The EVIL that is...

Calvin and Hobbes? SRSLY?!?

The Struggle To Find Fault
Lifted from the comments, which you’re reading of course:

Calvin and Hobbes deemed dated, problematic.

In the piece linked above, Ben Sixsmith responds to an attempt, by Lukas Shayo, to problematise a much-loved comic strip, one that must now, it seems, be fretted over as both “violent” and “sexist.” Readers familiar with the strip in question may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.

It’s practically a genre – and a tool for the forging of progressive credentials. Basically, take something that’s very good and that a lot of people like, or have liked as children, and then problematise it, sour it, generally in a narrow, glib, and self-satisfied way. While getting details hopelessly wrong and missing all kinds of subtlety.

Or as Ben puts it, “joyless Buzzfeed-esque finger-wagging.”

See also, certain popular songs of the 1940s.

The author of the joyless prattle, Lukas Shayo – CUNY and Brooklyn, naturally – does rather struggle to find his “10 ways” in which Calvin and Hobbes should elicit regret or disapproval. We’re told, for instance, that,

Dinosaurs actually had feathers, which contradicts Calvin’s imagination.

And we’re informed that the absence of smartphones and GPS tracking devices – the strip concluded in 1995 – may be “baffling for young readers.”

Mr Shayo also bemoans Calvin spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader.

Given that the charm of Calvin and Hobbes so often hinges on the mismatch between what Calvin imagines and rather more mundane reality, you’d think that Mr Shayo might entertain such possibilities. But no. Wokeness must be announced, a posture assumed, and things found problematic. Because contrived disappointment, a souring of all the things, is the latest must-have. For a certain kind of person. And everything, especially things that many people have enjoyed, must be judged – and found wanting – by the narrow standards of one’s own self-admiring in-group at this precise point in time.

Leftists/shitlibs/whatevs are absolutely, positively determined to be as miserable and unhappy as they can possibly be. Which, honestly, I wouldn’t mind so much, if they’d only leave the rest of us out of it and just get on with it.

No, the thing that puts the juiceless killjoys on the fightin’ side of me is that A) They INSIST on imposing their mental/emotional dysfunction on everyone else, and B) They ceaselessly remind everyone within reach that their piffling neurosis demonstrates that they are in fact SUPERIOR to us less-exalted beings, vastly so. Clearly, their misery confirms that they are in fact more intelligent, more evolved, more enlightened, more moral, more empathetic, more compassionate and caring than we lower-order oafs can ever hope to be.

That being the case, who would dare to question their Divine Right to Rule over the knaves, serfs, and braying asses they obnoxiously claim to be their Inferiors?

One last time, not that they’ll ever listen: Either you get the fucking fuck out of our fucking faces and leave us the fuck alone, or you contract yourself a fatal case of lead poisoning before too much longer. That’s the deal, our final offer; it comes with an expiration date, and the clock is ticking.