Wake up, reader, I think I got somethin’ to say to you. It’s early October (as of this writing) and I really should be… blathering about the election? Right?
Well, lucky for you, everyone with the byline is already gassing like so many distended colons about November’s big-ticket throwdown. If you need your fix, click over to the New York Times editorial page and browse a thousand paeans to Queen Kamala. But if you’re a normal, non-neurotic citizen, I’ll give your ears a rest from CNN-style prognosticating. Besides, I’ve been over the election since two Augusts ago, more than ready to shrug off the results and move on with my little life. The candidates, pace Homer, fail to make me want to vomit in terror. More like upchuck in acedia. As my age ticks up, I find my attention span youthens, retrograding to that of a TikZonked Gen Zer. If I could swipe through an Insta reel of election-night returns, and save myself the agony of Jesse Watters’s groanful Kamala cracks, my thumb would slide scroll faster than speed-running Super Mario World.
Alas, the fate of the free world doesn’t have a “skip outcome” setting. But we can, like the ascetic St. Augustine, incline our mind elsewhere, to more important matters than whose trembling hands grasp the nuclear football. Like children’s books, for instance.
No, no, no, this column isn’t turning into a souk for MAGA kids drivel. Fear not: I’m not peddling fantasy laminate tracts about a brave lion king who lost his crown thanks to a Venezuelan hack job.
I’m referring to a tried and trusted franchise: The Berenstain Bears. (Yes, that is the putatively correct spelling, Mandela Effect criers notwithstanding.) On a recent trip up-and-back-again to Pennsylvania, I passed by what should be recognized by Congress as a literary institution: The Book House, a second-hand bookstore in a quaint strip mall off US-15 in Dillsburg. Stacked floor to ceiling with pawned off volumes, the “House” offers your usual mix of paperbacks foraged from your later grandmother’s molding bookshelves. There’s the requisite antiquities cabinet placed strategically by the cashier, which, while not holding a first edition of Tender Is the Night, displays plenty of rare-seeming leatherbounds marked high enough to brace my wallet, lest my wife force me to sleep in the yard.
The shoppe also boasts a sizable kids section, with the usual offerings of Disney Princess classics and a respectable credenza piled tightly with those early century Cupples & Leon hardbacks that feature children demonstrating such musty morals like “telling the truth” and “obey your parents.” Hello, American Library Association, I’ve found some ban-worthy books!
Of course, there’s always a handful of Berenstain Bears softbacks for sale, which I tend to pick up for my older daughter. On this excursion, I picked up a curious title Eager Beavers, the copy, which, I gather from the familiar golden arches on the cover, was once a Happy Meal lagniappe. It was one my daughter’s first bedtime story pick that night.
Eager Beavers starts off normally enough: everyone’s favorite anthropomorphic bear family (not counting the orphan Winnie-the-Pooh) are lazing in their treehouse front yard when their neighbor across the street Mr. Skunk suddenly up-sticks, packing his Chevy pickup and spiriting off, not before offering the Bears a hasty goodbye. Then suburban wonder and dread kick in: the Bears fret about who will move in next. What kind of family will it be? Stinky and loud? Disruptive and rude? Discourteous and trashy?
They don’t have to wait long before a colony of beavers puts in an offer on the Skunk house. (Is it a sign of some mental deficiency in these inflationary times to wonder what prime mortgage rate the Berenstain world’s central bank is offering?) Papa Bear, spying their paddle tails and buck teeth, goes full-on Archie Bunker, warning his kids that beavers are “the hardest working critters known to nature. Bunch of workaholics.”
Better call the Bear Country CPP—Papa is a nasty racist! Brother Bear, who hasn’t had enough DEI training yet to inform on his father to the authorities, innocently asks, “What’s a workaholic, Papa?”
Papa Bear, blessedly for young readers, doesn’t launch into a xenophobic diatribe about how beavers are migrating (possibly illegally!) to Bear Country to steal all the good jobs like nicking nectar honey from beehives. He provides a more anodyne—and thus, more insidious!—answer: “It’s someone who doesn’t know how to have fun.”
Now, if you aren’t jolted into burning Eager Beavers on account of its wholesome-washing bigotry, you can read on to see that Papa’s stereotype has, like all categorical clichés, more than a kernel of truth. The Beavers are industrious, never fiddling around with such trivialities like playing catch or lounging. The Bears, particularly the patriarch, come off as lazy in contrast, which Mama Bear is quick to nag about.
So what’s the next natural thing to happen? No, Papa Bear doesn’t found a nativist Do Nothing political party, running for public office on a platform of deporting those who poison the fine stock of Bear Country. That might be too realistic. Instead, what Ludwig von Mises referred to as the “evenly rotating economy” dynamic takes hold. The Beavers buff up the outside of their humble dwelling while the Bears bat around a baseball in their yard. The families eye each other, first scoffing at the respective lolling and toiling, then, eventually, adopting a little of each other’s ethic. Papa Bear starts putting his front steps in good repair, Mr. Beaver asks his son to take a homework break and play checkers with him. Gradually, they let the attitudes of their opposites influence their behavior, bringing about a new social equilibrium.
The Italian philosopher René Girard called this “keeping up with the Joneses” desire “mimetic rivalry.” Or, to put differently, I once had a community college professor explain to our class that he considered competition the invisible force behind everything. The impulses are refractions: to emulate more desirable traits of others. This pattern co-opting is the engine of life, from commercial advertising, to attracting mates, to vying for the love of a parent, to besting the crosstown team on the gridiron, to joining the mob madness by chucking a rock like the peeved off marcher next to you, we model ourselves off others, trying to satisfy the inner need for superiority.
From politics to children’s books, mimesis is everywhere. That’s something to chew on as we approach the grand herding match known as Election Day.
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