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Tubbythumping
THEY GET KNOCKED DOWN, THEY GET UP AGAIN. BUT NOT FOR LONG. LET THE TELETUBBIES BASHING BEGIN.
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BY JOYCE MILLMAN | You may not have heard of "Teletubbies" yet. Savor this blessed ignorance. On April 6, the mega-hit British children's TV show premieres on PBS stations in the United States and, soon, you will not be able to hide from the loathsome rat-baby visages of the four Tubbies: Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po.
Am I being cruel? Watch the show. "Teletubbies," which has been airing on the BBC for a year, is simultaneously vacuous and surreal. It's the first show specifically aimed at children as young as 1 year old, and it does so with an inane mix of goo-goo talk and hallucinatory imagery. The British media hates the show. Parents hate the show. Child development experts hate the show (Dorothy Singer of the Yale University Family TV Research and Consultation Center has come out against "Teletubbies" because the target audience is too young). PBS president Ervin Duggan hates the show, telling a national educational television conference last year, "I used to think 'Barney' would make me throw something at the television set. Wait till you see 'Teletubbies.'"
So why is PBS airing "Teletubbies"? Because it draws a regular viewership of 2 million in England. Because an estimated $80 million worth of Tubbies merchandise was sold worldwide last year (the show is also seen in, among other countries, Australia, South Africa, Israel, the Netherlands and Singapore). It's a creepy show, educationally suspect, yet here it is, helping PBS reach that last untapped kids' market. What's next -- programming for fetuses?
Actually, the Teletubbies do look an awful lot like fetuses, with their huge eyes, oversized upper lips and hairless, smooshy faces. They also look sort of like an infantilized version of the gray space alien. From an American perspective, the Teletubbies are a disturbing collision of two of the most pervasive cultural obsessions of our time, abortion and UFO's.
The Tubbies, played by four actors encased Barneylike in color-coded, big-bottomed felt suits, cavort in a green rolling meadow strewn with flowers and live bunnies -- it's like a trippy cross between a Sid and Marty Krofft puppetland and an Oasis video. The Tubbies live inside a breast-shaped grass mound, supervised only by a vacuum cleaner named Noo-Noo. Disembodied adult voices are heard through "voice trumpets," periscope-type thingies that pop up out of the ground to signal when it's time for exercise, naps or meals. In a sunny-side-up version of heinous parental neglect, the Tubbies eat machinery-dispensed food (Tubby Custard and Tubby Toast) and exhibit the stunted verbal development ("eh-oh" instead of "hello") you've read about in cases where a child is, say, locked in a closet for 10 years. The Tubbies' main activities are playing peek-a-boo, hugging, falling down and watching TV through the video screens embedded in their stomachs. Yes. They have TV's for tummies.
The Tubbies apparently receive incoming broadcasts from a mysterious spinning windmill; the transmission makes the antennae on top of their heads glow and then one of the Tubbies' tummy-screens will start playing a video clip of a very young human child doing something like riding a tricycle or taking care of a pet pony. After it's over the Tubbies cry, "Again, again!" and the tedious little film is replayed in its entirety, because babies like repetition, and if you parents have a problem with that, scold the ads PBS has taken out in magazines and newspapers to introduce the show, you need to slow down and "connect with your child on a whole different level. Theirs."
Of course, parents filled the need for repetition quite adequately in the prehistoric era before "Teletubbies." We read "Goodnight Moon," twice a night, 365 nights a year, and played pat-a-cake until our brains nearly imploded from boredom, and we liked it, by gum! Oh sure, Anne Wood, the British creator of "Teletubbies," may babble earnestly to the press about her great social mission of creating programming for babies who "are growing up in a technological world," but the pragmatic comments of Kenn Viselman, whose itsy bitsy Entertainment Company holds the lucrative U.S. merchandising rights to "Teletubbies," are a lot more believable. If parents are using TV as a baby sitter, he told the public broadcasting magazine Current, "they might as well have a good product." And speaking to Advertising Age, Viselman (whose bio touts him as the "genius behind the sales and marketing of 'Thomas the Tank Engine'") said that having "Teletubbies" running on PBS "is like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval."
Exactly. And that's why it's depressing to see PBS messing with the parental trust earned through years of conscientious programming like "Mister Rogers" and "Sesame Street." PBS's advertising for the show seems designed to assuage parental guilt over using "Teletubbies" as a baby sitter; the PBS Web site promises that the show will "nourish children's thinking skills, teach them to listen, help build their curiosity, expand their imagination and increase their confidence." But absent from that list is the lesson most important to Wood (whose company, Ragdoll Productions, has created scores of kids' shows), and to Viselman, and to the BBC and PBS: "Teletubbies" teaches toddlers how to be good little TV-watching soldiers.
"Teletubbies" is indoctrination so naked and pure it's almost farcical. On the show, a human baby's face inside a sunburst in the sky functions as a visual cue, telling little viewers how they should respond to what they're seeing. And the tummy-TVs blatantly internalize TV watching, making it a part of the Tubbies' selves, a part of their doughy couch potato bodies. "Teletubbies" links TV to all the good things baby loves -- custard and breasts and full tummies. How unfortunate (snicker, snicker) for PBS that it's launching "Teletubbies" only a couple of weeks after a widely publicized Harvard School of Public Health study documenting a correlation between childhood obesity and excessive TV watching.
But while "Teletubbies" may be bad for babies, the show's not-quite-hidden agenda and dazed and confused weirdness has inspired some mischievous Tubby deconstruction among grown-up viewers. A show like Comedy Central's scatological cartoon phenomenon "South Park," for instance, is its own graffiti (you can't possibly trash it better than the show trashes itself), but the bland, jolly fascism of "Teletubbies" practically invites you to take your best subtextual pot shot. So, to the BBC's dismay, gay groups in Britain hailed Tinky Winky (the purple one with the coat hanger coming out of his head) as the first queer hero of children's TV because he often carries around a big red purse. And on the Web, there are dozens of Tubby parodies, all of them more clever than the show.
The amusing Teletubbies Conspiracy Site places the Tubbies in an Orwellian scenario where they "spend most of their lives in abject fear, nervously awaiting the moment when the omnipresent windmill with its mind controlling red rays" will single one out to be "subjected to an ordeal of telly torture as an example to the others." The British humor webzine Palindrome offers a droll, Monty Pythonesque entry called Teletubbies: The True Story, which purports to be a natural history journal containing observations about the mysterious species "Tubbis tele" ("The actual act of Teletubby procreation has never been observed, although several mating rituals have been recorded. A common one involves two Teletubbies running towards each other, then colliding in mid-air ...").
The anti-Tubby jokes are so funny because they're grounded in truth -- "Teletubbies" is indoctrination, it is mind-control, it is a transparent attempt to institute brand-recognition and consumer craving in the youngest, most innocent viewers. "To be free to learn, children must be free to dream," gushes the manifesto for Viselman's itsy bitsy Entertainment Company.
Free to dream -- as long as they dream of Tubbies.
SALON | April 3, 1998
October 6, 2003
From a Cub to a Menace, and Now a Mystery
By LYDIA POLGREEN and JASON GEORGE
His obsession began innocently enough, with the puppies and broken-winged birds every little boy begs to bring home. Over the years, Antoine Yates's taste in animals grew ever more exotic, neighbors said, and his collection came to include reptiles, a monkey or two and, according to one neighbor, even a hyena.
He had a deep affection for living creatures in need of a home that he might have picked up from his mother, Martha Yates. She had raised dozens of foster children in her five-bedroom apartment in a public housing high-rise in Harlem, according to one of her foster sons.
In time, Mr. Yates's most exotic pet, a tiger that he named Ming, grew to more than 400 pounds, and that happy home disintegrated. Terrified, Ms. Yates, 67, packed up the last two of her foster children and moved to a suburb of Philadelphia earlier this year, neighbors said.
Mr. Yates, 37, hard pressed to control the tiger, apparently decamped, too, to a nearby apartment. He continued to feed the tiger by throwing raw chickens through a door opened just narrowly enough to keep a paw the size of a lunch plate from swiping through, neighbors said.
On Saturday, the police moved in, alerted by Mr. Yates's curious call in which he claimed to have been bitten by a pit bull. They discovered Ming and managed to remove him, but only after a sharpshooter rappelled down the side of the apartment building and shot it with tranquilizer darts. The mission created a swirl of excitement in the neighborhood and left a series of questions for an assortment of officials. The police are trying to determine where Mr. Yates got a tiger cub and how he managed to raise it from kitten to menace in a public housing project.
Officials at the city's Administration for Children's Services said they were trying to determine whether foster children had lived in the apartment while the tiger and other dangerous animals were there. Officials of the New York City Housing Authority were trying to determine how the tiger escaped the notice of workers at the complex. As was obvious on Saturday, his roar is ferocious.
People who live in the building in the Drew Hamilton Houses at 2430 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard said the tiger had lived among them for at least three years. His presence, while strange, was widely known and did not really alarm anyone, they said.
Jerome Applewhite, 43, who lives on the 18th floor, first encountered Ming about three years ago, when he stopped at the apartment for a visit and saw Mr. Yates sitting with the tiger cub cradled in his arms.
"He was feeding it with a bottle," Mr. Applewhite said. "He cared for his pets."
It did not surprise him much, he said, that an animal seen only in the East or the north, if that includes the Bronx Zoo should show up in a city apartment. "It was a house pet," Mr. Applewhite said. "To me that is cool."
City officials did not share his view. "Tigers are dangerous animals," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told reporters yesterday at a news conference on Fifth Avenue before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade. "Clearly this tiger should not have been anyplace in New York City outside of a zoo."
Investigators from the New York Police Department were questioning Mr. Yates yesterday, who was placed under guard after he was located at a Philadelphia hospital. On Wednesday, he went to Harlem Hospital Center, where he gave skeptical doctors his account of being bitten by a pit bull. He checked out early Saturday, prompting an inquiry into his whereabouts.
Mr. Yates could be charged with reckless endangerment, the police said, and he will be returned to New York after he is released from the Philadelphia hospital, the police said.
Kathleen Carlson, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, said the agency was "looking into our history, if any, at this address."
Howard Marder, a spokesman for the housing authority, which oversees public housing, said officials were trying to determine when the apartment was last inspected and how a tiger was not detected. He said authority records indicated that one complaint was received about the smell of urine coming from the apartment.
Public housing residents are permitted only one pet, and it must weigh no more than 40 pounds, Mr. Marder said. It was unclear exactly who was supposed to be living in the Yateses' apartment, he added. He said records indicated that Ms. Yates moved out in January, but neighbors said she was still living in the apartment as recently as June.
The tiger, along with a five-foot-long alligator-like reptile called a caiman that was also found in the apartment, was taken to a New York animal shelter, and the tiger has been sent to live in a wildlife preserve in Ohio, city officials said.
Residents of the Drew Hamilton Houses who knew Mr. Yates said yesterday that he was well known as an outsized character who, above all else, loved animals, but none of them were sure how he came to have a tiger cub.
"Every time I have ever seen him, he was talking about his exotic animals," said Wanda Tompkins, 26, whose family has lived in the apartment directly below Mr. Yates's for five years. "He was nice, but he was strange a bit."
Ms. Tompkins's mother, Valerie, said she had long known that a strange assortment of beasts lived upstairs. It was not a problem until this summer, when she tried to raise her windows and found the sills soaked with urine and an animal stench invading her apartment.
"I complained to housing, but they never responded," Valerie Tompkins said. "It does sound far fetched."
She had never seen the tiger, but her daughter Janaya had. Janaya, 11, was a friend of one of Ms. Yates's foster children, a girl named Dana, Janaya said.
"She asked me if I wanted to see the tiger," Janaya said. She told Dana, yes, she did want to see it, and she was led to one of the apartment's bedrooms. The tiger was lying inside a cage. Janaya said she was too terrified to pet it. "It was scary," she said.
Raven Eaton, who works at the nearby Associated Supermarket, said Mr. Yates would come into the store every afternoon to buy several bags of raw chicken.
"He said they were for his animals," Ms. Eaton said. He never said what kind of animals he had. "He was as normal as someone like Antoine could be."
Whatever his motives, city officials said, it is both unsafe and cruel to keep a tiger in an apartment. A police officer who answered the telephone in Mr. Yates's room at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia said Mr. Yates did not wish to be interviewed.
Last night, a young woman who answered the door of Martha Yates's two-story house in Yeadon, Pa., just west of Philadelphia, identified herself as a daughter and said her mother would have no comment.
Mr. Yates's brother Aaron, 24, said Antoine Yates cared for his animals and never wanted to hurt them.
"His love for animals started when we were babies," he said. "He would nurse animals off the street. He got that from my mother."
"He was straight up," he added. "He raised a healthy tiger. They should find him a job with animals."
What the Monkeys Can Teach Humans About Making America Fairer
By ADAM COHEN
Give a capuchin monkey a cucumber slice, and she will eagerly trade a small pebble for it. But when a second monkey, in an adjoining cage, receives a more-desirable grape for the same pebble, it changes everything. The first monkey will then reject her cucumber, and sometimes throw it out of the cage. Monkeys rarely refuse food, but in this case they appear to be pursuing an even higher value than eating: fairness.
The capuchin monkey study, published last week in Nature, has generated a lot of interest for a scant three-page report buried in the journal's letters section. There is, certainly, a risk of reading too much into the feeding habits of 10 research monkeys. But in a week when fairness was so evidently on the ropes from the World Trade Organization meeting in Cancϊn, which poor nations walked out of in frustration, to the latest issue of Forbes, reporting that the richest 400 Americans are worth $955 billion the capuchin monkeys offered a glimmer of hope from the primate gene pool.
The study's implication that we are, to some extent, hard-wired for fairness speaks with special force to the legal system. American law has undergone a transformation in recent years, led by conservative Supreme Court justices and scholars, away from a focus on broad principles of fairness and toward a willingness to subject people to treatment that might be unjust, on the grounds that it is legal. The monkey study suggests, however, that fairness might be more than a currently unfashionable legal concept. It may be integral to who we are.
Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, chose capuchin monkeys because capuchins are among the few primates along with men and chimpanzees that hunt cooperatively. Team hunting has evolutionary advantages, allowing a species to capture prey, like squirrels, it otherwise could not. In many monkey societies the dominant male eats what he wants, and the others fight over the scraps. But in societies like those of capuchins and humans in which hunting is done cooperatively, food is more equitably distributed.
The reason for the sharing is obvious. Cooperative primates will be reluctant to engage in a group hunt if they cannot be assured that their reward will be properly related to their efforts. The capuchin monkeys in the study did not care merely about rules: it was not enough that they were given a cucumber slice when that was what they expected. They also wanted the rule that was applied to them to be, in a larger sense, fair.
What role an inherent, human sense of fairness should play in the law is a critical issue today. In the "rights revolution" of the 1960's, the Supreme Court found broad fairness principles throughout the Constitution strong rights to equal protection and due process, for example, and an expansive notion of what it means to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. The court brought these fairness principles to every corner of society, from schools, to prisons, to welfare offices.
Today, in law's eternal battle between strictly applied rules and broader principles of fairness, the pendulum is rapidly swinging back toward strict rules. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court considered the case of Leandro Andrade, a father of three who, because of California's harsh "three strikes and you're out" law, was sentenced to 50 years to life for stealing $153.54 worth of videotapes. The court's four liberals protested the unfairness of the sentence, arguing in dissent that if it was not "grossly disproportionate" to the crime, and therefore a violation of the Eighth Amendment's bar on cruel and unusual punishment, "the principle has no meaning." But the court's five-justice conservative majority concluded, in effect, that rules are rules, and that the sentence "was not an unreasonable application of our clearly established law."
In death penalty cases, criminal appeals, discrimination suits, the conservative majority regularly shows an indifference to the sort of fairness claims that would have prevailed in the 1960's. Lower federal court judges are also engaged in heated battles between rules and broader fairness principles, notably over the federal sentencing guidelines. The guidelines can pressure judges to impose sentences that, given the facts of a particular case, would result in unfairness. But the Justice Department, egged on by Republicans in Congress, is collecting data on judges who give lighter sentences than the guidelines recommend, which critics say could be used to create a blacklist.
Legal philosophers have long debated whether there is such a thing as natural law higher principles of fairness that trump the rules enacted by man and if so, from where it is derived. To natural law proponents like St. Augustine, who said an unjust law is no law at all, the answer was God. The capuchin monkey study suggests, however, that part of the answer may be biological. It hints that, as Mr. de Waal puts it, "a lot of the notions we use in our moral systems are much older than our species."
None of this, of course, means human society is destined to be fair. We are also hard-wired for competition and aggression. And we have a tendency to establish societies in which, as Shakespeare observed, "to do harm is often laudable, to do good sometime accounted dangerous folly." But the capuchin monkey study suggests that fairness is at least part of the mix of traits that go with being human and that over time, higher notions of justice that look beyond mechanical application of rigid rules may have a fighting chance.
In Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," an ape-man throws a bone he has just used as a weapon into the air and it is transformed into a spaceship. The discovery of weapons was certainly, as the movie indicates, one of our key evolutionary moments. But the capuchin monkey study is a welcome reminder that the first time an ape-man angrily picked up his food allotment and threw it into the air because it was unjust was no less pivotal to the emergence of what it means to be human.