Marcus Bachmann said this:
Barbarians need to be educated. They need to be disciplined.
Some people (lots of people) claim he was referring to gays. Bachmann claims he was misquoted, that "someone" doctored the recording of his voice to make it appear he was condemning homosexuals, and what he really meant was this:
I was talking in reference to children.
If Bachmann was speaking of gays, the issue will be debated to death until the next extremely idiotic declaration by the next extremely idiotic politician or political spouse rears its ugly head.
If he was speaking in reference to children (was he? What do you think? Don't ask me what I think), I have to agree that, in the sense that barbarian refers to those who are clumsy or unsophisticated, children indeed fit the description.
Ooh, I just said indeed. I think the word indeed is severely neglected and underused. Let's all vow to use it more.
Very small children lack a sense of self-consciousness that will alert them when they're overstepping their boundaries and beginning to tread on the toes of other people. It's the parents' responsibility to guide their kids' behavior, no matter how tiring or annoying the constant supervision and behavior-curbing might be. If your child is tantruming in a restaurant or grocery store, it's your job to curtail the tantrum, either by calming your child or removing him or her from the premises.
I had to do this once with the Cupcake-as-toddler, when she became enraged that I'd cut her hamburger in half so that when she inevitably dropped it her entire meal would not be a goner. In her anger she stood on her chair and flung half the burger at me, at which point it landed on the floor exactly as I'd predicted. As she wailed her fury I carried her outside, alerting the waitress that we weren't dining and ditching. Cupcake and I hung out outside for a few moments until she collected herself. Once we returned to our table, however, she noticed the rest of her burger, remembered why she'd been so mad in the first place, and flung the other half at me. I swept her up and we went back outside for a few more minutes; once my burger offense was forgotten, which came about pretty smoothly since all the evidence was on the floor under our table, Cupcake happily ate french fries for lunch.
She was a toddler. We were in a lunch restaurant with no tablecloths and waiters that called customers "you guys." Anyone in that place should not have been surprised to have to share the room with a toddler; nevertheless, as soon as she erupted I took her away so as to cause the least possible disturbance.
When my kids were that small I spent a lot of time in restaurant lobbies, and turned down more than one invitation to take them places where I felt they wouldn't be able to control themselves appropriately. As they became older they learned, through an awful lot of teaching and coaching and lecturing and whining from me, what behavior was acceptable in public places. They learned to stay in their seats, not crawl under the table, keep their hands to themselves, keep their voices down.
In other words, the little barbarians were on the road to civilization.
They're still on that road; my hope is that I will be relieved of responsibility for coaching before they hit their 30s. I'm trying to instill enough self-consciousness in them to help them recognize that they are not the only people in the room, in the building, on the road, on the planet, and they need to practice a good degree of give and take if they expect to receive it from others.
Which brings me to the girls who sat next to me at the movies on Friday.
Do you know what movie came out Friday? Come on, you know... That's right: Harry Potter and the Emotional End to an Exceptional Series. My kids and I have been anticipating this film since 1997, which is remarkable when you consider that Cupcake wasn't born until 2000. Since both kids are in a land far far away for the next four weeks, I faithlessly went to see the movie without them. When asked whether I saw it I will lie and they'll know I'm lying and I'll admit my lie and then take them to see it directly from the airport.
I bought my ticket online a week ago. I showed up at the theater with plenty of extra time, found a seat in the last row, and prepared to fall down the rabbit hole of Harry Potter for the last time (sorry -- wrong metaphor).
And...
The teenage girls next to me had armed themselves with enough candy and soda and popcorn to feed a family of eight through a showing of Gone With the Wind, complete with intermission.
The first thing they did was dump a very large and sticky drink on the floor, about which they giggled and whispered copiously, and which they made no effort to sop up, allowing it to seep halfway down the stadium seating steps so that the people in the fourth row undoubtedly wondered why their shoes were sticking to the floor.
Then, the instant the film began, the girls began slurping. And crinkling. And digging around. And munching. And for the first half of the film they slurped and crinkled and rattled and masticated.
Now, raise your hands if you've seen any of the Potter films.
And what are some adjectives we can use to describe them?
Intense. Action-packed. Emotional. Dark. Loud.
There you go. Loud. The Potter films come equipped with more than their share of loud, what with dragons and curses and flying and dueling and bridge collapses and explosions. The loud is occasionally punctuated by moments of not-loud, but generally you can rely on the decibility of any Harry Potter film. Anyone who's seen any of the films will be aware of this fact instinctively. I'm certain the neighboring teens were well aware of the potential for loud.
So why did they persist in slurping and crinkling and rattling and chewing the entire first half of the movie, even during the few and far between not-loud parts?
Well, most likely they were hungry, as they probably had eaten lunch, say, more than ten minutes earlier, and all the evidence I've seen points to the fact that teens are perpetually hungry.
The other reason is that they clearly lacked the self-consciousness of civilized adults, the ones who remove their children from restaurants when they are causing a disturbance, unwrap all their throat lozenges before the LSAT commences, and wait for the loud parts of the movie to shuffle their popcorn. Someone had not yet gotten the message through to them that they were not the only people in the theater and common courtesy demands that you consider the needs of those around you just as you would want them to consider yours, and keep your food quiet during the quiet parts of the film.
I hope their parents don't think their job is finished, since they clearly have some fine tuning to do. I helped them along by shushing insistently about an hour into the movie, when I could tolerate the ruckus no longer; either they got the message or they'd run out of snackage by then, since there was no more slurping or fumbling during the not-loud parts.
So, Mr. Bachmann, you're absolutely right: children need to be educated and disciplined, for their own good, and the community's. Personally, I take my job as a parent very seriously, so thanks anyway, but I don't think we'll be needing help from you.
That is what you meant, isn't it?
