Creepy: Now They've Gotten To Cookie Monster

From my limited memory of Catch-22:

"Where's Dunbar?" Yossarian wanted to know.

"They disappeared him."

"Dissappeared him? What does that mean? Where is he?"

"No one knows," Doc Daneeka said. "He's disappeared."

"Who did this? Who are 'They'?"

"They are the ones who disappeared him," Doc Daneeka said sagely. "It's best to not ask too many questions. Because They might be listening."

To borrow from another cynically humorous take on WWII, "And so it goes."

They got Cookie Monster. They disappeared him. He was once in fact a "Cookie" Monster, but...

...not according to the well-meaning social engineers of PBS. After three decades, they’ve announced he’s not a Cookie Monster at all. In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, “C is for Cookie� has been changed to “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food.� And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster’s ontology, his telos, his raison d’etre, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness.

If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he? Why didn’t they just name him “Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie�? Conceptually, this is no different than the idiot animal rights types who want their dogs and cats to be vegans, too. Cookie Monster cannot help being a Cookie Monster any more than your tabby can stop liking fish. It is their nature to do so. Why not just declare that Big Bird is now an elm tree? If the ineffable, inexorable, immutable nature of Cookie Monster’s cookie-eating can be erased for some good cause, why should Big Bird’s birdness be safe?

Just keep in mind that these are the same sorts of jackasses who are against teaching abstinence in high school or middle school as an effective way to avoid pregnancy and STD's.

That's just silly, they say. Kids are going to have sex no matter what we say.

But, apparently, if Cookie Monster now acknowleges cookies to be a "sometimes food" to be consumed in moderation as part of an otherwise balanced and nutritious meal regimen, that that, you see, will turn the kids off the cookies and on to, say, brussel sprouts.

Right.

If that will work, why not introduce a new Muppet, "Gina, The Green Hairy Monster Who Believes In Waiting For the Right Man At the Right Time," who can sing songs like "Anything he wants, give him slightly less, and he'll still be happy about it, because he's a horny bastard and will probably have an orgasm if you just wink at his package."

I haven't really worked out the meter or the rhyme. I don't do this for a living. This is all, like, new to me.

Thanks to NickS.

posted by Ace at 10:46 AM

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