H.R. Puffinstuff and Britney Spears

I was not born of the Saturday morning soccer generation. When I was little, Saturday mornings were all about cartoons---the non-educational kind like Buggs Bunny and the Road Runner. The closest thing we had to thought-provoking animation was Scooby-Doo. But in 1969 NBC aired a surrealistic puppet show called H.R. Puffinstuff. I loved it. But it was not until I was well into my thirties that I became aware that H. R. Puffinstuff was an homage to marijuana. Purportedly H. R. refered to hand rolled and Puffinstuff literally meant puffing stuff. The fantasyland in which that story was cast was called Lidsville. A “lid” was vernacular for ¾ of an ounce of pot. Subliminal and allegorical messages were everywhere in the program about the glory of drugs.

I had no idea. All those references eluded me. I thought the show was about puppets.

 When my daughters were in Stewart and the Middle school it was the age of Britney Spears, Christina Aquilera and the Spice Girls. Hip hop and rap were becoming increasingly raw and had seeped into mainstream culture. President Clinton was in office and we soon learned a new anachronism—called a “Monica Lewinsky.” Parents were concerned over how all the covert and overt sexual references of the day would negatively affect the youth. It seemed that Oprah talked about sexual corruption every other week on her show. It was discussed at PTA meetings. There was genuine fear that the children of the 1990’s would make hedonisim seem virtuous.

And my daughters as well as all their friends were exposed to all of it.

Last year for her senior college class trip my daughter drove with her friends from Lewisburg PA to Hilton Head South Carolina. It was a ridiculously long journey. And to alleviate the boredom of the trip my daughter and her friends brought music CD’s of their youth. One of them was the Spice Girls. The passengers knew every word to every song. No lyric was forgotten. But it wasn’t until age 22 that any of them really paid attention to the message of the words. They were shocked to discover that the songs were about sex—lots of it. Up until then the true content had eluded them. The subject matter had never been ingested—merely masticated and then spit out.

I think sometimes adults (and I am not excluding myself) overthink children’s thinking. We forget that children are more literal creatures. The depths of their thought are more shallow than we fear. A puppet is just a puppet—not a stoner. Britney Spears is a good dancer in a school uniform, not an objectified underage Lolita. Monica Lewinsky was an intern, not an illegal act in the state of Connecticut. And Bill—he’s Hillary’s husband and Chelsea’s father who happened to be president a long time ago. And Buggs Bunny is not a sadist or a con man---he is just a bunny who does funny things.