Hostages

 A confession:  I grew up without any acquaintance with the Great Children's Classics -- no Beatrix Potter, no Laura Ingalls Wilder, no fairy tales that I can remember.  My parents were new at parenting and just pointed me toward their own shelves of Dickens, Poe, biographies and assorted long-forgotten novelists of the 1940s (Samuel Shellabarger, anyone?  Kathleen Winsor?).  So I have no emotional attachment to Winnie the Pooh, either as the companion of the late Queen Elizabeth or the subject of a 2023 British slasher film.   If the copyright owner could not keep the bear out of the public domain, well, this kind of thing happens.  I suppose the XXX version of Little Women will be along at some point.

One appropriation of Pooh is too disturbing to be overlooked.  Texas schoolchildren, forbidden to read anything about Black or trans people, will have access to a Stay Safe Book where Pooh teaches them to "run, hide, fight" when a gunman enters the school.  Texas will do anything to protect children except restrict access to firearms, especially assault weapons -- it will even harvest their DNA to help medical examiners match up their small body parts.  As I said, I'm not a reader but my understanding is that the bear is from Peru, which doesn't fit the Texas attitude toward Spanish-speaking immigrants.  It seems more than presumptuous to press-gang him into the state's campaign of teaching children that they are hostages to a specious reading of the Second Amendment.

 

    "If there is danger, the police will come fast to catch the stranger."  Not available in Uvalde.

But we are all hostages.   Those of us who don't want to see the global economy explode like a new Tesla are the problem, according to Matt Gaetz, who doesn't even bother with euphemism.  "I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don't feel like we should negotiate with our hostage."  Fuck you, capitalism, this is about proving how powerful we are.  Biden says he's "very optimistic" about the debt limit, which I hope means he's prepared to shove the Fourteenth Amendment straight up their trumps.  Somebody needs to put sanity first and it's not going to be the Big Giant Head.  No negotiation with terrorists.