The only thing worse than children? Parents.

I'm not a big fan of children. I've never quite understood the appeal. Take, for example, very young children: when they're not bawling and screaming over the stupidest thing, they're drooling and peeing and pooping all over the place, a loathsome behavior compounded by the facts that they're utterly uninterested in cleaning up after themselves and barely bright enough to realize how disgusting they are. As they advance into prepubescence their intelligence awkwardly stumbles after, always tottering a few paces behind the threshold of tolerability.

As annoying as this is, it also represents the single enjoyable thing about young children: their gullibility. They so desperately want to be regarded as highly as an adult, they will say anything--no matter how retarded--as long as they think it will make their handlers happy. While it's always a hoot lying to children, their innate self-conscious stupidity has always distressed me for some reason. This has been a mystery to me until a recent epiphany: the stupidity that I see in children doesn't vanish in adults, but rather only becomes slightly more muted. Children remind me of what I dislike about humanity, and, as a human, I find this (and them) discouraging.

That said, it's parents that I find even more annoying than children. It's parents who fool themselves into thinking that they really do possess the godlike intellect their children naively assume. Thus, instead of perceiving their offspring as cruel mirrors which reflect the shortcomings of human genetic conditioning (as children should be seen), they see their little worshippers and assume the adulation is evidence of their own innate greatness.

Once a mother or father reaches this point, they become supremely annoying. Parents recognize their children are stupid and gullible, and they use this period in their kid's life to imprint their own worldview and ideology. Hearing children echo their weakminded drivel back to them gives them satisfaction not gleaned from conversing with fellow adults, who are more likely to scrutinize and criticize and arrogantly postulate their own perspective.

This brings me to two youtube clips, from both sides of the political/cultural spectrum, for your viewing disgust:



Ah, yes! Poor, idiotic, 9-year-old Rachel must be the apple of her moronic parents' eye! That she has so uncritically bought into her parents' mysticism is only proof of its validity! Never mind that her voodoo-esque blessing of a bowling ball results in a performace 200 points shy of bowling perfection, she mimics Mommy and Daddy's "wisdom", and that's all that matters. As for the uncomfortably awkward attemped conversion of the hot blonde: Why go to the trouble of proselytizing yourself when your kid can be brainwashed into doing it for you?

Oh, and don't quote me on this, but I think the church featured at the end of the clip is the same one formerly headed by the prominent pastor in Colorado Springs who got busted buying regular massages (plus happy endings and probably sodomy and felching too) from a male prostitute in Denver. I wouldn't mind hearing what Young Rachel thinks about the head of her flock "tossing another man's salad."



The girl in this video is hyped by her hippie folk-music handlers as "the Coolest 8 Year Old in the World." Of course, when one considers the frequent edits throughout the clip, it's easy to recognize that the supposedly precocious and shrewd girl is really just aping short lines and gestures from a coach, which is why the coach likely watches the clip and thinks of him/herself as "the coolest 36 year old mind-meddler in the world." Perhaps if the girl was a normal adult, instead of mindlessly parroting an equation as moronic as "KKK=Nazis=Republican Party", the coach would've received a rational response, such as "well, I don't care much for the Republicans, but comparing them to Nazis? Are you fucking retarded or do you not know anything about the second world war?"

The delicious irony is that one of the supposed messages in this diatribe is that children should be "treated like human beings." But the creation method behind this entire clip is predicated entirely on not treating the girl as a human being, but rather exploiting her enthusiastic emulatory zeal and oh-so-cute stage presence. That's not treating someone like a human being. That's treating them like a stage prop.

Anyway, the point here isn't that ultra-charismatic Christians and ultra-liberal hippie producers of musical excrement are horribly annoying parents. Just about all parents of young children that I've met are horribly annoying. Missionary-girl and Hippie-girl are only easy examples to illustrate my point. I could probably find more clips to show you what I'm talking about, but I need to go to bed now so I can get up early tomorrow and watch the Patiots-Colts game.

In the mean time, if you find a smug parent of a young child, you have my permission to punch him or her in the face and then spit on their child.