I mean, the natural conclusion to draw from the Fort Hood shootings is that army bases are becoming ever more dangerous places. This poor man obviously had his head pushed down the toilet by the football team and was frequently snubbed by the cheerleaders, never got a date for the prom, and was obliged to eat his lunch with the Goths and the kids who play on-line games every second of every day that their moms don't send them to school. It's finally time to bite the bullet and enforce much, much stricter gun control on military premises to make sure that this can never, ever happen again.
I don't know how we all missed that one; really I don't.
Is this a grumpy and mardy old sod who you’d never let within a mile of any children, or what?
Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said.
Telling the story of a naughty little boy, Max, who is sent to bed without his supper only to journey by boat to a land where wild monsters live, Sendak's classic tale was first published in 1963 and has captured children's imaginations ever since. With a film version adapted by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze out later this year, Sendak told this week's edition of Newsweek that he would "not tolerate" parental concerns about the book being too scary.
"I would tell them to go to hell," Sendak said. And if children can't handle the story, they should "go home," he added. "Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered."
Truthful good sense or call the cops time if he wanders away from the press and towards the fans on opening nights?
He may also have some disillusionment issues, to say the least.
Sendak also criticised Disney, saying it was "terrible" for children. As a child himself, he'd loved Mickey Mouse as "the emblem of happiness and funniness", and at the cinema he would stand on the chair screaming "My hero! My hero!" at the mouse – who at that point still had teeth. "He was more dangerous," the author told Newsweek. "He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened was that he became so popular – this is my own theory – they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck.
That old transfer the cruelty and toughness from the mouse to the duck gambit again: everybody does it, but it never fails to hurt. Marketing!
And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point."
He may also be working out some childhood trauma issues.
He based the monsters of Where the Wild Things Are on relatives who visited his family home as a child, speaking practically no English. "They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do," he said. "And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate."
He’s homosexual and managed to hide the fact that he lived with his gay lover for 50 years from his parents in a touching demonstration of filial concern, and from possible residual fears of cannibalism. Who knew?
Sendak also recalled a fight he had with his publisher about Where the Wild Things Are, with the safety-conscious publisher keen to change the word "hot" to "warm" at the end of the book, when Max returns from his reign as king over the monsters to find his dinner "was still hot". "It was going to burn the kid. I couldn't believe it. But it turned into a real world war, just that word," Sendak told the magazine.
He won out eventually by "just going at it", he said. "Just trying to convey how dopey 'warm' sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is 'hot'."
So he’s capable of great discretion for the sake of his family (and maybe peace and quiet for himself at weddings, funerals, etc.) – but also of crassness in public now he’s richer and famous.
I’m not wise and so I can’t decide if this is a bad, rude man who writes great stories for kids, or a nice one who got roughed up by life and is getting his own back now he’s got the publicity to do it big-style.
At first sight, I’d put this down (gratefully) to our free and varied culture allowing the pungent exposure of an open secret concerning how we are misgoverned.
After all, he’s being boorish and callous at worst. It could be worse.
Here, according to Julia and others, we see how the jokers have decided that it’s much, much better if children are sprayed like silly string out of tiny crescent-shaped bomb-holes in plummeting jetliners at 30,000 feet than to risk some airport security man seeing them in the buff.
Perspective.
PS.
Oh, and here are three of the daftest paragraphs I’ve ever read in Wikipedia. Read them ladies and gentlemen and weep for the human condition one way or another.
Please bear with me; this has a substantive political point and it only looks like a random, recreational fisking…
As a social conservative my chief concern is about homosexuals and homosexuality and so I spend a great deal of my time researching into the homosexual lifestyle in libraries, bookshops and online. I also put a lot of work into reading their in-house literature: websites and newspapers and other, less readily accessible publications for hours on end. I frequent their gathering places and engage some of them in conversation.
It’s all very tiresome but someone has to do it. Someone must stand tall and proud against the Pink Terror that threatens to engulf our fair country under a tide of lightly-tanned, firmly-muscled young men; the prows of whose impeccably tight leather trousers resemble nothing so much as shrink-wrapped aubergines and leave nothing and I mean nothing, to the imagination…
Imagine how disappointed I am, therefore, when I read someone such as Ben Summerskill here from the Guardian missing the point about what, exactly, it is that we rampant homophobes are on about.
The dogma that denigrates compassion
Peter Hitchens's vitriolic outburst in the Mail on Sunday about a gay couple adopting two children insults their public-spiritedness
"If I never again had to read or write a word about homosexuals," spluttered Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday this week, "I would be very happy"."We cringe to the new thought police," he added, just in case slower readers hadn't caught his drift, "like the subjects of some insane, sex-obsessed Stalinist state, compelled to wave our little rainbow flags as the 'gay pride' parade passes by".
Hitchens effortlessly gives the appearance of someone who believes that all homosexuals belong in prison, just as all women belong in the home.
Nice touch that: hinting that someone believes some outrageous X, whilst stating unlibellously that you don’t necessarily think that he does believe in outrageous X.
Does it work with anyone, I wonder?..
“Summerskill effortlessly gives the appearance of someone who believes that all homosexuals should expand into erotic specialisations involving vibrating studded attachments and cavity inserts, and possibly panicked rodents in plastic tubes; rather than the plain, boring old fashioned man-love that was good enough for the Spartans and King James The First (and Sixth of Scotland).”
Check.
But his latest eruption is of unprecedented unpleasantness, particularly given the targets of his vitriol. Its cause? Last week's report that two Edinburgh children had been placed for their welfare in the care of a loving gay couple in a stable, long-term relationship. The alternative, already tested, was to stay with their heroin addict mother in her parents' household.
So, that whole mothers-are-best line Labour has been pushing with its feminised agenda these past eleven years stops at heroin addicts?
Good. That might be wise, Baby P and all that, lessons apparently learned, but the grandparents want to give it a go, as grandparents tend to do, on the grounds that families can work well – and usually do.
And if they are always at hand to help her recover but empowered to make all the important decisions to look after the child, isn’t that, well, kind of socially inclusive?
Or shall we just lock all the junkies up in cold-turkey cages till they sweat the poison out?
I’m for it if you are, Benny-boy.
I must declare an interest. Like a curious alignment of the planets that only happens once every three centuries, I once worked alongside Hitchens. What I learned from that encounter was that his views – even if Private Eye naughtily
…more plausible deniability Ben
…but accurately…
…no: a bit of honesty there instead lad, and damn the defamation suit that’ll never, ever come. I’m almost proud of you.
… describes him as "bonkers" – are at least genuinely held, with the rabidity you'd expect of a former Socialist Worker.
Which part? The ‘former’ or the ‘Socialist Worker?’ Let’s see shall we…
Google doesn’t exactly find you railing against the Socialist Workers or any other Marxist group. Hmm. Is it Marxian apostasy that makes him rabid or some invisible anti-communism on your part?
Just asking.
But while they may be genuinely held, that doesn't, of course, make them genuinely grounded. While Hitchens has barked – and his Associated Newspapers colleagues have had a good growl too – his analysis turns out, quite by chance and just like theirs, to be rather selective.
Each froths angrily that what children really deserve is a mother and father, oblivious to the unhelpful truth that more than three million children of heterosexual parents are currently growing up in Britain in one-parent households.
You know, I rather suspect that the Daily Mail does have some vague notion that single motherhood is a problem here in Britain. How does page 1 of 214 sound?
Meanwhile, today's Daily Mail reports another case of a woman, like the celebrated Mail pin-up Diane Blood, who has won the right to have her dead husband's child using sperm taken from his body. Her children will grow up without a father too. But curiously the paper contains not a whisper of complaint from Peter or his fellow attack dogs. She is, after all, heterosexual.
Well, she might be irresponsible going beyond the grave for fatherhood, but she is definitely the children’s mother. And their little friends aren’t very likely to chant ‘Liam and Joel’s dads are zombies’ every chance they get for the rest of their childhood.
Speaking during the last week to the Edinburgh couple who have taken responsibility for the children at the centre of this storm, one thing struck me above all else. It's not just that they're thoughtful, generous, sensible and calm.
‘Say, Angus, why don’t we adopt a couple of children and give them all the advantages of living with two loving gay men: excellent dress sense, natural flair and sensitivity, grace and charm and likely enough artistic or intellectual achievement. Chop the basil next.’’
‘Och, I don’t know, Ross. This is Edinburg, after a’. Wouldnae the other wains be a wee bit sharp wi’ such a child? Would they no’ be better off with their kin, even if they eat ketchup an’ smell o’ tobacco? I grew up in Govan. Bein’ called Pansy-boy’s bad enough if ye buy the Take That 2009 calendar for your ainself, but if it’s your daddies’…’
‘Now you’re being trite, Angus. Garlic, please. We can give the children much better lives than council house types who let their daughter get pregnant and then addicted to heroin. A life with sun-dried tomatoes never killed anyone-.’
‘Except for Soft Tony, Ross -.’
‘Soft Tony was an exception, Angus dear: a one in a million fluke that could happen to anyone. No; never mind what other wains’d say – we can give these ones a good life. Pass the ricotta.’’
It's that, should they have wished, they could easily have arranged to have a "designer baby" through a fertility clinic rather than be persuaded to adopt children whose lives have been left traumatised by the irresponsibility of others.
Bless them, but what if they chose not to have a designer baby either; for reasons not obvious to the chief executive of Stonewall? Might they so choose for what a Scottish philosopher christened ‘common sense’ reasons?
If Hitchens had half an ounce of the Christian compassion whose absence he frequently bemoans in others, he would lionise public-spirited people like these, not demonise them.
Here’s what Hitchens wroteand his argument is largely about the bigotry from gay activists. Note that he does go on to say after that excitingly-controversial strong opening sentence:
‘I really don't want to know what other people do in their bedrooms. But these days they really, really want us all to know. And, more important, they insist that we approve. No longer are we allowed to keep our thoughts to ourselves, while being polite and kind.’
He has no problems, it seems, with the politeness and kindness (and quite rightly too) – just the fear that he perceives in politically-correct authorities pushing a gay agenda to absurd limits.
So, Hitchens and I both object to politically-motivated adoptions outside the norm on the grounds that children may be hurt (by third parties such as cruel kids who’d make life difficult because of the unusual status of gay parenthood, I stress) if put into unusual or inappropriate backgrounds, but Summerskill thinks it’s hunky-dory to do so.
And if you compare that with cases of the Left not approving adoption of black children by white people…
Let’s look at the charity the British Association for Adoption & Fostering
and its offshoot Be My Parent
BAAF believes:
•Each child has a right to loving and secure family relationships, a right to be heard and rights as a citizen.
•Secure attachments to carers are essential to children’s mental health and psychological development.
•Every effort should be made to enable children to live in their own birth families and kinship network, providing this is consistent with the child’s welfare.
•Where it is not in the best interests of children to live within their family of origin, an alternative family should be found which can provide continuous care, stability and life-long commitment.
•Children have a right to have their needs understood, assessed and reviewed so that, where it is necessary for them to live away from home, their placements can be planned and their needs met.
•Adoption and fostering should meet the emotional, developmental and spiritual needs of children, including needs relating to their religious persuasion, racial origin and cultural and linguistic background and any special needs.
Which is clarified as follows:
Black and minority ethnic children.
A child’s well-being is linked to who they are, and feeling comfortable with their identity. This is built up through their ethnicity, religious, cultural and linguistic background, community, relationship with their birth family, and current and past experiences.
Ideally, a child’s new family should meet all their emotional, identity, health and development needs. In BAAF’s view, practice experience indicates that children do best when brought up in a family that reflects their ethnic and racial identity as closely as possible. In part, this is informed by reports from black and minority ethnic adopted adults who grew up with families who did not match their ethnic and racial identity, describing difficulties in belonging to any community outside of their immediate family.
What this means in practice is that vigorous efforts are made to find a family that matches the child’s individual identity. Given the profile of prospective adopters, this is not always achievable. In these instances, social workers will have to make a decision about when to consider alternative families in order to minimise delay for the child. Children would then be placed with families that best match most of their needs, even if this means they are of a different ethnic group.
Children who are black Caribbean or black African, Asian (particularly Asian Muslim), and of mixed ethnicity (black African and white, black Caribbean and white, or Asian and white) wait much longer for an adoptive family in comparison to white children.
(The BAAF’s Chief Executive and Senior Management are almost all long-time social workers or social care administrators so what you have is a charity pretty much recruited out of local and national government and so any hopes you might have for advantages in recruiting for experience must be tempered with fears that the political monoculture they come from is going to be inescapably Left-wing and I think that their policies reflect this.)
Thus the BAAF will only place a child outside its originator grouping only as a last resort. In terms of ethnicity, at least, family and kinship group first and, barring that, the same or similar racial group so they can grow up in as normal a background for their family as possible.
I wonder what was wrong with the heterosexual couples that were queue-jumped for the gay couple? Outsiders beyond the immediate ‘family’ are, people being only human and all, very likely to taunt and tease these two children, and probably do worse.
When it suits the Left, therefore, children can be treated as ideological spot prizes to be aimed at favoured minorities from which their own ancestors didn’t – couldn’t – belong. So that’s the children of heterosexuals to be exposed on purpose to all kinds of taunts and awkwardness to do their bit for gay…What? Integration? Pride? Being treated equally to all the rest – unless the rest are not gay and therefore less rewarding for our political class to place them with?
But when the trump card of race comes along, the United Left will hold that staying near your roots; being brought up amongst kinsfolk first or the same racial group even if they are strangers, would be better than, say, adopting black orphans into a middle-class white family. So; no comfortable home in the suburbs for black kids if a nice inner-city block of flats with authentically racial adoptive parents are available.
So little Hamish and Fiona are going to grow up knowing that their grandparents could not adopt them as children because the authorities instead thought it would be a hoot to place the in an arrangement in which they experienced ‘difficulties in belonging to any community outside of their immediate family.
The dogma that denigrates compassion indeed.
At least it's unlikely that anyone will so anything as career-destroyingly cruel as calling them 'golliwogs.’
Cedar tree - Council seeks to ban nursery children from playing under tree
The Cedar tree in Cambridge where council officials want to stop children playing claiming they will damage the tree roots
It’s also a highly dangerous tree. You see, it’s haunted by ghosts.
The ghosts of childhood…
Officers are applying for a permanent preservation order on the 30-year-old cedar to safeguard it from damage.
‘Crikey!’ gasped William, in astonished at the Council’s daring.
Parents have called for common sense and say that the children - aged two to four - exert too little pressure to cause any harm and will be too restricted in where they can play if they are not allowed under the tree.
‘Them little ones is the toughest,’ said PC Plod glumly. ‘Destructive as mad badgers, in their way.’
The move follows a Cambridge City Council report into the health of the tree at the Under Fives Roundabout Pre-School in Cambridge.
The report argues the tree, which covers half the playground, will suffer if the ground is "poached and compacted" by "constant activity" which could stop water reaching the roots.
That Council sounds like silly chumps,
Said Rupert glumly, in the dumps.
It recommends: "Ideally, the children would not be able to play beneath the tree."
‘Ideally,’ said the Child Catcher ‘They’d be locked in my dungeon.’
Poached ground is commonly caused by cattle cutting up grassland with their hooves near gates and feeding points, exposing the soil leaving it open to erosion.
The council served a tree preservation order on the school on June 9, 2008.
‘Poached ground served with tree preserves,’ Julian excitedly.
‘With lashings of ginger beer, one jolly well hopes!’ came Anne’s reply.
A planning committee meeting will be held tomorrow (Wed) to hear objections and decide whether to confirm or reject the order.
The pre-school moved to its current site on the grounds of a primary school in September. Previously the tree was outside school grounds by a public footpath.
‘Must have wandered off, all hasty-like,’ mumbled Treebeard. ‘Errant scamps, they Cedars.’
Eileen Hori, chairman of the nursery's management committee and parent, said the tree is now better protected than ever.
"Before the tree had branches broken off and was played under and climbed on by children and adults," she said. "People littered on it, dogs and cats went to the toilet on it and tramps slept under it - and yet the tree still thrived.
"The tree is beautiful and a great asset to the school. We are taking care to protect it whilst enjoying it."
‘That’s because we love that tree, don’t we, children?’ asked Tinkerbell, tinkling.
Mrs Hori said the pre-school has a maximum of 34 pupils with no more than 12 playing outside at anyone time.
She added: "It's utterly ridiculous to restrict the kids like this. They will have a tiny amount of space to play in."
‘They can play in our house,’ piped Arrietty Clock, generously.
As a compromise the pre-school wants to sow the ground under the tree with flowers and use it as a quiet area where children can listen to stories.
‘Just so, perhaps?’ asked Baloo.
David Hargreaves, vice-chairman of the pre-school's management committee, said it is happy to protect the tree but does not want "harsh restrictions" on action.
He added: "It's deeply frustrating. We don't think two and three year olds are going to exert too much pressure. We just want the children to be able to enjoy the tree."
‘The poor man can’t make up his mind. Are the little children good or wicked?’ asked the Blue Fairy.
The council's principal arboricultural officer Diana Oviatt-Ham…
…‘That’s a Death-Eater name if ever I heard one,’ said Ron, chewing on a slice of bacon…
…said the children could compact the earth and starve the roots of water.
"They were advised right from the start when they were interested in the site that there were going to be constraints on the use of the tree," she said.
She said that if the order is upheld council planning officers will work with the school to agree on exact restrictions.
Mrs Oviatt-Ham added: "If the order is upheld we hope we will be able to reach a satisfactory compromise as to how the area is used."
‘And if not, we’ll be carving runes on our own hands, I expect,’ added Harry.
The council report also warns the tree might need to be trimmed if children are allowed to play underneath.
‘How shall the little children play under the tree?’ mused the White Rabbit to the Dormouse. ‘Shall they run down my burrow?’
It states: "In addition, cedar trees shed spiky needles and exude resin,
…go ask Alice when she is ten feet tall…
…which could result in complaints from parents and an application to trim the tree to reduce the nuisance."
‘Not mention of the dryads, poor things,’ scowled Lucy, loyally.
David Howarth, Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge, who lives near the pre-school, said: "Children have played underneath trees for centuries without serious harm coming to either. I am sure some sensible arrangement can be reached."
Cedar trees are coniferous and closely related to Firs. They are native to the mountains of the western Himalaya and the Mediterranean region.
‘Yes, wandersome trees, as I said,’ agreed Treebeard, standing next to the Mad Hatter from the Council.
They typically grow up to between 30m to 40m. The leaves are evergreen and needle-like.
‘The timber can be made into may useful things; not least of which are the most prominent symbols on Cambridge Council’s coat of arms – two short planks.
And so the poor tree was saved from the killer children and the poor little children were saved from the big bad tree and everyone lived ever after…
Except….
Except that this is how we are now governed.
The jokers make us safe from splinters and tumbles and give us and the trees hugs (and I’m a bit of a tree hugger myself; but not on the rates) when we fall and these children are to gown up to cherish and to defend what’s left of Western civilisation once the rest of Eurasia finally discovers we’re a small, quarrelsome and disunited peninsula (a bundle of peninsulas really), on the edge of a land mass whose growing populations believe strongly in what they are and their place in the world, and see us as guilt-bag milksops.
If no adventurous toddlers are even allowed to play around a mere tree, then where are the confident, daring children to come from? When the multi-culti bed-wetters move on from exorcising Enid Blyton’s children and their intrepidity or the culturally imperialist Christian Pevensey children or impeccably middle-class Rupert and his chums from childhood, who will they copy, look up to, or follow? Muscle-bound Japanese superheroes with American accents and handy accessories upgraded every Christmas? Impeccably diverse munchkins from rainbow-hued Balamory?
Do you think if we asked Diana Oviatt-Ham, Eileen Hori and the Davids Hargreaves and Howarth what they thought of the results at Thermopylae, Tours and Vienna, would they know, and if they did, would they approve?
Likewise Chaucer, Mallory, Shakespeare, Milton. Any good come form them, what with all those sharp objects in the stories. How about Kipling, the Gawain Poet or Rupert Brooke? The Winchester Cathedral architects and Isambard Kingdom-Brunel? How do Josiah Wedgwood and his anti-slavery plates figure in their cotton-wool world?
