My children have one of those bloopity-bleepity electronic toys that plays different sounds when you press its various buttons. I have a general standing prohibition of such toys entering our home, but this one somehow made it past the perimeter guards—and once it’s inside, it’s inside. One of things it does is play the Spanish-language children’s song “Señora Vaca,” which I am sure many of you parents with young children will know. The song—which is not of Mexican origin, but I can’t tell one kind of Spanish from another—always makes me think of West Texas, in particular a stretch of land along the border that I have always loved. It’s beautiful country, and you should go if you’ve never been. There’s a place out there, not very far from the river, that I have always loved. It’s out in the desert, a lovely, austere, remote spot, one that isn’t easy to get to but that is worth the trip. There’s a particular quality to the light out there that I’ve never seen anywhere else. There are many beautiful places in the world, and there are many places that have a place in my heart, but there’s something special about this one. I don’t want to be sentimental or morbid, but there is no sense in denying the simple fact that death is coming for us all, eventually. And, when the time comes, I think that high lonely spot out in the desert, out there in the middle of that vast Sergio Leone landscape where the wind is barbaric and the skies are a perfect deep blue and you feel like you’re in a Marty Robbins ballad—that is where I am going to bury the people who gave us that toy.
¡Señora Vaca, eres una pinche f——g cow!
I don’t mind children’s songs. But if I hear “Señora Vaca” 86 times before 7 a.m., I get a teensy bit homicidal.
I shouldn’t complain, of course. My sons are delightful, and one naturally wants them to have things they enjoy. The church we belonged to in Dallas was in the main pretty well-heeled, and we used to get wish lists twice a year from a sister congregation with a much lower average income, one at Christmas and one before school started in the fall, and the simple things people needed for their children but could not afford would break your heart. They’d love to have a tenth of the stuff that people give to us that we don’t need. People have been unbelievably generous to my family, in part because we simply are surrounded by good and generous people but also in part because we have identical triplets with a very charming older brother, which makes for a good story, and people like to be part of a good story. And there was a time when we weren’t sure we were going to have children, when the racket and clutter and such we have now would have seemed to us the blessed trappings of the best things that could ever have happened to us—which they are.
I’ve been shouting “Get off my lawn!” since I was about 6, so semi-misanthropic choler is far from new territory for me—but one must draw some lines in life. We don’t have a television in our house and intend to keep our little ones off screens for as long as is feasible—my preference would be until they’re in graduate school, if it should come to that—but my wife and I both work mainly from home, and our oldest boy sees us using laptops and phones and such, and he’s very interested in them. He sometimes asks me to look at pictures on my phone—pictures of him or pictures of me—and, if I’m working on my laptop in the morning, he will insert his face between mine and the screen and demand: “Play ‘Thunderstruck’!” I’ve mostly played Bach for my children, but I did play a little AC/DC for the oldest boy one time when he was about 7 months old, and something about Angus Young’s insanely catchy E harmonic minor riff spoke to him, as, indeed, it speaks to his father, who has always had a thing for the harmonic minor. (For you non-nerds: That’s the same as a regular minor scale but with a major seventh. It’s real Bach-y and baroque-y and sounds pretty cool on an electric guitar—ask Yngwie “Don’t Omit the J” Malmsteen or Ritchie Blackmore.) So we listen to “Thunderstruck” from time to time, and he will tell you that if you happen to catch fire, the thing to do is: “Stop, drop, rock ’n’ roll.”
And he supplies most of his own sound effects.
It is easy to lean too hard into the evolutionary-psychology stuff, but I tend to agree with Jonah Goldberg that a great deal of the discomfort in modern life is rooted in the fact we sundry specimens of H. sap. have, more than any other species on Earth, developed the power to radically reshape our physical and social environment to such an extent that our evolved anatomy and our evolved psychology is out of step with the world we have built for ourselves—human beings are optimized to thrive in an environment of radical scarcity, a world of constant hunger and danger, but the world we live in has Virgin Atlantic and YouTube and DoorDash. And so a great deal of our lives, particularly our lives on screens—from social media to pornography to politics—is designed to distract us from those underlying tensions and to provide us relief from the discomfort of our situation. If you are very good at providing that kind of relief, then you can make tremendous sums of money or achieve high-level celebrity or secure meaningful political power—and, increasingly, each of those prizes is an aspect of the others.
Commercially speaking, the hardest thing to do is to leave people alone with their own thoughts—hence the bloopity-bleepity toys, the constant screens and smaller screens to distract us from the larger ones, the too-loud restaurants, the too-wired and too-plugged-in libraries, the debased liturgies and abandoned churches, the Three Stooges-level political discourse. The less terrifying explanation is that we are bored and demand entertainment—the more terrifying explanation is that we have good reason to believe that we cannot be entirely trusted with our own imaginations, that we are something like E. Howard Hunt’s description of Richard Nixon (as imagined by Oliver Stone): that we are “the darkness reaching out for the darkness.” I know where my unoccupied mind goes, and it is not a place you’d enjoy visiting. I do not exempt myself from any of my own criticism.
Of course, that isn’t what I want for my sons. The more calculating part of me suspects that if I can teach them how to read a few serious books by themselves, to have a conversation while looking someone in the eye, and to pay attention to something difficult for more than 11 seconds, then these will end up being, in effect, superpowers, gifts that will distinguish them from young contemporaries reduced and deformed by social media, celebrity culture, disposability, and the philosophy, if you want to call it that, of Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and the rest of the troll army that has occupied our public square. (Yes, of course that is just another expression of primordial status competition. Papa knows.) But I don’t need to make my sons into supermen—I only need to help them to become men deserving of the word. I want them to know about music and books and beautiful things not because I expect these to confer some competitive advantage in the agora but because I want them to have the joy and the pleasure of these things, and those are joys and pleasures that often are found only on the other side of some hard work and deliberate concentration. That which comes naturally is not good enough: Push the button, get the bloop and the bleep and the flashing light. Repeat, ad infinitum ad nauseam.
Yeah, I know—that’s big talk with the little ones still in diapers. But even though the triplets aren’t talking yet, every day I see one of them cock an eyebrow in a familiar expression—familiar from the mirror, I mean—and start to figure something out, imposing a little bit of intellectual order on a world that must be, because it is new and unfamiliar, perplexing and intriguing at times and confusing and frightening at others. And when I see such a look cross the face of one of my sons, I think: There’s a little man in there! And I want to help him get out and get up and make the most of all the wonderful things that this world has to offer him. Which is, I suppose, a long way of saying that I believe that what I don’t give them is at least as important as what I do give them. I don’t suppose they’re going to be hurt by a little bit of “Señora Vaca”—but not too much.
And if I don’t know what’s too much “Señora Vaca” for them, I can assume that it starts with what’s too much for me. If you’re looking for some bloops and bleeps, stop by my local Goodwill. I think you’ll find what you’re after.
