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Letters

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Parent Issue
Month
June
Year
1990
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
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Agenda Publications
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LETTERS

Ransby Off Mark on Bugs

Bugs Bunny bigoted? Road Runner a road warrior? With Daffy Duck I can only say to Barbara Ransby, "Now, jutht a minute, buthter!"--- which is not (repeat not) meant to oppress the speech-impeded.

Doubtful though I am about judging a fantasy figure more than 50-years old by current codes of ethnic etiquette, I would make a more basic point. Ransby looks only to the surface content of the Jay Ward cartoons, as do nearly all grown-ups. Even there she has eyes only for her own anti-racist and the anti-sexist preoccupations, missing entirely the many send-ups of power and pomposity, everything from imperialism to opera. She thinks children can't tell fantasy from reality because by adulthood, reality for most of us has either soured our taste for fantasy or trivialized it as an occasional bout of entertainment.

For children the message is different. They never walk off cliffs on air like Road runer does, nor do they brain each other with hammers when they see the Three Stooges do it. But they relish these antics because for them the marvelous is not yet, as it is for Ransby, the unttainable. Growing up is the process of progressively demolishing all hope and expectation for something different.

In their play, as in the these cartoons - admittedly already a regression toward consuming- children live another life in their imaginations. Adults mutilated out of their capacity to do this are psychologically incapable of revoution, creation and play.

Is Barbara Ransby the pseudonym of Elmer Fudd?

That's all folks.

Bob Black
ALBANY, NY

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