Death, Class, and Sesame Street

In a 1982 episode of Sesame Street, cast members explained to Big Bird that shopkeeper Mr. Hooper had died and wasn't coming back. They dealt with death head on and avoided using any euphemisms. They told Big Bird Mr. Hooper had died--not "passed away" or "passed on".

Paul Fussell, in his book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, notes that speaking euphemistically about death is a quirk of the American middle class. They will say that their loved one passed on or passed away, while the upper class won't have any of it. Like the humans on Sesame Street, they speak directly about death.

This was a bold and respected move by Sesame Street. They avoided coy language about death that is bound to confuse children. And as a public program with a diverse audience, they left religious interpretation to parents, who could discuss the episode afterwards with their kids.

I speculate that this was a moment of exchanging values across class lines. Sesame Street's upper class writers and producers offered middle class parents an example of their alternate approach to the world.

Alternate Histories

If you happen upon a time machine, the first thing you are supposed to do is kill Hitler before he unleashes his terror on the world. This is done with the very best of intentions in Stephen Fry's Making History, but the outcome is not what the protagonist hoped it would be.

Without Hitler, an equally charismatic but far more clever and patient German leader emerges. This man, Rudolph Gloder, privately assures the country's Jewish scientists that they are safe in Germany despite his public posturing against them. The country develops the atomic bomb and uses it to destroy Moscow and Leningrad. All of Europe capitulate as Nazi Germany invades the Soviet Union and swiftly relocates the continent's Jews to Czechoslovakia where it fully implements the Final Solution. The United States develops nuclear weapons soon after and threatens war when word of Nazi atrocities spreads across the Atlantic. But Germany reveals its superior weaponry and forces America to back down as a cold war ensues. America in the 1990s is a segregated, socially conservative, police state. Nazi Europe, however, thrives economically and is home to the world's leading high-tech industry.

There is no time machine in Christopher Priest's The Separation, only a well-crafted mix of fantasy and history. In it, Britain reaches a truce with Nazi Germany in 1941 under the condition that the Nazi's leave Western Europe and the British Empire alone, but have a free hand in the east. Britain is left responsible for relocating Jews in Nazi territory to Madagascar.

The novel gives only limited details of the course of world history from 1941 to modern day. Britain remains a thriving world power. The United States and Germany stagnate as they drain their resources in an endless war over former Soviet territory. Jews are in constant violent conflict with the natives of Madagascar.

I found Making History chilling. The Nazis had a real chance of succeeding and only Hitler himself stood in their way. And The Separation is mind-expanding. It presents an alternate balance of power in Europe. Germany, rather than the United States, keeps the Soviets out of Western Europe. I think this is Pat Buchanan's thesis that nobody seems to give a fair chance: that Germany and the Soviet Union could have been left alone to destroy each other.

I would have liked The Separation to have painted a more detailed picture of the contemporary world resulting from its divergent history. Does the British Empire remain intact? Does the whole of it thrive as much as the mother country?