It Ain't Me, Babe

Those who know me, or for that matter spend more than twenty minutes with me, know that the Simpsons is one of my favorite shows. I just consider it to be very funny and incredibly well-written. The guys writing it know what they're doing. Besides which, watching it is one of the very few ways that I rebelled during my formative years. Yeah, I was a weenie. Anyway, there was an episode where Bart gains his 15 minutes of fame by becoming the "I didn't do it" kid after causing a mild disaster on television looking at the camera guiltily and saying (imagine this), "I didn't do it." I'm sure that it was, for the most part, the writers' way of pointing out the absurdity of all of the merchandising that was being created at the time with Bart's mug and signature lines ("Don't have a cow, man" and "Eat my shorts) all over them. However, if you want to look at it a different way, it's also a horrible snapshot of our modern culture. We've become a society of "I didn't do it" kids. The Devil made me do it. It's not my fault that I'm overweight, Gigantic Fast Food Place is making me overweight. It's not my fault that I smoke and have emphysema, it's the fault of the cigarette companies for selling a product that I wanted to buy. You can't blame me for having kids that are out of control, it's the fault of their other parent for being too lenient, harsh, absent, violoent video games (a personal favorite), etc. How long until people are suing the cola makers and coffee companies for making a product that makes some people have headaches if they don't have it? How long until we're suing the automobile industry for making a product that lets me drive at an unsafe speed and crash? There are getting to be too many areas in society in which the concept of personal responsibility is nothing more than a nice turn of phrase or something that should be applied to everyone and anyone but the person that we see in the mirror.

I was watching According to Jim tonight since I'm addicted to the TV (blasted broadcast television!) and gravitate towards the situational comedy (I'd blame my father for that, but it'd be too easy). It was an episode in which Jim takes his daughters to a football game and gets into a fight with a fan from the opposing team. He becomes the town hero and ends up being very proud of punching another guy in the face. Of course his wife Cheryl is appalled, and it ends up biting him in the rear when one of his daughters gets upset and punches the other in the face, just like Daddy. Jim's response? Paraphrasing, "It's all of these violent cartoons! Pigs hitting ducks and rabbits walking around without pants? It's a recipe for chaos!" Again, the buck is anyone's responsibility before his. Later in the same episode, after everyone has reconciled and Jim has seen the error of his ways, they are going to have hot fudge sundaes for desert. Well, at least that's the intention before one of the girls (who's around seven) says, "I don't want any. I'm too fat. My butt looks like two hams." Jim looks at Cheryl, who says, "It's all of these fashion magazines that are giving them an unrealistic view of their bodies" while refusing to recognize the words that she herself used earlier.

You want your kids to have a positive self image? Model a good self-image for yourself in front of them. What your kids to respect your spouse? You need to respect your spouse. This is one of the things that I greatly appreciate about my wife, Anne. Even if we have disagreements about exactly what the appropriate consequences are for something or how quickly those consequences were enforced, we don't air those concerns in front of the kids and we never counteract an instituted consequence. That would only serve to undermine the authority of the other.

We even see this attitude in some of the sports' personalities. Terrell Owens always has some excuse for why he didn't play very well or had those three dropped balls. So many excuses except the very obvious one, "I didn't play well, and I need to do better the next time to come through for my teammates." You'd think that wouldn't be too hard for someone who enjoys talking about himself so much already.

All of this, of course, begs the question of whether or not I, your humble writer, am also guilty of passing the blame on to someone else? Of course not. And if I ever have, it must have been the fault of someone else. Oh, I know, it was society. Or maybe it was the gremlins. Yeah, let's go with the gremlins.