Angela Dove: Award-Winning Writer

Poland redirects the world's attention to insidious forces at work on our children. Sort of.

No, I’m not referring to the mass marketing assault perpetrated by every movie studio, fast food chain, and toy-making conglomerate in the nation, which hopes to rob my children of their own decision-making apparatus and instead turn them into passive consumers of whatever trinket is hot off the assembly line. Quite the contrary. I’m talking about those technicolored potbellied denizens of iniquity: The Teletubbies.

You may recall that it was the Reverend Jerry “Mr. Liberty” Falwell who originally unmasked the Teletubbies in 1999 as perverters of our nation’s Pampers wearers. These four tubby creatures with TV screens inset in their tummies tried for years to pass themselves off as colorful, cuddly, and above all harmless friends to the preschool crowd. But they didn’t know what they were up against. Falwell used his DogmaVision ™ to look beneath the happy songs, nursery rhymes, and premath skills to reveal the wolf inside the sheep’s clothing.

Sure, Dipsy, La-La, and Po ate tubby custard and danced and sang “Tinkle Tinkle Widdle Star,” but Falwell wasn’t fooled. Instead he honed in on the Dungeonmaster of this Gay Cesspool of Song: Tinky Winky.

Never one to denounce something harmless just to further his own personal agenda, Falwell assembled a crackpot team of right-minded truth-seekers to gather credible evidence against the tallest Tubby. The results were beyond reproach:

1. Tinky-Winky is referred to as a “him.”

2. Tinky-Winky is sometimes shown carrying what he calls a “bag.”

3. The bag looks a heck of a lot like a purse.

Armed with this amazing body of evidence, Dr. Falwell publicly outed Tinky Winky as a gay Tubby in The National Liberty Journal. Under the banner “PARENT ALERT!” Falwell & Co. presented their evidence. Here’s a sample:

 "He is purple — the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle — the gay-pride symbol."

(Actually, the gay pride triangle is solid, Pepto Bismol pink, and looks nothing like a fuzzy purple antenna, but let’s not nitpick.)

The article clearly revealed that “The Teletubbies” were to blame for the alarming increase in homosexual toddlers in our nation.

No, that’s wrong.

Wasn’t it that Tinky-Winky was to blame for all those gay men carrying around bright red vinyl purses?

Well, no, I’ve never seen any guy do that, and besides, the Teletubbies weren’t around when those nonexistent men were children . . .

OK, but the point is that Tinky-Winky was making little boys like purses, and it’s a well-known fact that a two-year-old boy who picks up his mother’s purse is exposed to a toxic level of “girl cooties.” Too many girl cooties make you gay. At least, that’s what Falwell’s Team Tubby discovered via an intensive interview with nine-year-old Joseph “Little Joey” D’Angelo of Boston, MA.

Regardless of all the hard work behind the team’s research, the Liberty Journal article was largely laughed off as “containing more nuts than Grandma’s fruitcake.” But who will have the last laugh?

Three weeks ago Ms. Ewa Sowinska, a spokesperson for children's rights in Poland, built on the forgotten foundation of the Falwell research. "I noticed that [Tinky Winky] has a purse, but I didn't realize he's a boy," Sowinska told a Polish journalist. "Later I learned that there could be some hidden homosexual undertones." Sowinska went on to posit that Tinky Winky might be a “homoagitator.”

This would no doubt explain the large number of agitated gay Polish toddlers that we’ve heard so much about. Well beyond carrying their mothers’ purses, these tots form gangs and ruthlessly recruit members in daycare centers and playgroups throughout the country. Some have been known to threaten heterosexual children who toddle onto “gay turf,” brandishing purses, handbags, and even floral shopping bags while yelling such slogans as “Me want juice!” and “Mine! Mine!” (Investigators are in process of examining these phrases, which they feel are clear evidence of “early gang-slang.”)

No, not really.

Apparently even the League of Polish Families, which The Washington Post calls “a militantly anti-gay rights group,” was somewhat embarrassed by the whole “homoagitation” assertion. Within a week, the group issued the following statement:

"[The Teletubbies] are fictional characters, they have nothing to do with reality. And the bag and scissors and other props the fictional characters use are there to create a fictional world that speaks to children. We are not going to deal with this issue any more."

(The key word here seems to be fictional.)

So once more Tinky Winky has dodged the bullet, but not before it has occurred to me that perhaps I need to be a bit more diligent about the secret messages in other shows my children enjoy. Could “Hello Kitty” be a communist? And this “Thomas the Tank Engine”—he and his trainyard buddies run on “gold dust.” Could this be a PCP-induced fantasy?

I’ll certainly look into it.

If I have absolutely nothing better to do.

Angela Dove is a writer living in the Smoky Mountains. She was recently awarded the North Carolina Press Association’s top prize for humor columns.