Full disclosure: I was an oddly political child. I canvassed my fellow kindergartners to vote for Gerald Ford in our 1976 presidential mock election because I was convinced that my dad, who worked for Ford Motor Company, was employed by the incumbent. In 1980, I managed the mock re-election campaign of my fellow Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter at my elementary school. He lost. Badly. I cried. I got over it.
But, again, I was the exception. Apparently, not anymore.
Now there’s a new genre of children’s literature designed to catechize youngsters in “party values.” Political activist Jeremy Zilber has written a new book for children, Why Mommy Is a Democrat. The book features cute pictures of a cuddly maternal squirrel teaching her little ones why “Democratic values” are best. “Democrats make sure we all share our toys, just like Mommy does,” the book notes. “Democrats make sure we are all safe, just like Mommy does.”
The book promo assures us that it uses “warm and non-judgmental language” but with “numerous subtle (and not-so-subtle) swipes at the Bush Administration and the Republican Party.”
I’m all for educating our kids, including in our political philosophies. My two sons, adopted from a Russian orphanage when they were infants, know that Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan brought down the Evil Empire. They can sing along with the School House Rock version of the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” and the preamble to the Constitution. They know Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert E. Lee, and they know why Daddy admires each of them.
Still, I find this kind of humorless political propaganda for the kindergarten set a bit scary. It’s not “Uncle Joe” Stalin surrounded by smiling children, mind you, but, even so, it’s a bit strange. And I would say the same thing about a GOP version: “Republicans protect us from terrorists and evildoers, just like Daddy does.” In fact, the conservative versions already exist: think Fox News spin-caster Bill O’Reilly’s children’s book. Can Ann Coulter for Preschoolers be far behind?
At first I couldn’t put a finger on my discomfort with this until I realized: it’s Sunday school material. In Red and Blue America, we’ve so privatized our religious convictions (“We’re going to let Johnny choose whether or not he goes to church, and which one”) that all we have left is our political identities. And so much separates us now that it really matters why Mommy is a Democrat or why Daddy is a Republican, or vice-versa.
I suppose such children’s books and radio programs and television shows will only continue. Intentionally catechized Christian little ones may seem stranger and stranger as hyper-partisan America raises up its children in the nurture and admonition of Caesar.
