The Death of the Grown-Up by Diana West

Author:Diana West
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

7. IDENTITY

We must have but one flag. We must also have but one language. That must be the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington’s Farewell address, of Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech and second inauguration.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1917

I hope very much that I’m the last president in American history who can’t speak Spanish.

—BILL CLINTON, 20001

One day, a few years ago, when my girls were small, I read them Mary Poppins, the notably bizarre but durably beloved 1934 fantasy by P. L. Travers. Things were going along just fine, with Mary arriving on the east wind to kick off a series of magical adventures for her charges. Then we got to chapter six—“Bad Tuesday.”

This chapter revolves around Mary’s remarkable compass, which not only tells which way to north, south, east, and west, but also sends Mary and the kids there. Mary barks “North!” and they find themselves at the North Pole conversing with a polar bear. The command of “South!” lands them in a steamy jungle where they eat bananas with a hyacinth macaw. “East!” takes them to China and a panda bear, while “West!” brings them to a beach where they encounter a seaweed-serving dolphin.

It was the dolphin that did it. Maybe the exotic specificity of “hyacinth macaw” should have made me wonder, but it was the dolphin, environmentalism’s poster mammal, that jerked my gearshift from doting mother to PC-detector. Was it possible, was it plausible, that P. L. Travers—a British subject born at the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, the high point of the British empire—would choose a polar bear, a hyacinth macaw, a panda bear, and a dolphin to represent the four corners of the earth? Not bloody likely. (Later, I learned that the panda didn’t even appear in the West until Ruth Harkness brought a cub named Su-Lin out of China in 1936, two years after Mary Poppins was first published.) Another hand, contemporary and clumsy, was at work, as indicated by the note to be found in the 1997 edition’s table of contents: “Chapter Six (Revised version).” A quick dip into the local library fished up a suitably old and unreconstructed copy of Mary Poppins, which revealed what drove modern-day editors to rewrite the thing.2

Turns out, Mary’s original spin around the globe took her and the children not to visit animals of different species, but human beings of different races. To the north, in the original chapter six, Mary & Co. rub noses with “an eskimo man … his round brown face surrounded by a bonnet of white fur.” This, of course, was not a face Inuit rights advocates were going to love. His “eskimo wife” goes on to make an offer whose generosity would be lost on PETA: “Let me get you some fur coats. We’ve just been skinning a couple of Polar Bears.” In a southern desert, a black-skinned family offers, gulp, watermelon to the parched travelers—not only ballistically “incorrect,” but also botanically improbable. (“My, but dem’s very white babies,” the mother, her tiny “picaninny” in her arms, tells Mary.

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