So, apparently, there is a huge thing going on right now with white people losing their crap on Twitter over the fact at a cartoon character from the 80s has been recolored into a wrong hue. No, wait, let’s make it The Wrong Hue, because it’s 2019 in America, and we are doing white supremacism again.
I have only taken a cursory look down this chasm and I have already seen everything from outraged white men decrying the desecration of their childhood crush to hysterical white women lamenting the loss of their childhood altogether. Two questions arise immediately upon inspecting this battlefield. One: how many of these people were shrugging off the concerns of Asian Americans when Doctor Strange cast a white woman in the role clearly meant for an Asian man? I mean, come on, shut up already with all that “whitewashing” PC nonsense, this is just a fun movie about a bunch of fictional characters, so lighten up, amirite? Two: is it actually possible for a mermaid to be black? Or white, for that matter? What’s the melanin situation like under the sea? I know there is also a Jamaican-speaking crab involved there somehow, which only complicates matters. Disney, man… Don’t even get me started on Anastasia.
But what I really want to talk about is the strange obsession Americans have with the idea of ruination of their, or their children’s, childhood. I think I once saw a movie which may or may not have starred the great Hollywood star Adam Sandler, in which a mother accidentally tells her daughter that she is the one who has actually been leaving the tooth fairy money under the pillow. The look of anguish on the mother’s face as she realized the enormity of the psychological trauma she had just inflicted upon her child would have made the Motherland statue in Volgograd proud.
This, friends, will not do. Now, listen, I get it, the tooth fairy is more American than a baseball dropped into an apple pie by a bald eagle. What can be more symbolic of this country’s philosophical underpinnings than the notion that a young person’s idyllic childhood dreams will forever be crushed once they stop believing in a nocturnal cash transaction for their discarded body parts? I grew up in small, depressing USSR town, and the reason nobody ever came up with the myth of a Tonsil Fairy or even a Nasal Polyp Gnome is because we were a bunch of fucking commies who couldn’t see a financial opportunity if it fell out of our orifices.
But I am not so much annoyed with the Western capitalistic idea of teaching your children to sell themselves off piecemeal to supernatural beings as I am horrified at your equating a happy childhood with a sustained belief in myth. Trust me, the best way to grow up a mouth-breather who whines on Twitter about the skin color of a terrifying nymphette-fish hybrid is to have your folks keep you believing in Santa Claus throughout elementary school.
Do you want to hear about a childhood ruined by a destruction of a myth? When I was a kid, we also believed in a benevolent man with a beard who lived eternally and would ensure that good people would be justly rewarded. His name was Vladimir I. Lenin, Grandpa Lenin to us. We grew up trusting his eternal wisdom and his vision of a perfect moneyless, classless society in which all of us would live well before we hit retirement age. We finished high school, went into college and began work as a telephone line repairman in Tomsk, Siberia still firmly believing that our country has the most just, democratic, free political system in the world. We died in a communal apartment which we shared with six Gypsee families in Kiev knowing for a fact that we were the envy of exploited workers in the dying and decrepit West.
Do you know what happened next? The Soviet equivalent of a careless American mother who blurts out the sacred knowledge of tooth monetization to her innocent offspring? Our fucking country went and collapsed. All of it. In what amounted to an instant. All of a sudden, all of the eternal truths that we held so ever self-evident turned out to be goddamn lies. Every single one.
For me, it began with a Soviet TV program that specialized in showing snippets of Western life, normally in an extremely negative light. The starving workers, the oppressed minorities, the regretful immigrants… One day, they had a segment about McDonalds, an American food dispensary which featured no lines and could feed citizens meat and bread at the same time, usually as a single dish. I waited patiently for the good part to start: the food is inedible trash, infected with maggots or heroin. Or, maybe, the prices are outrageous, so most of the starving masses could only afford a scrap of moldy bread while the bourgeoisie gorged itself on decadent “Hamburg sandwiches.” I waited and waited, but none of that came. The citizens, none of them obvious millionaires, seemed to be satisfied with their food, and one of them, a black gentleman, smiled to the Soviet reporter and said, “Maybe you should have McDonalds in the Soviet Union.”
You think you know what it feels like to have your childhood destroyed, salty redheads who cry about Ariel? You have no freaking idea! My entire life came crashing down at that moment. And not just mine, mind you. The next week the TV program dedicated a segment to addressing the viewers’ outrage in their utterly incomprehensible shift in focus. “The Western society is complex”, said the host with all the ease and charm of a victim of severe constipation. “Some parts of it are terrible, but others are good…” The times, they were a-changin’.
Before long, we found out that our glorious country isn’t the envy of the rest of the world. That our Ladas are nothing more than sardine cans on wheels compared to Western cars. That Marx’s ideas may not have been all-conquering. That our great Brotherhood of Nations was little more than a clumsily slapped together inland empire with badly drawn borders between ethnicities who hated each other’s guts. And Grandpa Lenin? He very possibly suffered from syphilis.
So, yeah, forgive me if I have little sympathy for the demise of your childhood ideas, you adorably infantile nation. Growing up a little would’ve done you a great deal of good in 2016, but it still isn’t too late. Maybe you should consider it.
