Sesame Street and its Bastard Political Agenda

It would be easy to surmise that Sesame Street was borne out of an acid-fuelled late-60’s Californian love-in.  But we’re talking about a BAD trip here:  One which the US Federal Government funded from 1969-82, presumably as a warning to pre-school aged American children about the dangers of narcotics.

And there we were thinking it was all good clean educational fun.  Consider it carefully, and you’ll come to the same conclusion as I have; that the world of Sesame Street is in fact a nightmarish dystopia, a grim vision of Hellish surrealism in which furry-puppets come alive and assume humanised characteristics; an apocalyptic bastardisation of an ordinary multi-ethnic downtown New York neighbourhood infested by freaks and monsters and creepy hippies with an obsession for the numbers 1 to 20.

It was the subliminal use of these numbers that worried me the most.  I felt that there was a political agenda here.  Right-wing, Tea-Party propaganda being fed to us against our knowledge.  Those numbers were not randomly generated to help us learn how to count.  I’m sure if you were to take the sequence of numbers that Sesame Street was “brought to you by” in the Republican administration’s years of 1969-76, you would uncover a secret code that translates to VOTE COWBOY!  As those US viewers grew to maturation in the 80s, that’s exactly what they did in Presidential elections.

A prime mover in this brainwashing was the “Mad Painter.”  He assumed the work-clothes of a painter-decorator, but let him into your home and he will do no more than use his stencil to paint the number 13 on one wall, leaving you to ponder whether you should call the police or a priest to deal with this unsettling implicit threat to your life.

Equally disturbing was “The Count,” a numerically-obsessed vampire, who spoke no words but numbers.  At first, no one knew the meaning of his numbers, until evidence started to suggest that the number he’d last say to you signified how many days you had left to live.  The police never managed to pin the related murders on him and he was able to remain free and his evil spawn became the cast of the Twilight films.  Perhaps, he should be known by the Transylvanian  spelling of his name, where in the Romanian language the “o” is discarded.

More explicitly menacing than the subliminal number hypnosis, were the fierce leviathans Big Bird and Mr Snuffleupagus.  The former assumed the sexually ambiguous, genderless form of a gigantic primeval winged monster and spent years issuing stark warnings about the latter.  Big Bird foretold the coming of the Snuffleupagus much like the Book of Revelation paints a graphic visual doom-scenario of the end of the world.  “He will come and SNUFF you out,” Big Bird would yell in a demonic trance.  Obviously, the programme makers toned this down a little (you know, because kids were watching), but the message was still clear.  And when he did finally make an appearance, Mr Snuffleupagus was indeed frightening.  Like a cross between a mammoth and a hairy ball of horse-shit.

The right-wing persuasive under-current manifested itself in the homophobic portrayal of Bert and Ernie.  A ridiculous send-up of a gay couple, who bickered and played with rubber duckies.  The message was, “Let’s all laugh at the gays,” much as it was “Let’s all laugh at this uncoordinated chef who manages to fall down the fucking stairs and drop all his cream cakes every time he makes any.”

The anti-immigration agenda was strong as well.  Each human depicted in Sesame Street represented different ethnic minority groups, but not in order to celebrate diversity.  They were shown as sexually permissive – you never knew who was married to whom, the assumption being that they swapped sexual partners on a regular basis.  Was Luis with Maria or Susan?  And who was Bob nobbing?  They were shown spending their time hanging around on downtown street corners, talking to creatures that inhabited bins, forming suspiciously friendly relationships with local children.  This was like “Birth of a Nation” all over again, this depiction of the immoral practices of the Unamericans.

Maybe I’m being alarmist.  The Federal Government withdrew its funding in 1982 and coincidentally this was the same year that Elmo was introduced into the programme.  This seems to signify a conscious turning point.  Unlike the anorexic-thin, dirty and socially inept Grover, the more brightly-coloured, cuddly Elmo represented the expiration of the political agenda and the start of the merchandising one.  From here on, Sesame Street’s bias was blunted, its cynical twisting and fear-fuelling of the American consciousness died; and instead, it was only in it for the money.  Elmo helped Grover to count.  As it turned out, they were counting the dollars.  But at least we were now allowed to warm towards Bob and Luis and Maria and Susan.  Bert and Ernie could now be respected for their monogamy.  The Count became an anachronism.  And the clumsy chef was applauded for his baking skills rather than derided for his lack of balance.

This blog was brought to you by the letters B, A, S, T, A, R and D and by the number two, which some fucking bearded hippy just painted on my computer monitor.  The Romanian count!

(disclaimer – knowing the power of American corporations and the swift way in which they’d sue the arse off anyone, I should here be explicit in pointing out that I am in fact taking the piss.)