You Know, For Kids
+ HannahI consider Hannah Montana to be just one more signpost along the road to humanity’s doom (other such signposts include American Gladiators and the sanctioned use of synthesizers in high school marching band competitions). Every so often, something becomes popular that in my estimate really has no business being popular, and its resulting popularity drives the rest of the world beans-up-the-nose crazy in their clamor to possess it. Case in point: Tickle-Me-Elmo. People went nuts for that! Why, though? If you poked it, it trembled and made giggling noises – I could get the same results with a Jell-o mold and a tape recorder for a damn sight cheaper, but on Black Friday there were parents beating each other up in Toys-R-Us for the thing! Might I reiterate, why, though? Tickle-Me-Elmo did only one thing! Had I been a four year old who was presented with a Tickle-Me-Elmo, I would’ve given my parents a harsh tongue lashing for giving me a toy with such limited prospects for play.
Hannah Montana is the Tickle-Me-Elmo of the 21st century – a broad statement, considering that we’ve only completed roughly 8% of the 21st century so far, but should the world go crazy for a Tickle-Me-Truman doll sometime in the next 50 years, I’ll be happy to eat my words on this one. The tweenybobber pop star’s latest endeavor has been the Best of Both Worlds tour which so far has been an unparalleled success, with tickets selling out about as quickly as tickets to Elvis and The Beatles concerts back in the day, according to industry experts. Parents desperate to appease their Hannah Montanaphile children are going to great lengths to buy the neigh impossible to find tickets. Some parents stay up all night at Ticketmaster.com, waiting to buy at the very second tickets go on sale, while other parents pay thousands of dollars to scalpers or pretend that they’re war widows.
Oh, what, you didn’t hear about that last one? Priscilla Ceballos, a 25 year old mother of three from Texas who apparently drew her eyebrows on with a brown Magic Marker, helped her daughter write an essay about her father’s death in Iraq so that she could win tickets to see Hannah Montana. It’s all very sweet and tragic until you consider that the girl’s father, Jonathon Menjivar, is alive and well and has never been in the military. The press discovered this minor detail only a few days before the daughter was due to receive the tickets, triggering an outpouring of loathing for the woman willing to parley our country’s greatest diplomatic and military blunder of the past 20 years into an evening of fluorescent pink, girly fun. Now, of course, your first instinct will be to blame the mother for all this, but when you think about it, if Mr. Menjivar was a dead soldier like he was supposed to be, his daughter would have fulfilled her lifelong dream of worshipping at the altar of Hannah Montana – now who seems like a bad parent? Mrs. Ceballos, the feckless, lying curmudgeon that she is, first used the excuse that she had lied by accident, assuming that the contest had been to write a compelling fictional story, which is a lot like a bank robber saying that he thought the money in the vault was for anybody to take, or a murderer saying that he and his victim were just playing a friendly game of “See how many times I can stab you before you bleed to death.” Under additional scrutiny, Mrs. Ceballos began playing the martyr, lamenting that she had made a bad decision in her quest to be a good mother and, due to the considerable bad publicity caused by her actions, has been forced to move out of her home and shut down her Myspace page. In her appearance on The Today* Show a few days ago, she said that, “It was not my intention to mislead.” I have to call BS on this – I think it was exactly her intention to mislead. Very few people say things that aren’t true when they don’t want to mislead people, because four out of five liars agree that lying is the very best way to mislead people.
*Because how better to punish a bald faced liar than to put her in the limelight on a nationally televised TV show?
Children grow into adults, and then as adults they have children, and in their crazed quest to win the approval of their children, parents will regress back into childishness themselves. Kids have always fought over toys on the playground, and then a bunch of them grew up and fought over Tickle-Me-Elmo in toy stores so they could be good parents and give their kids what they wanted. Kids will tell outlandish lies to get what they want, and sure enough, Mrs. Ceballos first pretended to have a dead husband, and then pretended that she had thought she was entering a fiction contest – all so she could get tickets to a concert by a performing artist who targets preteen audiences. And how was she punished? Well, for one thing, she had to get rid of her Myspace.
Truman Capps finds the notion of rubbing Elmo until he trembles just a little bit pedophilic, and wonders how many Tickle-Me-Elmo recipients will go on to appear on To Catch A Predator.
Hannah Montana is the Tickle-Me-Elmo of the 21st century – a broad statement, considering that we’ve only completed roughly 8% of the 21st century so far, but should the world go crazy for a Tickle-Me-Truman doll sometime in the next 50 years, I’ll be happy to eat my words on this one. The tweenybobber pop star’s latest endeavor has been the Best of Both Worlds tour which so far has been an unparalleled success, with tickets selling out about as quickly as tickets to Elvis and The Beatles concerts back in the day, according to industry experts. Parents desperate to appease their Hannah Montanaphile children are going to great lengths to buy the neigh impossible to find tickets. Some parents stay up all night at Ticketmaster.com, waiting to buy at the very second tickets go on sale, while other parents pay thousands of dollars to scalpers or pretend that they’re war widows.
Oh, what, you didn’t hear about that last one? Priscilla Ceballos, a 25 year old mother of three from Texas who apparently drew her eyebrows on with a brown Magic Marker, helped her daughter write an essay about her father’s death in Iraq so that she could win tickets to see Hannah Montana. It’s all very sweet and tragic until you consider that the girl’s father, Jonathon Menjivar, is alive and well and has never been in the military. The press discovered this minor detail only a few days before the daughter was due to receive the tickets, triggering an outpouring of loathing for the woman willing to parley our country’s greatest diplomatic and military blunder of the past 20 years into an evening of fluorescent pink, girly fun. Now, of course, your first instinct will be to blame the mother for all this, but when you think about it, if Mr. Menjivar was a dead soldier like he was supposed to be, his daughter would have fulfilled her lifelong dream of worshipping at the altar of Hannah Montana – now who seems like a bad parent? Mrs. Ceballos, the feckless, lying curmudgeon that she is, first used the excuse that she had lied by accident, assuming that the contest had been to write a compelling fictional story, which is a lot like a bank robber saying that he thought the money in the vault was for anybody to take, or a murderer saying that he and his victim were just playing a friendly game of “See how many times I can stab you before you bleed to death.” Under additional scrutiny, Mrs. Ceballos began playing the martyr, lamenting that she had made a bad decision in her quest to be a good mother and, due to the considerable bad publicity caused by her actions, has been forced to move out of her home and shut down her Myspace page. In her appearance on The Today* Show a few days ago, she said that, “It was not my intention to mislead.” I have to call BS on this – I think it was exactly her intention to mislead. Very few people say things that aren’t true when they don’t want to mislead people, because four out of five liars agree that lying is the very best way to mislead people.
*Because how better to punish a bald faced liar than to put her in the limelight on a nationally televised TV show?
Children grow into adults, and then as adults they have children, and in their crazed quest to win the approval of their children, parents will regress back into childishness themselves. Kids have always fought over toys on the playground, and then a bunch of them grew up and fought over Tickle-Me-Elmo in toy stores so they could be good parents and give their kids what they wanted. Kids will tell outlandish lies to get what they want, and sure enough, Mrs. Ceballos first pretended to have a dead husband, and then pretended that she had thought she was entering a fiction contest – all so she could get tickets to a concert by a performing artist who targets preteen audiences. And how was she punished? Well, for one thing, she had to get rid of her Myspace.
Truman Capps finds the notion of rubbing Elmo until he trembles just a little bit pedophilic, and wonders how many Tickle-Me-Elmo recipients will go on to appear on To Catch A Predator.