I've been working for some time on a new blog entry. It's full of anger and spite and vitriol and self-righteousness. But I'm not done yet, and I may still come to my senses and not post it.

In the mean time, so that I'm not a total killjoy, I'm going to talk about something happy and life affirming.

I'm going to talk about Mr. Rogers.

I had a dream last night wherein Peter Jennings and I were working on a news piece about a Mr. Rogers best-of anthology. Being a dream, a lot of other weird and inexplicable things happened (But, I assue you, nothing weird and creepy that was directly Mr. Rogers-related). A while ago, the world lost Mr. Fred Rogers, and I think most people who have any opinion at all on the subject would have to concede that the world is a worse place for his loss.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most kids shows today suck. It's not a total wasteland (Between The Lions isn't bad), but still. A lot of sucking. I'm sure that this is mostly me being an Old Fuddy Duddy. Kids shows of today seem less clever than kids shows of ages past because I'm smarter than I was in ages past (But, eg. Square One TV and 3-2-1 Contact really *were* unusually smart for children's educational programming). Whatever I think of Pokemon, it's really no more a shameless excuse to justify merchandising than GI Joe or the Transformers were (I did something bad when I was a kid, and my parents forbade me to see the Transformers movie. It was my own personal Itchy and Scratchy Movie [.01 points]. I finally did get to see it in 2001, and was amazed that I'd been so disappointed at the time for what was a painfully obvious rip-off of Star Wars.). But I think that there's at least a little more going on than my being Old. Kids shows today seem to be all about the Speech Impediment. Sesame Street, which I think has for a very long time been the archetype for children's educational programming, is little more than a life-support-system for Elmo these days. All the great monsters of ages past are playing second-banana to a cast of younger, hipper, and, for some reason, speech-impaired morons (Elmo himself is totally unable to use pronouns. Baby Bear has a lisp. And there's this little cereulian thing that whines all the time).

Kids shows didn't used to have to condescend. I'll grant you, every kids show had a monkey. Not always a literal monkey, though they were popular. I'm talking about the not-human-but-anthropomorphic sidekick who was nonverbal or barely-verbal who had a penchant for getting into trouble, but also frequently saved the day by virtue of the villain ignoring them when they tied the hero up. But Snarf, Copper Kid, Chimp-chimp, and Slimer [2, 3, 1, and .7 points, respectively] were never the focus of the show: they were the comic relief. And, perhaps more importantly, we always hated them. It was the network execs who liked them (Like clowns. Kids hate clowns. Parents take their kids to see clowns because *they* think kids like clowns.). Now, they're running the show.

I think the key difference that I'm working toward is that there's two competing philosophies. The Elmo Character is the infantile simpleton who is discovering the world with the viewer. In current shows, the focus is on the audience-avatar; the character who is supposed to be doing the learning. In my day (God, I sound old), the focus was on the character who was doing the teaching. The mature character (Yeah. I just called Grover a mateur character. Compared to Elmo, he is) was the focus, and it was the kids at home doing the learning. And the reason I think this was better is that kids don't need "guy just like you". Kids need heroes.

But I've gotten side-tracked. Mister Rogers is a lot different from Sesame Street. Sesame Street is all about the Letter and Number of the Day. And that's fine, but I think that what really made Mister Rogers something special was that he wasn't really about teaching kids something specific. Mister Rogers was about love and respect. Big Bird taught you that 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' wasn't a word. Mr. Rogers taught you that you were special. He taught you that it was okay to be sad sometimes, and that your parents loved you even when they were mad at you, and that you were a good person and deserved to be loved. Also, he had a trolley.

I've looked, though maybe not as hard as I should, given the dire pronouncement I'm making on modern children's television, but I don't see anything coming out today that has so simple, so important, and so beautiful a message. You are special. It's you I like. It didn't matter to Mr. Rogers if you were rich or poor or black or white or Jewish or Christian or Hindu or Muslim or Hispanic or disabled (Did you ever notice that on Children's Television, being something other than a white middle-class christian more or less defined you? If you were Hispanic, it meant that you were fluent in Spanish, and occasionally slipped into Spanish accidentally. You were incapable of eating anything other than mexican food. If you were Jewish, you'd whip out a dreidel given any opportunity. Ethnic superheroes, like Miss Piggy, were somehow unable to use personal pronouns in English (You know the word 'neutrino' but not 'I'?) They taught us white kids not to be prejudiced, because when we were asking ouselves "How prejudiced should I be?" we'd say "Well, not as prejudiced as the guys who write Captain Planet." [0 points because I'm going to give it to you: http://www.seanbaby.com/superfriends/eldorado.htm]): Mr. Rogers's love was unconditional. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home with parents who, for their other shortcomings, loved me a lot and told me so on an approximately daily basis. But some other kids were not so fortunate. I think it's really something that, so long as Mr. Rogers was around, every kid had someone out there who would tell them they were a worthwhile person. And even kids who did have loving parents, I think, benefitted from knowing that they could be loved for something other than an ingrained biological imperative.

I have three personal heroes (Though I might add some more if I think really hard about it.). One is Hugh Hefner (Not for his money. Not for the women. That's all really nice, but what really does it for me is that he gets to go to work in his pajamas. Whenever he feels like it.). The second one is my dad (Because he taught me a good 55-65% of everything I know, and he's one of the first and only people to teach me that being smart and being knowledgable are good things. And because when I went off to college, he warned me about the temptations of partying, drinking, drugs, and sex, and then said "Just remember: everything in moderation, son."). And my third hero is Fred Rogers.

Mr Rogers's last public appearance (If memory serves) was a monologue recorded in 2002, explaining, for the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, that the scenes children were seeing on their televisions weren't actually happening then, so they didn't need to get scared all over again. Thank you, Mr. Rogers.

Won't you please? Won't you please? Please, won't you be my neighbor?

[Updated: 7:40 PM: On this date in 1969, Sesame Street Premiered. Happy Birthday.]
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