Tanked
If you have a child or grandchild, you’re familiar with “Thomas the Tank Engine,” the gentle kid’s show featuring a fleet of talking trains.
The wildly popular animated series is based on British children’s books written by the Rev. Wilbert Awdry in the early 1940s featuring the adventures of Thomas and his train friends who work for Sir Topham Hatt on the Isle of Sodor. Well — and this won’t surprise anyone who understands the left — libs despise the series. Last year, a Brit Labour transport official complained, “The only female characters are an annoyance, a nuisance, and in some cases a danger to the functioning of the railway.” And now “social justice” writer Tracy Van Slyke has taken to the pages of The [UK] Guardian to blow her stack over the show’s “twisted” and “subversive” messages — the value of hard work and friendship. Van Slyke runs out of pejoratives as she accuses the series of “classism, sexism, anti-environmentalism bordering on racism.” Not to mention colonialism, elitism, despotism. She hates that “these trains perform tasks dictated by their imperious, little white boss,” who “orders the trains to do everything from hauling freight to carrying passengers to running whatever random errand he wants done, whenever he wants it done — regardless of their pre-existing schedules.” In other words, doing their job. The horror.
The Limbaugh Letter September 2014