premise of the show is that father Chum Chum teaches classic history to his kiddies by staging little plays in which they participate as a family.
Hess disapprovingly pointed out that Boreing has described the message of “Chip Chilla” as a conservative one.
“It matters,” Boreing said last year when he introduced the program, long before an episode was to air. “It matters because kids go to school 40 hours a week, and then they engage in pop culture for 40 more hours every week. That means for 80 hours of a child’s week, you are turning them over to the left.”
.@JeremyDBoreing: “I want to give you an update on @DailyWirePlus. In the spring of 2023, we will be rolling out our very first kids content… I have for you…the first tiny teaser of our very first animated show, Chip Chilla.”
pic.twitter.com/0k3OTHZBjd— DW Entertainment (@DailyWireEnt) June 30, 2022
Hess was not amused. She tsk tsks the cartoon because she doesn’t appreciate its “fantasy.”
“With ‘Chip Chilla,’ conservative parents can fulfill a fantasy of their own, combating the perceived indoctrination of public school by screening home-school-themed content afterward, featuring lessons about dead white people and classic texts,” she scolded.
Hess called the father character Chum Chum a “throwback to the lazy sitcom dad,” sneered that the mom in “Chip Chilla” is the one “holding the laundry basket,” and she also seemed to think it is impossible to be a perfect mother.
“The ‘Bluey’ family feels progressive, ‘Chip Chilla’ traditional,” Hess exclaimed, “but their vision of paternal whimsy is shared. It is harder to construct a fantasy mom that way. The perfect mother must be a lot of things, and few of them are very fun. The base line expectation of selfless devotion leaves little room for experimentation.”
Hess concluded by insisting that cartoons need to get moms and dads out of the way to allow a “child to experience risk, adventure, failure and growth.”
In the end, it is clear that Hess — like the left-wing media in general — despises a traditional family, assumes men simply don’t care much about their own children, and believes that kids need no parental guidance to “experience risk, adventure, failure and growth.”
And that pretty much explains the childish, irresponsible ignorance of the American left today. No wonder they’re triggered so easily.
