D.B.Tarpley's Amazing Ass Blog-6/26/18

Greetings and salutations people and peoplettes,

I was recently invited to attend a screening of ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor’ – a documentary about Fred Rogers and the cultural impact his show had throughout the years it ran. I had seen the trailer and felt it was something I wanted to see. I should preface this by saying that as a child I wanted nothing to do with ‘Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.’ If it was on I would immediately change the channel or turn it off. It might be that I caught it too late in my development. I was raised in a military family and as such spent much of my developmental years in Germany watching AAFES television which did not carry the program. No, I gravitated towards sexier children’s programming like ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘The Electric Company’ before graduating to ‘He-Man’/ ‘G.I.Joe’/ and ‘Inspector Gadget’.

‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood’ has always struck me as disingenuous. I realize that it is about as genuine as you can get if you are grading intention. But in the age of the electronic babysitter, surrounded by the previously mentioned sexier, market-driven media… that which is genuine becomes disingenuous by virtue of context. In other words my younger self had already become jaded to the point that the overly sanguine message presented by the program did not ring true to me.

The documentary itself does a very good job of going over Mr. Roger’s career and his driving will to present his message of positivity to the world at large, especially through the shotgun barrel of his show directly into the noggins of impressionable children everywhere. There is no doubt in my mind that Fred Rogers was an incredible man. He had the singularly unique vision that kindness and love were the only emotions anyone anywhere should ever express. And I heard time and time again that if there were more people like Fred Rogers that this world would be a better place. And I cannot disagree with the face of that statement. Having said this, my take away from the documentary was undoubtedly different than that of most people who left the theater.

As previously mentioned the film does an excellent job of going over Mr. Roger’s life, even going so far as to portray a childhood rife with dark/ depressive issues. The film presents that Fred Rogers spent much of his early childhood bedridden from a variety of common childhood diseases of the day. In addition to this he grew up in a privileged Protestant household with cold – unloving parents who apparently discouraged the expression of any effervescent emotion whatsoever. I would almost go so far as to say that the severity of what Fred Rogers experienced could be categorized as emotional abuse and that he was most definitely psychologically scarred by this upbringing. In addition to this, he was a pudgy child and as such severely bullied throughout his early school career.

It becomes clear early on that the man never learned to properly process and or express his emotions as evidenced by his penchant for speaking through puppets rather than one on one interactions. Even in his family life when he felt the need to say something negative he used a certain character voice so that it was the character and not him saying it. This was at home, as an adult, in private, around his family dinner table; that is how emotionally stunted Fred Rogers was. I could tell that the filmmakers wanted this anecdote to be a humorous revelation about the man but I found it to be a deeply disturbing portrait of severely unhealthy behavior.

The portrait of the man I saw was one of a sad, depressive individual who spent his entire life hiding from the real world through his constant and pervasive interactions with children. His intentions were beautiful but ultimately, as previously mentioned, unhealthy in my opinion. As far as the social assist his program attempted to provide I have to agree that many kudos are in order for the effort. He took great pains to promote racial equality and handle weighty issues such as death and divorce. His efforts should not only be commended but also recognized as ahead of their time in respect to their timeless quality of universally recognized good. One area he did fail on, if you want to call it that, was his public acknowledgement of the homosexual lifestyle even though his good friend and show collaborator, Francois Clemmons, was gay. In the documentary his wife divulges that they ‘had many gay friends’. I can forgive this failure though as one of my biggest pet peeves is looking back on history through contemporary eyes. At the running of his show, the audience was not ready to handle that particular social sin. Homosexuality itself was considered an official psychological disorder well into the eighties.

If you took the staunchest black militant in the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement and said, “Imagine you are the white son of a white southern slave owner in 1786 and you are about to inherit the plantation. Will you be owning slaves like all your neighbors or will you run your farm with less cost effective paid labor?” Anyone who seriously sits down and thinks about this will have to consider their probable complicity in the social sin of slavery. It is an evil but it is also an evil of conditions. In other words, in a certain context, everything becomes situational.

Life is not black and white but a series of grey hues overlapping in a hodgepodge of asymmetrical majesty.

And this brings me to my main qualm with ‘Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.’ The man spent his whole life hiding from any sort of negativity and this permeated any underlying message presented on his program. But this presentation was predicated on the assumption that we are all, at heart, creatures of goodness. This is not true. We all start out innocent and then grow up to be assholes, each and every one of us in our own unique way. To believe otherwise is the height of naiveté.

Negativity is a very important part of who we are. No one should spent their life shunning all negativity, only ever choosing to espouse positivity. (This may not be a popular school of thought but life is not a Hallmark card.) We are creatures of both light and dark and to eschew the darkness is to deny our true natures… our very humanity. Sure, everyone is born innocent and given the length and severity of the bubble a person is raised in, (home schooling for example), exposure to the realities of the world can be held at bay for quite some time. But most of us experience a period, usually between junior high and college, when we ‘find ourselves’ and embrace at least part, if not all, of our darker nature. I believe it is very important to go through this phase so that we can learn to control this side of ourselves as well as to use it when necessary.

This does not mean we should not all try to do good whenever we can nor does it mean that we should not try to help our neighbor whenever and wherever we can. But that is not the totality of who we are, and if we fail to realize this then we are doing a disservice to ourselves and those around us. We all get mad sometimes, and we all get scared, and it is OK to express this. It should not run our lives but neither should the pursuit of all things ethereal. Balance in all things is important but in order for there to be balance there has to be both good and evil. We are human beings, not Angels. You know how I know this? Because Angels only exist in the stories of our minds.

Fred Rogers was a great man. No doubt. He was also a man who never learned to face his demons and then went on to tell the world that was the way to be. The only problem is that we can’t all surround ourselves with children every waking hour of every waking day like he did. We live in the real world, not the land of make believe. But this is just the opinion of one bitter old self-important man with bitter old self-important blog. Until next time, leave the pages bloody and have an amazing ass bitter old self-important day.