Let’s start this week with a confession. I’m not a big pre-screener of the stuff my kids watch. Usually I’m just too busy to watch everything they consume, so I kind of tend to trust parental filters and monitors to do the work for me.

Hoo boy, was I ever wrong to do that.

My daughter loves this one particular show called “Yo Gabba Gabba.” It’s a kids’ show, so it can’t be all that bad, right? And the people who run the summer camp my daughter attends have tapes of the show they play during TV hours, so it’s got to be at least educational and wholesome, right?

What if I told you there was a show that took Jerry Falwell’s nightmares about the purple purse-wielding Teletubby and made them pale in comparison? What if said show was KIND of like the Teletubbies, but if the creators of the Teletubbies did a hit of mescaline and two tabs of the good acid before they got to the drawing board?

Friends, let me school you in the horrors of Yo Gabba Gabba.
Look at this image. Just feast in the sheer absurdity of it. What the fuck are these things? I get the yellow one’s a robot, but the others?

You’ve got an orange cyclopean fiend, something that resembles a cross between a human and a flower, a blue thing that looks like a dolphin and a cat, and…something green.

I don’t know what to call the green thing, but damned if it isn’t frightening to look at.

And then there’s the human at the center of all this madness. Lance Robertson is the name of the guy with the orange hair and sweater, but he goes by the name “DJ Lance Rock” while performing his duties on the show. I imagine this involves any number of playing songs for this assemblage of Chuck E. Cheese rejects to dance and sing to.

The one segment I did catch my daughter watching was known as “Dancy Dance Time.” This particular symbol of terror involved actor Elijah Wood teaching kids how to do something called the “Puppetmaster.”

You might think teaching children to dance as though their hands were holding marionette strings attached to their feet was a harmless enough feat. I would be inclined to agree with you, dear reader, if the yellow robot didn’t vaporize Elijah on the spot as soon as he was finished teaching this “Dancy Dance.”

THE ROBOT WENT AND NUKED FRODO FROM LORD OF THE RINGS. ALL THE HOBBIT WANTED WAS TO DANCE, Y’ALL, AND THE BASTARDS KILLED HIM.

You know something? I’m actually beginning to understand why Jerry Falwell sounded the alarm about the Teletubbies. It wasn’t that the purple one was gay or a cross-dresser or something. In fact, it had nothing to do with the actual Teletubbies at all.

No, I think Falwell saw something in that smiling baby-faced cloud and realized there were horrors more Lovecraftian in nature waiting for us if we didn’t call a hard stop to this kind of programming immediately.

“Yo Gabba Gabba” proves this. It is the opening of the Seventh Seal in children’s television. It is my personal Yog-Sohoth that confronts me in car line whenever my daughter bats her eyes at me, giggles, and says “I want Yo Gabba Gabba please.” For anywhere from a minute to ten minutes, I’m forced to relive the horror that is the chip-tuned theme song with idyllic children singing the praises of these monsters.

Well no more. I’m taking a stand. Jerry, your fight will live on in me. I’m going to do what no one’s had the balls to do. It’s time to banish these monsters back to the ninth circle of hell from whence they came.

And for those of you in the crowd crowing about how I’m calling for “deplatforming” or “cancelling” Yo Gabba Gabba, you’re goddamn right I am. This is about creating a better world for my children, and I’m not going to stand by while those bastards in Hollywood create filth like this to poison the minds of impressionable youngsters.

Our real danger, our real threat to democracy, isn’t Joe Rogan, COVID misinformation, or white supremacy. It’s DJ Lance Rock and this gaggle of Cthonic Chaos accompanying him.

Time to get that Change dot Org petition going. I hear that’s the first step in changing the world. It’s either that or getting Marc Elias on the phone, and I hear he’s not taking too many calls at the moment.

Enough of my silliness for now. If you’d be so kind at Scotch-o-Clock to raise one with me, we lost a great humorist this week in PJ O’Rourke. “Parliament of Whores” was my first exposure to PJ’s work and I think it still holds up as a damn fine primer on civics today.

If there’s any justice in the afterlife like I think there is, O’Rourke’s up in Heaven right now grumbling about the accommodations. I’ll close with a quote from “Parliament of Whores” that always stuck out to me.

I have only one firm belief about the American political system and that is this: God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

God is an elderly, or at any rate, middle-aged male, a stern fellow, patriarchal rather than paternal and a great believer in rules and regulations. He holds men strictly accountable for their actions. He has little apparent concern for the material well-being of the disadvantaged. He is politically connected, socially powerful and holds the mortgage on literally everything in the world. God is difficult. God is unsentimental. It is very hard to get into God’s heavenly country club.

Santa Claus is another matter. He’s cute. He’s nonthreatening. He’s always cheerful. And he loves animals. He may know who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but he never does anything about it. He gives everyone everything they want without thought of a quid pro quo. He works hard for charities, and he’s famously generous to the poor. Santa Claus is preferable to God in every way but one: There is no such thing as Santa Claus.

This one’s for you, PJ. Rest in peace. I’ll take it from here.

See you next week, everybody!