What the Hell is a Wiggle?

[caption id="attachment_226" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Would you trust your kids with them?"][/caption]

Okay, I'm watching "The Wiggles" on Netflix with my daughter right now for the first time. Who the hell authorized this show? I heard of them before, but I always assumed they were cartoons, or animals or something. I mean honestly, what the hell is a wiggle? Is that what we're calling grown ass men in sex offender costumes these days?

The last time wearing a long sleeve solid-color Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt was cool was 1988. Dr. Huxtable had one, but even he moved on to wool patterns. As a matter of principle, man-law requires that you beat the shit out of any man wearing one within 100 feet of a school. And you know what? If I ever see a Wiggle, that's exactly what I'm gonna do. How dare you, PBS, undo twenty years of stranger danger messages!

[caption id="attachment_227" align="alignright" width="160" caption="Puff the magic dragon"][/caption]

As the show goes on, I see them talking to and dancing with a six foot tall dog, a purple octopus and a dancing dinosaur. This makes me think of only one thing: psychotropics! No good pedophile would be caught dead without some ruffies.

I blame all of this on Barney. Before that purple bastard showed up, PBS was four straight hours of Sesame Street with a little Mr Rogers, 321 Contact and Square One thrown in for good measure. Barney took the land of make-believe to a whole new sick and twisted level. Sesame Street was this hidden gated community where we just accepted that muppets and people lived in harmony.

[caption id="attachment_228" align="alignleft" width="262" caption="The mascot for Ritalin"][/caption]

Barney, on the other hand, was a 30 minute case study of the effects of Ritalin on children in special ed. Don't act surprised. How else do you explain eight year olds being in the same class as twelve and fifteen year olds? Then we have the conundrum of how the hell do all of the kids imagine the exact same thing in real time? I can see Barney talking to one of them at a time, but for all of them to hear and see Barney do the exact same thing...not even heroin addicts synchronize their trips. At the end of every episode the kids went home and the camera panned to show us that Barney was still a small stuffed animal.

There's a fine line between imagination and hallucination. You don't teach kids that it's okay to be crazy, just like you don't teach them to hang out with Chester and the rest of the Wiggles.