The Daily Procrastinator

Careful! These brownies are special, and not in a good way.

There’s an email being forwarded around quite a bit that tells the story of a couple kids who want to go see a popular and critically successful movie that has material that some people might find objectionable, perhaps a sex scene, perhaps some language. The father of these two boys, who believes they should not go see the movie, attempts to teach them a lesson about the dangers of such entertainment by baking a batch of brownies and telling his sons that he’s used the highest quality ingredients, but added only a smidgen of horse manure to the batter. He then asks his sons if they feel “only a smidgen” of manure matters in the brownies, which otherwise are perfectly edible and tantalizing. The lesson, of course, is that the little bit of objectionable material ruins the entire thing, whether it be a film, a television show or a book, and is even potentially harmful.

This parable irritates me because the analogy it makes is patently false; viewing a movie or reading a novel containing some objectionable material and digesting manure-tainted brownies are two completely different processes. Most people, by using their brains (though I might be already assuming too much), can differentiate between what is “good” and what is “bad.” I’ve even heard that parents can teach their children to do so, and not be subject to the corruptive influence of the media (cue ominous music). The stomach, however, cannot differentiate between brownie batter and manure, and will attempt to digest everything that enters it. Yes, garbage-in/garbage-out works in the case of the stomach, but it’s not quite so easy when considering the brain.

For example, I teach Huckleberry Finn every year. The novel uses the word “nigger” a little over 200 times, and, if the above parable and its adherents are to be believed, after reading it, a reader should be more likely to actually use the word. But of course that’s ridiculous – it doesn’t happen. My students recognize the context of the word’s use and know that it is a word they neither want to use nor will use.

This modern-day parable is also refuted by the Bible, both in verse and as a work. There are any number of risque passages in the Old and New Testaments; a particular passage about a former prostitute and her longings for the old days comes to mind (Ezekial 23:19-20). There are many more like this one that you won’t hear on Sunday mornings, but were considered crucial by those compiling the books of the Bible. But no one’s calling to purge these verses from the work; in fact, my church gives copies of an unedited Bible to our fourth graders (gasp!). But we’re Lutheran, so we’ve historically been rebels.

The point? Every one of us has been blessed with a brain, and I’m troubled by how many people choose not to use it. As I’ve stated time and time again in my classes, context counts. And there’s a vast difference in reading the word “nigger” in Huck Finn and reading it in Klan propaganda, or between nudity seen when watching Schindler’s List and some late night Cinemax flick. If you suggest otherwise, you’re shoveling your special brownie ingredient.