Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!

Katharine DeBrecht

I admit: I went into this book expecting to hate it. That feeling was not helped when I picked it up from the library; I had expected it to be, well, bigger. It's 5x7, not exactly the size one expects from a kids' picture book. But, at 5x7 and fifty-four pages, how much time would I have to expend on actually hating it? So I dove in. And I have to admit, I liked it a whole lot better than I thought I would.

Tommy and Lou, two brothers, want a swingset. Their parents, attempting to teach them about good old-fashioned values, tell them they'll have to earn the money to buy it. They set up a lemonade stand, and get to work saving money-- except the money they put aside to help children with no shoes. (Yes, echoes of bad Steve Miller songs ran through my head, too, for the rest of the time I read the book.) However, when they go to sleep that night, they dream that they live in a place called Liberaland, and it turns into a nightmare right quick after that, with various bigshots from Liberaland showing up to thwart their money-making scheme at every turn. Then they wake up. Did the horrible dream discourage them? You'll have to read the book to find out.

I knew, as I'm sure everyone know knows about this book did, that it takes potshots at liberal politicians. Thus, I was expecting this book to run straight on neocon party lines. Surprisingly, DeBrecht comes off almost as a classic conservative (there's a nod to the religionist "right", presumably to get them to blurb the book; one notes with some irony, however, that DeBrecht could easily have installed a number of current-cabinet tax-and-spend neocons in here and had just as valid an argument). This makes sense, as the premise works on financial lines; after all, the liberals are trying to confiscate the kids' cash, not make off with their social liberties. While DeBrecht can't stop herself, at times, from getting some some classic value-judgment pokes that do nothing but weaken her argument, the thinking itself is relatively sound. It does fall into the usual fallacy that pervades most political thinking-- that the average human is willing to work for what he wants-- but given that this is a kids' book, and is meant to try and instill values in the kiddies, then showing the idealized human being is permissible. After all, we want the kids to grow up as idealized human beings, do we not?

I wish I knew some five- and six-year-olds I could run this by to see if they like it. Like the golden-age cartoons, a good deal of the humor here is actually aimed at the adult market (what kid of the book's target age is going to get the "Kennedy's Car Wash" gag I found endlessly amusing?). It seems to me there's enough here, between the vivacity of the artwork and the straightforwardness of the story-- which I'm guessing only seems overbearing, again, to those who grok the caricatures (after all, you could replace Hilary Clinton with Joe-- or Jane-- Blow performing the same actions, and it'll be all the same to the under-seven crowd)-- to keep the target audience happy. But I can't vouch for it, as my daughter is a few years past where she'd be able to judge it on the level I'm looking for.

For adults, however, this is either going to be deeply offensive or a treat. Hopefully both sides will get over their knee-jerk reactions long enough to read and digest it before attacking or defending it.