Crap Brownies
I have mentioned before how consistently I read Snopes.com, which for those of you who don’t know is one of many websites out there dedicated to debunking rumors and urban legends that fly around the internet. Because there’s a presidential election on the way, I expect to contend with a lot of infuriation as people send out email lies and distortions about the two candidates. No, I don’t expect to find it any easier when it’s the guy I’m not supporting than when it’s the guy I am; that sort of partisan bullshit generally pisses me off every time.
Anyway, in addition to things you’d expect people to be asking questions about, such as lies about a politician’s behavior or past, scientific fallacies, “advice” about using household goods or avoiding danger, “warnings” about the latest toxin that will kill you and all of your issue, free offers, and other unverified rumors, they also frequently have jokes or “inspirational” stories that get passed to them, apparently with the all too frequent, “Is this true?” tagged onto them. These tend to boggle my mind, in part because for some of them the answer is pretty obvious, such as jokes or opinion pieces for which the site’s authors always have to explain the difficulty of calling an opinion true or false (never seems to sink in, though). Even when the veracity is not obvious, I don’t get people asking about them, because it’s ridiculous. If an inspirational story does its job (i.e. inspires you), then what difference does it make whether it really happened? Lots of children learn important lessons from Aesop’s fables; nobody seems concerned that those pretty clearly never happened. Of course, I’m not one of those people who claim that disputing the story of Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark demonstrates a rejection of all Judeo-Christian moral principles, so maybe I’m out of touch when it comes to the importance of knowing whether or not a story is true.
So they put one of those stories up a couple days ago about a father whose teenage children try to convince him that he should let them go see a PG-13 movie. Essentially, he tells them they can go if they’ll eat brownies he baked with a little bit of dog crap in them. You can find the whole thing at http://www.snopes.com/glurge/brownies.asp.
Normally, I think “lessons” like the one this father gave are pretty much crap (no pun intended). First, the analogy he is relying on is missing a large piece. The children had polled their friends (and people at their church, because that gives unassailably reliable information unlike their friends who presumably go to a heathen public school) and had detailed the objectionable material in the film. This included three swear words (which I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they’ve heard once or twice before), an exploding building (which they insisted is no worse than what they’ve seen on TV), and an indication that two characters had sex without showing any nudity or actual sex. I’m actually starting to wonder why this was PG-13 given such a tame description, but that’s beside the point. My point is that their ability to dispassionately report these items suggests that they have had exposure to such things in a clinical sense and come out relatively unscathed, so a better analogy would have been if they had been eating small amounts of dog crap for a while now or if he had used something unpleasant that they had been exposed to before, like castor oil or something. Second, he admitted when he described the brownies that the amount of feces was too small to affect the flavor and that they had been cooked thoroughly to remove any health danger, so he made the teenagers’ case for them… a small amount of crap in a well-baked product is no big deal. Finally, I think that a parent who has children thoughtful and rational enough to present as well-prepared an argument as they did is an idiot if he forbids them from witnessing movies that have dirty language or dirty scenes rather than letting them see it so long as they’re willing to talk to him about it (or better yet, see it with him), especially since a PG-13 movie is not restricted, so even the most anal theater manager will let them in if they decide to go without permission. Better to have a dialog with reasonable children about something as innocuous as this, than forbid them and risk them doing it without any guidance from you.
There is one point that makes me not hate what the narrow-minded twit of a father did, though, and that’s the fact that the kids did not eat the brownies. Like I said, he established that they would be unlikely to taste even a hint of doggie-doo and that he had cooked away the health risk, so what the hell were they afraid of? Is it just the ickiness? “Oooh, that’s taboo, our society has taught me that eating this brownie would be horrific, so even though I can’t point to any harm, I just can’t do it!” Not surprising given that they come from a family that probably doesn’t question any of their own local cultural traditions or mores (e.g. “Those two guys’ kissing is wrong because I am unsettled by the fact that it is uncommon in our culture; now let me go to my Bible and pseudoscience and see if I can come up with a justification for my feelings!”). Pop the bit-o-poopie in your mouth and show the self-righteous old man up! Then see if he has the balls to do the same thing since he presumably is allowed to see any movie that comes out! The fact that they didn’t belies the appearance of rationality they conveyed with their argument, so maybe they are too childish to see anything with the slightest tinge of blue. If my dad were that patently unreasonable, I’d have done it (probably would’ve made a couple of the arguments from the last paragraph first, though). Fortunately, my father was able to recognize that when I was old enough to carry on a reasoned conversation, I was old enough to start dealing with influences I might see in PG-13 and R rated movies. I still think this guy came up with a lousy test, but the kids still could have passed.
Of course, now I am forgetting that this was almost certainly a work of fiction, and that the author added in an “of course,” when explaining that the children did not eat the brownies. I guess the author was exactly the sort of never-question-the-norms bucket-head that I just described the family in the story as being. Okay, now I am starting to get burned because this is just another example of that type of people thinking they know exactly how everyone else thinks, and…. Well shoot, now I have upset myself. Thanks a lot guys!