The worst thing I read yesterday was a good passage in a good story. It was in the Huffington Post’s long feature about the useless and cruel way our culture responds to obesity, medically and socially:
I have never written a story where so many of my sources cried during interviews, where they double- and triple-checked that I would not reveal their names, where they shook with anger describing their interactions with doctors and strangers and their own families. One remembered kids singing “Baby Beluga” as she boarded the school bus…
Imagine being Raffi and reading that. “Baby Beluga” arrived a few years too late to be a feature of my babyhood, so it’s always landed on my ears as an alien text, and a strenuous one, with its try-hard wholesomeness and its megafaunal brand-boosting (my generation had bottlenose dolphins, thank you very much). Every time I hear it, all I can hear is how much it wants to be a good happy song for safe happy children.
Of course it became a weapon for young sadists. How could it not have?
