Scathing Critiques of Children's Literature: Little Blue Truck Leads the Way

(Warning: Although I normally restrict my swearing to the Poor Driving series so that it's easy to avoid, this post will also contain swearing.  But then again, it's at least in part about poor driving, so it seems thematically appropriate.)

So I normally have my next few blog posts planned out.  I've actually got a couple planned posts in this series that I haven't gotten around to doing yet.  This wasn't one of them.  But I read this one to my son at bedtime the other day because he asked for it, and it's been a while, and we needed a short book to finish up storytime.

And then I recalled why I hate this book, and this new post was born.

I've actually hated this book since shortly after the first time I read it.  I have nothing against Blue personally; I enjoy Little Blue Truck quite a bit.  How can you not?  It's about the Golden Rule and the power of friendship, with a little bit of schadenfreude and karma thrown in.  And if there are other Little Blue Truck books, I haven't read them, which means I don't hate them either.

But this book, man.  This fuckin' book.

I complained to my wife about this book back when it was a near-daily staple in the storytime routine.  I may have slipped an editorial or two into storytime.  It's possible that I was told to knock it off and just read the damn book already.  (It's also possible I'm grossly paraphrasing here...)  And reading this book again brought back all of those feelings of rage as if they'd never left.

So you know what?  I've got my own blog, where I can write about whatever the hell I want, and no one can stop me!  So I'm going to write about this damn book.

For those of you not familiar, the Little Blue Truck is a simple country pickup who is friend to animals and rude bulldozers alike.  This particular story sees Blue on an adventure to the big city.

As you can imagine, simple country pickups and the big city don't mix very well.

After a brief time enjoying the sights of the city, Blue is overwhelmed by rude vehicles demanding that he get his ass in gear and stop blocking the damn road because they've got places they need to be and can't wait all day for a motherfucking n00b to finish gawking and get the hell out of the way.

Now, could these vehicles (including a tour bus, grocery truck, a police car (seriously, Blue is impeding a police car WITH ITS LIGHTS FLASHING.  Do they not have these out in the country?  Like, at all?  Are flashing lights that hard to understand?), a street sweeper, the fucking Mayor's limo, and the last straw, a taxi, behaving as obnoxiously as taxis usually do) be more polite in expressing their frustration with Blue's leisurely pace and their desire to be about their business?  Of course they could.  Do they still have a valid point?  Abso-fucking-lutely, and as you can probably guess from my Poor Driving posts, I'm way more sympathetic to them than I'm probably supposed to be.

So Blue winds up creating gridlock throughout the entire city core, and is trapped in the middle of an intersection, surrounded by hostile cars fed up with his fucking dipshit balderdashery, when he finally snaps (genteely, of course), and offers possibly THE WORST ADVICE IN THE HISTORY OF CITY TRANSPORTATION:

"You might be fast, and I might be slow, but one at a time is the way to go!"

Oooooooo-kay then.

Of course, then the Mayor's limo dies, and Blue offers him a ride, whereupon the Mayor seizes his chance to bloviate and pander ("the way mayors do"), and doubles down on Blue's folksy bullshit.  "How lucky we are to have this little blue truck here to educate us on the error of our ways," he says.  "Let's absolutely take advice from the truck that's NEVER BEEN IN THE CITY BEFORE AND CAUSED THE GODDAMN TRAFFIC JAM TO BEGIN WITH."

(I may be paraphrasing again.)

So, of course, all the good collectivist vehicles follow their glorious leader's instructions and fall into a single file line behind Blue, having seen the light and mended their asshole-y ways.  And "it all went fine", we're told.

OH, FUCK NO.

What would actually happen, of course, is a clusterfuck of epic proportions that would shut down the city core for hours.  How do I know?  Just look at what happens around here when one lane gets shut down on any given street.  It's like goddamn Kralizec, and you need a fucking Guild Navigator to get anywhere.

Fittingly, a marching band joins the line of cars, because what's going on now isn't any semblance of reasonable traffic flow, but a full-blown, honest to God parade.  And do parades enhance traffic flow and allow the smooth and rapid transport of goods and people?  Of course they fucking well don't; they're a fucking disaster.  And of course people spontaneously line the parade route and cheer Blue all the way out of town, rather than running him out chased by threats of physical bodily harm.  Seriously, it's like this book takes place in North Korea or Crimea.

Anyways, it's probably clear that, despite the anti-peripatetic fuckmuppetry going on here, that's not the only thing bothering me about this book.  Most people don't get this worked up over a children's book, I'm told.  (Of course, I'm told this by someone who was read Beowulf for storytime when she was 5, so I've got a boulder of salt here with me...)  No, there's something much more insidious going on here.

Let's go take another look at the key passage in the story here:

"You might be fast, and I might be slow, but one at a time is the way to go!"

What's Blue really saying here?  Basically, he's saying, "I know you guys are all smart and fancy, and I'm just a simple country pickup truck here for the first time, but my simple folksy wisdom will obviously recognize and easily solve problems in a way your ivory tower methods can't."

It's the exact same anti-elite, anti-intellectual, "small towns are the pinnacle of American culture" truthiness bullshit that's infecting America today.

Look, as I've mentioned before, I grew up in Eastern Washington.  I've got nothing against small towns.  I like small towns just as much as I like big cities.  They've each got their own problems and charms; there's a lot they can learn from each other; and sometimes what works for one just won't work for the other, and both sides need to do a better job of recognizing that.  I'm not taking sides here, just arguing against the promotion of one over the other.

Seeing crap like this in a kid's book just pisses me off.

Did the authors do this deliberately?  Honestly, I doubt it.  This isn't Melanie's Marvelous Measles.  But if anything, that just makes it worse.  A deliberate bias like that is easy to explain away, brush off for what it is.  I think the authors simply took a character they established in a perfectly nice first book (except for that bulldozer which is probably off to demolish precious wilderness to build some soulless McMansion suburban sprawl), and put him in a new situation.

But a book that simply assumes that naturally Blue's way is best, despite being completely out of his element and his solution being a terrible one, is far more treacherous.  It starts planting that seed that them there city folks are not just rude, but they don't even have the common sense to figure out how to drive down a road!  It's a good thing we have these plain-spoken, clear-thinking country folks to show people how things should really be done.  And it's all so natural that it's hard to argue against or even recognize that it's happening.

And no, I would equally not want to see a book where a city car goes out to Blue's farmland and starts giving advice, either.  Just so we're clear.

For what it's worth, my characterization two paragraphs above is not necessarily how I think of non-city dwellers, but it is, in my experience (in person, online, and with more public figures in the media), how many of them seem to think of themselves.  For a particularly egregious example, consider Sarah Palin.

So yeah, I know.  It's just a kids' book.  It seems a little silly to get so worked up about it.  But dammit, this is an attitude that is seriously fucking up America right now, and it pisses me off that it's in a goddamn kids' book, of all things.  He's got his whole life to deal with this; why start now?  Why start instilling that sort of attitude before he's even old enough to understand it?

Fuck that shit.  And fuck Blue's craniorectal advice, too.  "One at a time" is the motherfucking Blue Screen of Death of traffic management.  Here's a better idea: Go with the goddamn traffic flow and stop getting in everyone's way, please and thank you.

Fin.