The View from the Barcalounger

Watson's been on a roll lately, and today offers up a good intro for some themed parenting thoughts.

It's as dangerous to play the "all parents" game as it is to play the "all anybody" game, though comedy relies on stereotypes and assumptions. I've offered a quick "well done" to parents of young children as we left the airplane far, far more times than I've glared at out-of-control seat-kickers and screamers, but where would the world of comedy be if we didn't assume all children on planes are a plague?

However, I've sure met the parent in Watson. When I coached rec league soccer, I took a coaching effectiveness course that told us to have a mandatory parent meeting to start the season, and to stress the importance of showing up to support your kid.

"If you ask your child if it's okay for you to miss the game, they will say 'yes' because they love you," I would say. "It's not okay. You need to be there."

And, by golly, about 60 percent would be there. If I hadn't had that meeting and made that little speech, it probably would only have been 55 percent.

Mileage varies on this, by the way. I was embarrassed when the hockey team from my own tiny alma mater, with classes down to 20 or less since the mines and mill closed, drove 120 miles to play my son's team and I found myself standing with more of my old classmates than there were parents of my son's classmates from a school six times as large at a home game.

But then many of the parents who did show up for our tiny-tot soccer games were the "Little League Parents" who pop up in any sport and who really need to just shut up and watch.

Though refs do maintain control in some rec leagues today, as demonstrated in one of my favorite classic Cleats strips, which is a perfect segue to ...

... the other half of the issue, as seen today in Pearls Before Swine.

The rules of comedy remain in place, and so we assume that any show of care at all is overdoing it, such that you have people proudly declaring that "we" all rode around without seatbelts or bike helmets back in the day, and it didn't do us any harm, goddammit, and this goddam generation is over-protected and spoiled.

Which fits in with Brian Fies's comment in a recent posting about how they only interview the artists who have made it, creating the false narrative that if you keep to it and never give up, one day you will succeed.

Here's a pretty good graphic representation on the topic of literal "survivor bias" and how many people are not here to be polled about safety.

Note that the change in Rate-of-Death among the Old Fart demographic hasn't changed nearly as much over those 70 years as the rate among kids, so I'd say you don't need to belt yourself in and put on a helmet if you're just going to sit in your Barcalounger bitching.

Of course, there certainly are helicopter parents. I've been reading an article in the New Yorker about a set of tiny schools for the children of people with enormous wallets. I haven't finished it, so I'm not sure if the author is writing it as straight reporting or dark comedy.

Apparently, though, if you are a multimillionaire and one of your pals starts a special K-8 school where the tuition is only $30,000 a year, it's pretty swell.

And they're going to iterate it, so that's good, because, once you iterate something, then even the peasantry gets some. (The writer does acknowledge that "fluency in the jargon of Silicon Valley—English 2.0—is required at AltSchool," so maybe she's trying to compete with Borowitz after all.)

Serious or not, the article ties in nicely with today's Mr Fitz, in which he satirizes charter school bafflegab.

The joke being that underachievers in for-profit schools never get D's. The worst are expelled, others get marigolded.

So here's another plug for Fowl Language, where bad-but-starkly-realistic parenting is celebrated. I swore I'd never pull the "Okay, I'm leaving" on my kids, and I only did it one time before the horror of "Oh, God, I've become one of them!" hit.

Or maybe twice. But not more than two or three times.

Probably.

Proving that, comedy does not, in fact, have to rely on stereotyping and assumptions. Sometimes the truth is ghastly enough to provoke giggles.

Meanwhile, back in the Barcalounger:

Matt takes on the precipitous rush of sponsors away from Maria Sharapova, following her testing positive at the Australian Open for a drug she has been taking, by prescription, for ten years but which was added to the ban list ten weeks ago.

Whatever the further investigations reveal, this quote reveals all:

“I would think in those circumstances that as a brand you would take a little bit more of a wait-and-see approach to see what the public court of opinion thinks,” said Kevin Adler, president of the marketing company Engage Marketing.

Does he expect fairness in the court of public opinion? Because you don't have to be in Australia to find yourself facing a judicial panel of kangaroos.

Consider the case of this little fellow:

The photo of this near-miss was originally posted by people awed by his father's lightning reaction, but it didn't take long for the Barcalounger Brigade to start trashing the kid for looking at his phone instead of watching the game, because those goddam kids these days don't pay attention to nothing but their goddam cellphones, goddammit.