On Care Bears
Playing this song while you read this is highly recommended.
Lately Tallulah has been watching a lot of episodes of the Care Bears and although I could go for hours talking about the detestable marketing ploys of shows such as this I noticed something even more sinister.
Care Bears are fascists.
They have a big clock that shows how happy and caring their people are and monitors for ‘wrongfeel’ and ‘badthink’. When they see the meter drop towards the raincloud side, they try to prevent it getting worse by going on “caring missions” (crusades?).
In the episode I saw this morning one bear can be quoted as saying “there goes the neighborhood” in response to seeing the negative swing of their bad mood detector – a very ominous expression bringing to my mind the Bodycount song of the same name which references black people moving into a white suburb and the ensuing social dramas and racism…
In order to deal with negative emotions they use the “Carebear Stare” – a group attack on the insurgent where they all release the full fury of their tummy laser/rainbows to force a change in mood.
While this sort of intervention might work in movies I know that if they tried this while I was in the grips of some sort of depression I would probably hit them with the full fury of an empty red wine bottle – ironically it would probably cheer me up too.
All their targets seem to want is the right to be able to feel sad and some of the more destructive tendencies of the Bear’s enemies can possibly be mirrored in the real life terrorist organisations hatred of America’s Care-Bear-like intervention in worlds affairs with the intention of pressing US political and religious views on an unwilling world.
To be fair, I don’t think the writers were aware of the nature of their creations but were rather setting their own society’s values into a script, thinking it to be an innocent portrayal of a how the world could be.
I say passive aggressive bears policing society from high, bent on creating a utopian society without regards for the personal rights of their prey would be a bad idea.
Just a side note – I always wanted to see a Care Bears/Transformers crossover – maybe a Decepticon invasion of Carealot. Would Tummy Power work on insane megalomaniac robots bent on destruction? I think not.
I never did like those Care Bears…