The Fly Is Undeterred

Have you ever actually watched the Teletubbies? I have, many times, and even before I had a child. When I first saw the show, it was in a UK college dorm room around the late 90’s, not long after the show first premiered. It was like a train wreck, horrible, but I couldn’t stop watching it. It seemed mindless, a demented fantasy that somehow ended up being made, like Springtime for Hitler from The Producers. But I couldn’t take my eyes from it.

Some years later, I watched it again, after it had been shown in America, and denounced by Jerry Falwell of all people, for promoting homosexuality (because one of the Teletubbies, Tinky-Winky, carried a purse but had no definite sexual identity). I had a different take upon it by then. It struck me as an attempt to recapture the beautiful innocence of childhood, before the world took it away forever, as it does for nearly all of us. Most of the time I would actually cry by the end, as I felt it reach into my heart and call out to that long-ago-lost child whose memories I carry with me every day.

Then of course, the merchandising came, and I drifted away again, back to adult concerns.

One thing I’ve always thought about the Teletubbies, however, is that I firmly believe that in part the show is based on H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Teletubbies are the Eloi – the simple, dumber descendants of ourselves, far into the future. Wells’s time traveler goes forward and meets the Eloi, who are smaller, nonsexual beings who seem to have no real language, living a life of paradise without work or illness. Technology exists, but they cannot utilize it or create it. They are like children in a world created for them. But they cannot really learn, or grow or evolve. In short, Teletubbies.

Now of course, I have a child, and so I watch it yet again. She seems to like it very much, altho she prefers In the Night Garden, which is a sort of second-generation version (Teletubbies TNG, if you prefer). Maybe one day she’ll think back to it the same way I think back to Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, or dear beloved Captain Kangaroo. Altho I didn’t notice back in the day how appallingly bad the production values were (thank you, YouTube). I guess she won’t have that problem in 30+ years, thanks to DVDs or whatever will replace them.

But I do wonder what her take will be – beloved childhood icons, dopy marketing figures, or a dark vision of the future of the human race?

Last year in some of my more political posts, I was certain that by this time, we would be living in a world where the United States was governed by a woman. How wrong I was. I also compared Barack Obama to Jimmy Carter. The jury is still out on that one.

My misgivings towards Obama were based on the impression he left me with that he believes his own press releases. I really feel he thinks he’s the chosen one, who will lead the world out of darkness and ignorance, and into a new age. Would that it were so. I freely admit that I would love to be proven wrong about the man; that in four or eight years, I write about how good he has been to the nation, and how much better off we are.

Sigh. There are already signs of a backlash in Congress, where Obama tried to reform the earmark system, and nearly had his economic rescue plan handed back to him on a silver platter (in place of his head). The American people seem prepared to give him unusually wide latitude, no doubt because they know the mess we’re in now is not really his fault. We can blame Bush and Cheney (the ‘one-man axis of evil’) for that. But at some point the tide may turn, then all his oratorial skills may do him little good.

I do agree with a lot of what he’s done – reversing Bush policy on things like stem cell research, refusing to turn a blind eye to torture, releasing previous administration reports that suggest suspending the Constitution in all but name is a good idea, etc. The allies of the US need to know they’re still backing the good guys. Putin and Pyongyang are talking tough, but how far will they go, really? Many feel they’re testing the new government, like Krushchev tested Kennedy.

But on the other hand, why is the Obama administration not interested in pursuing the legality of the warantless wire-tapping scandal? Why have three nominees had to withdraw from various appointments because of non-payment of tax? Doesn’t anybody learn? Doesn’t anybody vet these things? Obama seemed to suggest that it’s okay the head of the treasury can’t pay his taxes without media scrutiny. Would he have given McCain’s nominee the same free pass?

And before you ask, I don’t care what color the president is. He’s half-white as far as I’m concerned. Why doesn’t anybody talk about that?

But, I’m rooting for him. Not so much for Carter… er, Obama the man, but for the President of the United States. I hope he can put us (and the world) on the right path. I’m pessimistic, but they say a pessimist is just an optimist who’s had his heart broken too many times.

It’s been nearly 10 months since my last post, which is probably not important since nobody reads this blog anyway. But I’ve been off doing a number of things, one of which has been genealogy. I’ve had quite the fun time turning myself into a busy researcher, hunting online for records, links and photographs of grave stones. Even as a child, I always had a fascination with the dead; it’s much more personal when it’s the dead you’re descended from.

It has been a totally fascinating journey into the past, a history of farmers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, housewives and more. I discovered my Great-Great-Great Grandmother, who died when the pipe she was smoking caught her clothes on fire. She was around 100 at the time. Or the Great-Great Grandfather who lost two daughters, ages 6 and 12, in the same month to scarlet fever. The photograph of a Great-Great-Great Grandfather taken when he was probably in his late 20’s. He looks amazingly like me. Or vice-versa. How strange to see my own face staring back at me from a century or more. I also discovered the Grandfather I never knew, who divorced my Grandmother fifteen years before I was born. He died in 1978 and it wasn’t until late last year I finally saw a photograph of him.

As a boy, I always wondered where I came from. What were my ancestors like? My family never really talked much about the distant past, so I had a lot of questions. I know so much more now to pass on to my own child, when she’s ready to ask the questions. When you pore over census records, chronicling the children lost, the long and successful marriages, the wives who died young, the men who lived through terrible wars, it’s hard not to see yourself as nothing more than the current link. Their blood all flows through my veins, so I’m the part of them that has survived. I feel responsible in a way, to carry those bloodlines forward, to try and remember the centuries of laughter and tears for those who can no longer do so. If they were up there somewhere watching me, those lines of Grandparents, I wonder what they would think of the world today.

A hundred years from now, will someone carry on the history I’ve started, with my own name concisely summing up in a little box all that I’ve lived and experienced? Two dates neatly bookending a life; is that all at the end? At least I know that despite their certain flaws, on the whole they were a group of people I’m proud of, and when I’m a tidy footnote in the pages of history, I will be in good company. I hope those that follow me will be equally proud.