annoyed, catty

Drove back to Chicago today. It was a pleasant drive, save the last fifty or so miles of Pennsylvania, which are always a slog.

So, I get home and check the baseball and news, and what's there? some shit-head writing about how it would be terrible and send the wrong message to her fragile daughters (and by proxy others, I suppose/she supposes) if J.K. Rowling kills off ol' Harry...meanwhile little things like North Korea playing erector set and Iraq devolving into My Lai (aka Pinkville) along with another explosion in oil prices and inflation are becoming a real concern for some outside Dreamworld. For the first time in a few weeks, I wrote a letter doomed to be unpublished save here - I'm sure you can find the article I'm responding to reprinted in full somewhere, or email me for a copy of it...how I hated it! I stereotyped a little, the Park Slope brigade of parents...but they don't care, they're rich and I'm not:

To Whom It May Concern,

Your new columnist, Judith Warner, is terrible. I will not read her column again. Ever. Not even for money. Why do you publish this when there are plenty of intelligent people out there who could write something off the cuff better than this "oh what a complex and frightening world for my daughters...and ME, a gamely battling mother!" spew.

The last thing I want to see when I open the opinion page of the New York Times is some puff peice about what a crazy world it is since 9/11. Really?

I hadn't noticed.

Then, to top it off, in this column which stinks of privilege, Warner goes on some inane rant about what J.K. Rowling should do in the final Harry Potter book, or so I deciphered, it was kind of sketchy. Was she demanding, pleading or just being a typical overbearing Park Sloper who knows best? Why doesn't she write her own books for her daughters then? They could be about super-heroes who always win in the end and everything is better than it was ever before! Really, there should be little lobbying in art (especially if it comes unpaid or unasked), if Michelangelo wants to carve in ice, let him, if J.K. Rowling wants to make a martyr of Harry, well, Harry (like Little Dombey for Dickens), is from her heart, her imagination and owes his flesh and blood to her labors; if Ms. Warner wants to bring Pollyanna back from the deep-freeze, I'm all for her rolling up her sleeves, she could enlist the help of Mr. Snow, the current administration's spokesmen. Or she could just rip out the pages in her copy of the book, if the feared event that can't be named comes to pass. Regardless, what world is she in to say that a work of fiction must necessarily be something or threaten the worlds imagined by children?

Warner's rules of fiction for her daughter, who was terrified of narrative fiction (!), were dispiriting. Most of the great books for children are not so simplistic as she dreams, sadly, some owies are bigger than any band-aid and sometimes rising against will have to suffice, because rising above is not in the cards (Louis Lowry's Number the Stars, for example, or if she venture into the terrifying world of non-fiction, a particular diary). Witness even in the Great Brain series, bad things sometimes happen and there's no going back.

Just like the Election of 2000 and 9/11.

Other not-so-simplistic narratives for the young reader that Ms. Warner will want to shield her daughters from include the powerful StarGirl by Jerry Spinelli, A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck and, of course, Charlotte's Web by the amazing E.B. White. Children have the ability and the right to know that the world is more complicated than winning and losing, and also of being exposed to new ideas, not always positive, about the world. Innocence is not spoiled by knowledge, it is spoiled by lies.

Anyway, please try something else on the editorial page, anything! Take a page from Dave Eggers and interview people in odd places, like his Voices of Katrina. Have something written by a disaffected school teacher. Draw pictures. Anything is better than this Newsweek-worthy schlock. And tell Ms. Warner about this hero out there who faces bad people and always wins, her name is Nancy Drew.

Whatever it takes.

best and warmest wishes,

Andrew Decker