Little rebels with a cause

Primal, unruly, goofy, and commendable, there they were, a couple of 7-year olds pounding their fists against the armrests of their car seats. They chanted what has become one of the rallying cries of their classmates:

“A, B, C, D!

Barney is our enemy!”

Hmm, Barney bashing. Interesting. Sure, that green and purple dinosaur has been bashed black and blue for nearly a decade now. Sure, there’s nearly universal agreement that Barney is, in fact, the enemy. Even toddlers these days, clad head to toe in form-fitting jumpsuits, probably sense that a real Tyrannosaurus Rex would avail itself of Barney solely as a palette cleanser.

These sentiments are hardly radical. Still, organized rebellion is organized rebellion. It’s a start. They're only 7-years old.

Unlike my generation, these children and their generation will probably grow with irreducible edges honed by the blunt instrument of anxious times. They're already shaped into a discerning brood who demands — among other things — their dinosaurs be irritable and equipped with sharp teeth and bloodshot eyes.

By contrast, many in my generation were formed like rocks in a tumbler. Shaped into smooth stones by the time we were dumped out into the 1980s, we knew nothing ofVietnam and assassinations. We could never have deduced a menacing subtext behind Gallagher’s utilization of all those innocent watermelons.

By the time we came of age, it was as if the adults had all made an agreement to clean up the joint, to act like nothing happened. “Shh! They’re here!”

Maybe the streets still had the tire marks from radicals who made a getaway. But we didn’t suspect a thing.

We were force fed Cyndi Lauper and left hankering for clarification on what sort of fun girls just wanna have. We were handed Iran-Contra, but even if we cared, we were helpless against the muzzleloaded earnestness of Oliver North and his Bette Davis eyes. Even our appointed spokesmen of rage, the band Nirvana, in retrospect seemed merely to be sorting out disquieting experiences of lukewarm coffee and scant mall parking.

Pretty much all we had to rebel against was history’s most un-fun First Lady who told us to "Just say no." Given the messenger, nearly every one of us just said yes simply out of self respect, even those of us who would have otherwise be content with a case of Mountain Dew.

In other words, we were raised in an uncomplicated age, before Cookie Monster began eating fruit.

A line in the classic move “The Third Man” sums up the situation:

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerlandthey had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace — and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

My generation — call us “ Switzerland ” — perfected the proverbial cuckoo clock. It's called free music downloads. Meanwhile, I suspect our puny little Barney-bashers  — born post-9/11 and knowing nothing else but a world whose wallpaper is pealing at the edges — are preparing themselves for something much greater.

While Barney fancies himself the great, big, fat chalkboard eraser of troubling vocabulary, our little ones won't be denied a full accounting of such words as warfare, terror, etc., that cannot be sung to the tune of "This Old Man."

I’d like to believe their rebellion against Barney represents a kernel of a germ of a seed of a starting point of a Renaissance we can only begin to imagine. Look at their heroes: Ruff Ruffman, Capt. Underpants, Jedi Knights who haven’t idle time enough to even fathom judging people by their skin tone -- primary color or otherwise. An unimpeachable cast!

What will all this amount to? Who knows? But it’s too late to clean up the joint. The modern Borgias cannot be muffled with a bucket of Liquid Pledge.

Maybe, for starters, that merely means they’ll grumble how old age is wasted on the old. But maybe they’ll be the ones primed by history and rationality to dismantle most things that constitute an "industrial complex.” That includes the usual suspects — the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the medical-industrial complex, the agricultural-industrial complex, the Rupert-Murdoch-industrial complex, and the college-education-industrial complex.

But maybe they'll add a few newcomers to be dismantled, including the teeth-whitening industrial complex, the pop-star industrial complex, the wedding-planning industrial complex, and the "you-have-a-complex-" industrial complex.

Indeed, maybe they’ll be the ones rebellious enough to replace all hyphenated-industrial complexes with an actual industry-industrial complex.

Maybe they’ll embrace an indispensable form of comedy, the kind defined by Christopher Fry as "a narrow escape into faith." They’ll surely have their masterpieces. They may even live slap-happily ever after.

In the meantime, watch: Barney is just the beginning.