52 Essentials: No. 7, "I'm Just a Bill", Schoolhouse Rock! (1976) / "I'm an Amendment to Be", The Simpsons (1996)

Welcome to Maps & Legends, a project by two new parents looking forward to sharing our favorite art and culture with our new edition. Each week in this space, we'll pick a personal favorite of ours (or at least a favorite of one of us) and write about what it means to us and why we're excited to pass it down.

Let me preface this week's entry by saying this is not a political blog. This is a website about the art and culture we as two new parents look forward to passing along to our son. Now, having said that ...

The past few weeks since the Trump inauguration have felt like a stress test on our democracy. The President has shown a disturbing willingness to say things that are verifiable false, and his Party and inner circle have largely circled the wagons. Worse, these factual inaccuracies--including made-up terror attacks and false crime statistics--appear to be the basis for sweeping Executive Orders such as the recent ban on immigrants from seven predominantly Muslim countries.

The ban has been pretty controversial and for good reason. At best, it was a clumsy attempt to secure our borders based on bad data and a poor understanding of the law. At worst, it was a naked power grab by people more interested in stoking fear of Muslims and immigrants than protecting the country. Thankfully, the Ninth Circuit has put a hold on that Order, and they showed no patience for a White House that couldn't back up its fear mongering with facts.

But what's just as unnerving, if not maybe more so, are indications that Trump's supporters themselves have little patience for the basic principles of our government. Principles like checks and balances, and judicial review of the Executive Branch. In a poll taken last week of Trump voters, a shocking 51% of them said they think Trump should personally be able to overturn decisions he doesn't agree with. Over half! Luckily, it seems that a majority of America has never backed Trump (and that includes the voters in the last election), but that still amounts to about 25% of polled Americans who think the President can just ignore the courts when he feels like it.

But again, this isn't a political blog. We're here to talk about art and culture.

On the other hand, though, it's not not a political blog, and art and culture are never fully divorced from politics. Attempting to do so is the path to ignorance and misunderstanding. It's how you get a full quarter of Americans ready to give the President dictatorial powers.

Teaching our kid basic civics is going to be pretty damn important to us as parents. Not the least because he's being raised by a couple of lawyers (in fact, his mom had a small but important role in getting the immigration ban suspended!). This is a question of values. Deep, ingrained, core values that make us who we are as Americans.

And for me, at least, it began with a cartoon and a catchy song:

Schoolhouse Rock! (available at Amazon) predates me by a few years--at least, insofar as its heyday was the mid-1970s before I was born. The Saturday morning cartoon series was the brainchild of an old school Mad Man named David McCall who realized his son had an easier time memorizing the lyrics to rock songs than multiplication tables. McCall envisioned a series of short music videos to teach kids about math, grammar, science and--to coincide with the upcoming United States bicentennial--civics. Based on a demo for "Three is a Magic Number", he was able to sell the concept to ABC who ran thirty-seven episodes between 1972 and 1979. 

There were a few short series produced since then. One on computers in the 1980s, on money in the 1990s and the environment in the 2000s, as well as a couple one-off episodes on Presidential elections. But thanks to some VHS releases and Saturday morning replays, the first thirty-seven episodes were burned into my memory like the Lord's Prayer. Like the Beatles catalog. Like almost every 90s sitcom theme song.

So, like where Our Farther art, how I get by, and whatever happened to predictability, I knew how a bill (or "Bill", as it were) became a law.

The formula is simple enough. Take a catchy tune, put it over cute animation, and repeat ad nauseum. The real magic, more magic than the number three, is the lesson. The rest of my 1980s cartoon diet was straight garbage. Fun, memorable garbage. (Garbage I'll probably celebrate in some entry to come in this series.) But, yeah, garbage. In between Saturday morning rounds of Smurfs and animated Mr. T, though, I learned some basic civics on the separate of powers. 

That's not to say it wasn't overly simplistic and devoid of context, of course, which others have pointed out.

But the point isn't that Schoolhouse Rock! tells you everything you need to know. The point is that it was an altruistic exercise in instilling values in our kids ... and it may have had its day. What happened to this series after all? Did they run out of history to cover? Hardly. The "America Rocks" series hit on the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, westward expansion and (with a convenient hopscotch over the Civil War) the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.

There's obviously a lot of uncomfortable topics that would be hard to cover in between and afterward. But there's also plenty you could easily cover in Schoolhouse Rock! style while keeping things age appropriate.

That's not to say that educational cartoons aren't still being made. (Or that pioneering new works like the Hamilton musical aren't expanding on the formula in interesting ways.) But I'd guess that if you were born after the 1980s, you're probably more familiar with this animated civics lesson than anything actually directed at kids:

That's not throw shade on The Simpsons, or the nostalgia-obsessed cynics (like myself) who memorized every line of the show in its mid-90s golden age. But the subtext of the joke is that educational cartoons that jazzed up lawmaking were a relic by then. Somewhere along the way, we just gave up. What's the point of Bills becoming Laws, when the levers of government would inevitably be used just to abuse the system and make everything worse?

I don't know what happened. I'm confident saying that the old models wouldn't really work anyways. Saturday morning cartoons aren't really a thing anymore, whether we're talking catchy civic lessons or toy-hawking hyperactive garbage. Max is more likely to discover either "I'm Just a Bill" or "I'm Amendment to Be" while randomly scrambling YouTube clips, or whatever takes it place in a few years. And who knows, maybe with all the diverse content producers out there, we'll have no trouble finding ear worms just as educational.

All I know for sure is that, one way or another, we're going to be damn sure our kid knows that the President can't just make laws by snapping her or his fingers. And when the court says "no", you listen and do what you're told.