Bob the Bummer

The last time we gave money to OPB, they cancelled my favorite show. I was so mad, we took a long hiatus from watching any public programming. I mean, it just feels like a betrayal, because they always take something good and replace it with something stupid or just ruin it.

Take Bob the Builder. At first, I thought it was a little too "cutesy" and simplistic, especially the refrain, "Can we fix it? Yes we can!" The show centers around Bob and Wendy and their crew of construction vehicles that all have names and personalities and even hang-ups. Bob goes around doing construction jobs for the community, with no job being too small. Every member of the community has Bob on the payroll, it seems, and there's no lack of business from the mayor. So every show is a pack of three mini-episodes following Bob and the gang on their latest job, interacting with various other characters, and solving every problem with a mixture of teamwork and serendipity.

I quickly got over my first impression that Bob was a dippy show, however. Soon I began to appreciate the jerky stop-action animation, the cute animals and the anthropomorphic machines. There was an innocence about the show, that transcended bills and permits and contracts to show a simple world without sin, in which everyone worked together for the good of all. One time there was a segment oriented purely at the parents, who were told that, "By learning how to solve problems together, children learn to work together as a team." That was the extent of any overt messages in the show. Although Bob occasionally interjected that such-and-such was a salvageable material that should be reused, or mentioned "green" building methods from time to time, the main thrust of the show was fun, friends, and problem-solving. I got hooked on it, and for the last few weeks, Bob has been the high point of many hectic mornings.

Until now. I may be late to the scene--apparently Bob the Builder has been on for awhile--but after the first season of the show, the focus shifted. Bob and his team have been given a new mission: to develop picturesque Sunflower Valley into an environmentally-friendly community. The new focus was pitched in a full-length episode featuring an architectural contest in which Bob's green utopia was pitted against an ugly mass of skyscrapers. Bob wins the contest, to the relief and enlightenment of all, and is awarded the task of making his vision come alive. During the episode, Bob is what he usually is not--a man on a mission. No more civic redecorating or barn-raising for him! This is a real job. At several points in the episode, he even had all the vehicles chanting "Reduce, reuse, recycle! Reduce, reuse, recycle!" I almost choked on my coffee in annoyance.

Now each mini-episode consists of Bob alone in the wilderness, building his dream one step at a time, while delivering homilies on environmentalism to his captive audience of adoring machines. While Carl still enjoys the show, it's been ruined for me. Now instead of drifting briefly into fantasy land, chuckling over the townspeople's small foibles and unintentional bits of comedy, I'm having this environmentalist agenda shoved down my throat. Even the PC-ness of Sesame Street isn't stressed this much. It's bad enough that children can't just have fun anymore (everything having to carry an "educational" message), but the new, unmistakably political, tone of the show is cruel.

How so?

It's cruel to take a child's little memories and pleasures and twist them to reflect the agenda of some adults who just happen to be in charge and stand to profit from forcing their agenda. You can practically see some producer cackling with glee in anticipation of his next promotion, and some committee of writers sitting around going, "Well, what can Bob say about protecting the environment today? Who cares...somebody brew another pot of coffee and we'll spend 30 seconds chanting Reduce-Reuse-Recycle again." This is not to say that I'm against protecting the environment. It's just that "protecting the environment" has become the mantra of liberals, covering up their real agenda of killing human beings through abortion and euthanasia. They took a sweet little story and turned it into a half-hour long commercial for their platform.

It's cruel to eradicate every last vestige of imagination from television, especially when PBS gets public money to fund programs for poor children which should go toward something besides inculcating an ideology. "Wait a minute, it's just recycling," you point out. "Who can argue with that?" Nobody can. That's the point. It's the camel's nose in the tent, pitched at two-year-olds to soften them up for more propaganda once they get into the schools, where recycling bins proliferate and common sense goes out the window. And even if you don't agree with that, you'd think that there would be a better way than to take a good show that had good writing and production value and turn it into a platform of talking points.

Finally, it's cruel to all the rest of us who live in a diminished world, a world that has sold its birthright--the faith delivered once by Jesus Christ to the saints--for this mess of pottage: a world of paranoia and pornography, of political correctness and contraception, of anti-religious totalitarianism and casual killing. It's cruel to destroy every oasis of joy there is to be had in this howling wilderness, in which human beings exist only to use and be used, and children are simply pawns to be won to one agenda or another. Like the world, Bob has become boring...and that's a real bummer.