by FREDERICA VON McTOAST-HYPHEN, Alternate Reality News Service Pop Culture Writer
Jocund Ferlenghetti (who, yes, comes from a long line of pasta makers) felt that Myrna and Elijahu’s television viewing was out of control. They seemed to be in front of the set eight or nine hours a day. They ate in front of the set. They frequently shouted at the set. They cried at the set. They stayed up later than was healthy for them in order to keep watching.
Fearing dyer consequences (Elijahu worked on a psychedelic t-shirt assembly line), Jocund used the parental controls to block them from watching their favourite channels. The only problem is that Myrna (37) and Elijahu (41) are the parents in this family and Jocund (8 – but a mature eight – he knows who Frederic Wertham was and can recite a list of almost all Crimean War generals) is their son.
“I miss CNN!” Elijahu Ferlenghetti wailed, balling his middle aged fists and stamping his feet (an unhappy emoticon in red – that’s gonna take several days to wash out of his skin!). “It’s so unfair! All the other parents at work are talking about who was on Wolf Blitzer last night!”
Myrna Ferlenghetti rocked back and forth on the chair next to him, muttering about going through Rachel Maddow withdrawal and sobbing uncontrollably.
“It’s for your own good,” Jocund lectured them. “Remember the incident with Mister Baguette?”
Aloysius Baguette, Elijahu’s boss at International Transnationalism & Stuff, Inc., had been invited to share dinner with the Ferlenghettis (IT&S existed in a time warp that way). Things had been going pretty well until Anderson Cooper appeared (on the television – the Ferlenghettis were only distant cousins, after all, and were on his six year waiting list for family functions) with a report on President-elect Donald Trump telling the Supreme Court, “You’re fired!” Incensed, Elijahu threw a knife at the television set.
Unfortunately, his days as a circus knife thrower were long behind him, and he hit his boss right between the eyes. The good news was that he was so out of practice that he hit his boss with the handle rather than the blade. The bad news was that Baguette still needed seven stitches, and Elijahu’s moderately speedy rise in the company would come to a grinding halt.
“Until you show me that you can watch the nightly news like responsible adults,” Jocund sternly told them, “you’re cut off.”
It is estimated that as many as three per cent of children in liberal households have used the parental controls on their television sets to deny their parents the ability to watch cable news channels or network news broadcasts. In most cases, the adults are limited to watching a steady diet of sitcoms, reruns of Matlock and Murder She Wrote, and documentaries about snow.
The children can do this, of course, because their parents never learned how to use the parental controls in the first place, so they do not know how to get around them now.
“There has been a lot of talk about how the demagogic rhetoric of its politicians has infantilized the right,” commented political scientist and part-time stone thrower/full time window glazer Bartholomeo Spitzer. “But nobody saw this infantilization of the left coming!”
“Who you calling infantile, buddy?” Myrna objected. “I still know my infrastructure from my superstructure, and I could argue the deficiencies of American trade policy until your face was blue! I…I just miss Lawrence O’Donnell’s cutting calmness. Ooh, Lawrence O’Donnell’s cutting…cutting…cut…” She curled up in a fetal position (something that she will be forced to maintain for a full ninth months when Mike Pence is sworn in as Vice President) on the couch and moaned incoherently.
“You see!” Jocund yelled. “This is why you can’t have political things!”
While the children have good intentions – saving their parents from the anguish of watching the world go to hell (we asked Stan, Satan’s Press Secretary, for a statement on the situation, but he just grinned and “No comment”ed us – evil bastard!) on the nightly news – it may have negative consequences. Over the course of eight, or even just four, or fingers crossed a mere two years, the adults might lose touch with the world.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic,” said seven year-old Billy, who wants to be a political commentator, or possibly a firefighting cowboy astronaut, he hasn’t decided, when he grows up, “that the right gets more ignorant the more news it watches, while the left gets more ignorant the less news it watches?”
“We’ll deal with that bridge when a major corporation buys it and burns it to the ground for the insurance,” Jocund responded. “In the meantime, I have to do what’s right for my parents. I don’t want them to grow bitter and mean and end up shouting at you damn kids to get off their lawns. What loving child would ever wish that on his parents?”