Nitwit Lit

Some days, modern parenthood feels like an ever-expanding spiral of anxiety. Is your child watching too much "Wiggles"? Will she be seduced by an Internet predator? Will video games inspire him to shoot up his preschool? As if this situation weren't stressful enough, Eric Jackson, chairman and co- founder of World Ahead Publishing, wants conservative parents to contemplate one more nightmarish scenario: What if, God forbid, your indescribably precious offspring grows up to become ... a liberal?With an eye to forestalling such heartbreak, last September, the Torrance, California-based press, which touts itself as "the West Coast's leading conservative publisher," launched its own children's division, Kids Ahead. While the adult imprint focuses on titles addressing "serious and weighty matters" like Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine, Kids Ahead aims to bring the conservative message to the playdate set. The mission, explains Jackson, "is providing books for families who have traditional values, if you will, and who want to have books to use as a tool to pass on those values to their children." Thus far, the new imprint has only one writer in its stable: Katharine DeBrecht, the pen name of a mother of three whose authorial debut, Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed!, generated major buzz--and sold some 30,000 copies--after receiving an on-air plug from Rush Limbaugh. In the wake of DeBrecht's success, Kids Ahead is moving forward with an entire Help! Mom! series. Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper! hit stores in March, Help! Mom! The Ninth Circuit Nabbed the Nativity! will be out in time for Christmas, with Help! Mom! There Are Lawyers in My Lunchbox! to follow. Jackson, meanwhile, is wading through a flood of manuscripts from other would-be authors. "Over the past six to twelve months, the number of submissions to us has just soared," he marvels. With a little luck, the 30-year-old Internet marketing exec-turned-publisher hopes to usher in a new breed of kiddie lit geared to these bitterly partisan times--one that will make '90s relics like Heather Has Two Mommies look like, well, child's play. Forget championing traditional values a la The Book of Virtues; Jackson is hawking ideological warfare. There's just one problem. If the Help! Mom! series is any indication, the company has no intention of publishing real children's books. Rather, it plans to cash in on the right's enduring paranoia about the liberal assault on its values by churning out partisan tracts awash in humor so simpleminded that they could only succeed in the guise of kiddie picture books--not conservative books for children so much as childish books for conservatives. The opening premise of Help! Mom! is straightforward enough: Two grade- school brothers set out to earn money for a new swing set by opening a lemonade stand. But, when the aspiring entrepreneurs dream one night about "a very strange place called Liberaland," the story shifts into satire-saturated adult fare, as a series of "dastardly Liberals" pop up to meddle in the venture. A Ted Kennedy look-alike ("Mayor Leach") demands half the boys' take in taxes, a Hillary Clinton-inspired "Congresswoman Clunkton" makes them cut the sugar in their product and give out broccoli with each glass, and an "lclu" lawyer replaces their picture of Jesus with that of a big toe. With its unflattering caricatures (the wild-eyed Hillary alone is enough to give kids nightmares) and relentless stereotyping of godless, humorless, tax- happy liberals, DeBrecht's book is tailor-made for the same readers who regard Ann Coulter as one of the great political thinkers of our age. What remains less clear is how anyone could imagine that the four- to eight-year-olds for whom the book is ostensibly intended would be entertained by a story dependent upon such context-driven humor as Clunkton's assertion, "It takes a village to get kids to eat their vegetables!" "These books are written more as parodies of children's books," says Kathleen Horning, president of the American Library Association's division of Library Service to Children. "The story doesn't deal with the issues from a kid's point of view," agrees Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of The Horn Book, the foremost reviewer of children's lit. "It's the hectoring adult `liberals are bad, bad, bad,' kind of thing. Kids don't think that way." Certainly the illustrations (by a veteran newspaper cartoonist) aren't designed to advance the narrative so much as to provide an opportunity for political commentary, some of which, ironically, is not family-friendly: Even hard-core liberal- haters might hesitate to explain to kids a main street featuring "Teddy's Carwash." DeBrecht staunchly maintains her books are for children and even has an anecdote about how her eldest son inspired the series' title: One night during the 2000 GOP convention, as DeBrecht labored to explain to the then-four-year- old the need for a Republican president--"The harder daddy works and the more money he makes, the more that liberals want to take that money"--the tot's eyes grew wide, he peered over the edge of the bed, and he asked breathlessly, "Where are these liberals, Mom?" How adorable is that? But, for all her concerned-parent talk about teaching children that "there is a better way," DeBrecht's work isn't about promoting values. It's about demonizing the opposition--which is what sets it apart in the world of children's literature. Help! Mom! is hardly the first kids' story with a political point. Dr. Seuss books in particular are famous for their politics, which grew increasingly overt over the course of author Theodore Geisel's career. Most politically savvy adults read Horton Hears a Who! without ever recognizing it as a commentary on McCarthyism; The Butter Battle Book, by contrast, is an open slap at the cold war arms race. But, even at Geisel's most unsubtle, his books remained children's tales rather than political screeds. Similarly, conservative authors writing for children had, until now, avoided the overtly ideological. Lynne Cheney likes to write American history-themed picture books, and Bill Bennett reworked The Book of Virtues to create an entire juvenile oeuvre (The Book of Virtues for Young People, The Children's Book of Virtues, The Children's Book of Heroes, The Children's Book of America, The Children's Book of Faith). But, while their offerings may touch on broadly conservative themes like patriotism and self-reliance, they are for the most part self-consciously apolitical. Even the pugilistic Bill O'Reilly, in his 2004 best-seller--modestly titled The O'Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America's Families--eschewed partisan rhetoric, focusing on topics like the value of compromise (irony alert!) and how to cope with and avoid being a bully (!!). If anything, most conservative kiddie books seem more like vanity projects aimed at softening the images of their celebrity authors than at any sort of transgenerational indoctrination. So perhaps it's unsurprising that it fell to an unknown, first-time author, whose political claim to fame was cochairing South Carolina Security Moms for Bush in 2004, to bring children's books down to the level of today's adult political discourse. Or even lower: DeBrecht trots out tired stereotypes and arguments so simplistic that few grown-ups would try to pass them off as political commentary. "They're using the format of a children's book to cheat," says Sutton. "You wouldn't get away with anything said in the book except that it looks like a children's book." Too pedantic for children, too moronic for adults, the books thrive only as some kind of confused novelty hybrid. This suits Eric Jackson just fine. Well-aware that the adult conservative press thrives on such nuanced fare as Michelle Malkin's Unhinged and Sean Hannity's Deliver Us From Evil, World Ahead's publicity machine has been fanning the partisan flames. In interviews and press releases, DeBrecht is portrayed as a courageous mommy, and political indoctrination of one's offspring is pitched as part and parcel of good parenting. Then, of course, there's the requisite Hillary-bashing: In March, World Ahead hosted an online charity auction in which people bid to appear in a future DeBrecht book as the "hero" who carts Hillary Clunkton off to jail. In the press release, DeBrecht coyly speculates as to the cause of Clunkton's downfall: "[P]erhaps she'll be sent up the river for trying to snatch gifts from Santa's sleigh for an affirmative action program for naughty kids. You just never know what a liberal like Clunkton is going to do next!" You never know, indeed. It's much less difficult, however, to divine exactly what type of reader will be entertained by this kind of humor. Hint: It's not your six-year-old nephew.