“You like what?” I said.
“I like Barney,” he said, and he turned over and went to sleep. The next morning we broke down and let him watch the video again—we were pretty jet-lagged too—and that was enough. It was like what they used to tell you about heroin: One taste, and you’re hooked for good.
“I want Barney,” he would announce early in the morning. He began to whine for Barney: “I want Barney, I want Barney.” When we got back to Paris (the tapes somehow got into our bags), the need for Barney went right on. It even got worse. We’d be trying to watch one of the long, thoughtful French things that are good for your soul and your French—Bouillon de Culture or Droit d’Auteurs, or even just the dubbed version of NYPD Blue (“Ah, c’est un houlot difficile, ce travail de policier, Inspecteur Sipowicz”)-—and Luke would appear with a Barney tape. We had fled to Paris to escape our appointment with Barney, and Barney had come to meet us there.
Not wanting to be a bad or unduly coercive parent, I thought, Well, he has a right to his pleasures, but I too have a right—indeed a duty—to tell him what I think of them. We began to have a regular daily exchange.
“Daddy, I like Barney,” he would say with elaborately feigned nonchalance, coming into my office first thing in the morning.
“Well, I don’t like Barney,” I would say, frankly
“You like B.J.?” he would ask, tauntingly. B.J. is one of Barney’s even more inane and adenoidal sidekicks.
“I love Ernie and Bert,” I would say, trying to put a positive spin on my position. “I love the carousel. I love the circus. I love Charlie Chaplin.”
“I like Barney,” he would begin again, and it would go on.
Naturally it occurred to us that the pro-Barney campaign was a resourceful and in many ways courageous and admirable show of independence on the part of a two-and-a-half-year-old who might otherwise have been smothered by his parents’ overbearing enthusiasms. We put up minimal Barney resistance. More tapes arrived from America; more tapes got popped in and played.
We tried to be tolerant, but Barney takes his tolclass="underline" the braying voice, the crude direction, the inane mummery of the dancing, the witlessness of the writing. Our dreamed-of Parisian life was becoming unendurable. One afternoon around four-thirty I wandered into the bedroom, where the television is. My wife was, uncharacteristically, drinking a glass of red wine. On the little screen Barney was leading all the kids in one more rousing chorus of “I love you/you love me.” We finished the bottle of Burgundy together. On the screen Barney sang, and our son moved his lips in time.
What puzzled me of course was why. Loving Barney in Paris was partly a way of teasing his parents, but it was not simply a way of teasing his parents; it was too deep, too emotional for that. Nor had Barney yet crossed the ocean, so it wasn’t any kind of peer pressure from the French kids he played with in class and in the courtyard every day. In Paris, in fact, almost all the childhood icons are those that have been in place for forty years: stuffy, bourgeois Babar; conniving, witty Asterix and Obelix; and imperturbable Lucky Luke, the Franco-American cowboy in perpetual battle with the four Dalton brothers. Although these characters from time to time appear in cartoons, they remain locked in their little worlds of satire and storytelling. There is no Barney in France, and there is no French Barney. Whatever spell was working on my son, it was entirely, residually American.
There are certain insights that can come to an American only when he is abroad, because only there does the endless ribbon of American television become segmented enough so that you can pay attention to its parts, instead of just being overwhelmed by the relentlessness of its presence. In the middle of the winter I happened to see, during some stray roundup of the year’s events on CNN International, a clip of another familiar American figure, his arms around his wife and child, swaying and humming as he watched fireworks going off. Suddenly I got it. The nose; the rocking motion; above all, the squinty-eyed, aw-shucks, just-a-big-lug smile: Barney is Bill Clinton for three-year-olds. Or, rather, Bill Clinton is Barney for adults. He serves the same role for jumpy American liberals that Barney does for their children: He reassures without actually instructing. The physical resemblance alone is eerie. There’s the odd combination of hauteur and rondeur (both are very tall without really being imposing), the perpetually swaying body, the unvarying smile, even the disconcerting chubby thighs—everything but the purple skin. Barney and Bill are not amiable authority figures, like the Friendly Giant and Ronald Reagan. They are, instead, representations of pure need: Wanting to be hugged, they hug.
For the first time, I also understood Clinton hating, of the violent irrational kind that, when I left America, was being practiced on the editorial page of the Times and in the New Republic and had always seemed incomprehensible, directed, as it was, at so anodyne a character. Suddenly I saw that the psychology of the Clinton hater was exactly that of the Barney basher; the objections were not moral but peevishly aesthetic. Like Barney, Bill stripped away our pet illusions by showing just how much we could do without. We had persuaded ourselves that the modern child needed irony, wit, humor, parody to be reached and affected; Sesame Street and Bullwinkle were our exhibits in this argument. Barney showed that this was not the case. At the same time, we had persuaded ourselves that the modern citizen, similarly wary (he is, after all, merely the Bullwinkle viewer grown old), could be recalled to liberalism only through a heightened, self-conscious, soul-searching high-mindedness. Bill showed that this was not the case. Both dinosaur and Arkansas governor had discovered that the way to win the hearts of their countrymen was to reduce their occupation to its most primitive form. Where Kermit the Frog, on Sesame Street, had sung the principle of brotherhood to children through the poetic metaphor of his own greenness, Barney just grabbed the kids and told them that he loved them and that they loved him too, damn it. Where Mario Cuomo had orated about Lincoln and the immigrants and the metaphor of family, Bill Clinton just held out his arms and watched people leap into them. It turns out that you don’t need to be especially witty or wise to entertain children, just as you don’t need to believe in anything much to be an extremely effective president. All you need is to know your audience’s insecurities and how to keep swaying in time to them forever.
We had kept Barney in quarantine, for the most part, and though Neige and Jolie and Amandine passed through the house, it was mostly to sing lovely French songs—“Pomme de Reinette” and “Frere Jacques”—and play with Luke’s puppet theater. Then we decided to hold a party to celebrate the coming of spring, and I went out to Mulot to get a four-part chocolate cake. When I came back to the apartment, half an hour later, the roomful of lively children whom I had left drawling in haute French was silent. They were all in the bedroom. I walked in—no cuckolded husband can ever have entered his own bedroom with more dread about what he would find there—and saw the three girls spread out on the bed, their crinolines beautifully plumped, their eyes wide, their mouths agape. Barney was in France, and the kids were loving him. The three perfect French children looked on, hardly able to understand the language, yet utterly transfixed. I held out cake. Nothing doing. Barney was swaying. B.J. was prancing. The kids on the show were mugging like crazy and everyone was singing.