Posted by Jay Livingston
The parenting style of Mrs. Scavolini (not her real name), our next-door neighbor, was different from that of the other moms in the upper-middle-class, mostly WASP suburb where I grew up .
“I’m gonna kill you,” we would hear her scream at her kids, who for their part were often screaming at one another as well. “I’m gonna kill you.”
“But she never does,” sighed my mother.
It’s the recent flap* over Go the F**k to Sleep that takes me back across the decades to Mrs. Scavolini, with her shrill voice and her orange hair (and this was in an era when nobody had orange hair).
From the CNN website**
(Click on the image for a larger view.)"Imagine if this were written about Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos," says Dr. David Arredondo. He is an expert on child development . . .It’s not an irony. It’s the whole point.
The irony, says Arredondo, is that the people buying the book are probably good parents.
I haven’t read Go the F**k to Sleep, but it seems like one of those books you don’t have to actually read. The title says it all. The book is a satire of middle-class niceness and civility. It reveals the inconvenient truth that despite that niceness, kids can sometimes be a pain, and even good, kind, thoughtful, nice parents run out of patience. They’d like to explode at their kids, but they know they shouldn’t, just as know they shouldn’t denigrate Jews, blacks, Muslims, or Latinos. So they don’t flip off their kids and tell them to go the fuck to sleep. But they’d still like to, and maybe they even think it might be justifiable. That’s why the book is a best-seller.
Forbidden truth informs good satire’s jest –OK, it’s not Pope, but you get the idea. You have to be what Dr. Arredondo calls a “good” parent to know the tension that makes the book title funny.
What oft is thought but has to be suppressed.
Mrs. Scavolini would not have gotten the joke.
* See the post and comments at Scatterplot for example.
** If you like the on-screen juxtaposition of this book and the caption about fungal disease among bats, you’ll find similar ironies here . (On many of these, an ad is covering the caption, so you have to click on the “x” to close it.)
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