Muppets Mayhem is Misdirection

Honestly, I haven’t been paying much attention.

I mean, I love the Muppets but once I stopped having to read bedtime stories in Elmo’s voice to the kids, Muppet headlines stopped resonating (although the whole family does very much enjoy rewatching The Muppet Family Christmas Special each year — a classic, sadly unavailable, anymore).

But I’m hearing some suggestions that the new Muppet movie is a covert action by the socialists, hellbent on denigrating capitalism and especially conservatives.

I really do understand how a steady drip-drip-drip of insinuation can have a lasting impact on society. But sometimes I just have to shake my head at the way people react, or how eager they seem to be to get huffed up about everything, all the time — as though they’ve been primed to accept an “outrage of the day” and one day the outrage was The Muppet Movie. And another day it was Lily, the Food-insecure Muppet, who offended some by talking about free food at school, on that progressive-propaganda program known as Sesame Street.

I do think Sesame Street sometimes lays on the lessons with such a trowel of progressive goo that it can be unwatchable. What started out in the 70’s as fun education became so ponderously “instructive” by the late 80’s that my kids spent a great deal more time with Mr. Rogers than with whoever replaced Mr. Hooper.

Nevertheless — though I cringe when I hear the politically-and-bureaucratically-correct euphemistic “food-insecure” (why isn’t “hungry” good enough?) I’m not jumping on the Lily-Bashwagon. Someone I love was raised in an environment where food was a scarce thing — at one point, one “snack-sized” bag of potato chips a day was all there was to eat, for a whole week — so I don’t begrudge any kid a breakfast or lunch they can get at school. I didn’t see the whole Sesame Street scene, but I hope Lily also talked about church and community food-pantries, since they do a lot of good for hungry folks.

And I’m not going to jump on The Muppet Movie, either, especially not after reading this interesting tidbit:

In the film, the oil tycoon sings a song about how much he loves money and so on and so forth. In the soundtrack, the same song is there but is slightly longer, as it includes a little section about why the oil tycoon hates the Muppets. As I recall (heard it on Sirius XM; haven’t bought it yet), it’s something about how they managed to ruin one of his childhood birthday parties. I don’t know why that was cut out of the movie version, as without it the song made little sense. However, once you hear the complete song, so much more of the movie’s plot line and motivations becomes clear. It’s not all about the oil tycoon wanting to drill for oil underneath the Muppet Theater. There is primarily a personal revenge aspect in play.

Of course…there is this stunning confession of subversive activity by Sam-the-Eagle:

Kermit certainly knew how to crack the whip over at the UPMCMF – the United Puppets, Marionettes and Claymation Figures. The cast of Davey and Goliath was reactionary to a man – hardly surprising, when you consider the Evangelical Lutheran Church was bankrolling the show. Davey, who was the same cocky little bastard on-camera as he was off – proof, if anyone needs it, that he couldn’t act – wanted to impose the blacklist. In that quiet, unassuming way of his, Kerm reminded Davey that his high and holy bosses might be unhappy to hear he’d been flitting around with Roy Cohn and G. David Schine. Davey backed right off, although, to everyone’s sorrow, Scooter gave Kermit the cold shoulder for some time afterward.

For years, saving our own union cards was all any of us could do. That changed when ATV brought us all together on The Muppet Show. Overnight, we became culturally relevant.

In the end, of course, all of this Muppet mayhem is just a distraction, meant to take us away from the the training and preparation we should be undertaking.

Why waste your time on what in the end will only serve the illusion-makers, when you need to be preparing for the reality?