The Insidious Pleasant Goat.

I'm not one to become obsessed with cute little cartoon characters, but he haunts my thoughts as Sir Nayland Smith was haunted by the gaunt, ghostly visage of Dr. Fu Manchu.

I see him everywhere: from the backpacks of innocent children, from the pencil boxes and notebooks of my students, from slippers and sandals and untold other unexpected places, he leers his fatuous grin, empty, yet filled with hideous meaning.


Pleasant Goat. The very words send a spasm of dread through the core of my being. For this face is the rock on which 80+ years of American animation supremacy will be ground to dust. All that we know and love will be borne away forever on the cold wind that rises in the east. Mickey, Donald, Daffy, Heckle, Jeckle, Spongebob, and Bugs at one with Gomorrah.

Tom and Jerry are still venerated by my older students, but among the younger children their sun has set. These poor tykes know only Pleasant Goat as they will know and, God help us, love the hordes of poorly drawn, cynically concocted Chinese cartoon characters that even now are pouring from the animation sweatshops of the conquering dragon.

One day, mark my words, we will look back on this moment and see that we had won their hearts and minds and then, in a rather messy metaphor, let them slip through our fingers.

And the Goat abides.

P.