The hegemonic ideology of the ruling class, Antonio Gramsci once observed, becomes all too much like the “air we breathe.” It comes to define the “common sense”of ordinary daily consciouness and experience, with tragic consequences all around. 

Here is a small and childish example. 

Flipping through the television clicker one morning, I recently I happened upon “Sesame Street” (SS), the venerable educational PBS series for pre- and early grade-school children. 

The morning’s lesson was on the just and inviolable nature of socioeconomic inequity and the sanctity of private property and possessive individualism. 

At the point I clicked on the program, two very concerned and mature adults — a black man and a black woman, both in their 40s it appeared — were listening with raised eyebrows to a blue puppet animal (“Cookie Monster” perhaps) who had just designated himself “Cookie-Hood.” “Cookie-Hood” was a play on Robin Hood. 

“Cookie Hood” had just come to the alarming (for him) realization that “some people have lots more cookies than they need” while “other people have no cookies at all.”

That’s a prescient observation in the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society, where the top 1 percent owns at least 40 percent of total wealth and more than 1 million black children are growing up at less than half the federal government’s notoriously low and inadequate poverty level.

The solution, “Cookie-Hood” announced, is to take the surplus cookies away from the wealthy few and give them away to the poor, cookie-less many.  Imagine!

“Hooray!” the other puppet animals shouted. 

The two adults were not pleased.  “That,” the father figure sternly intoned, “is stealing.” And “stealing is wrong,” he elaborated, “because it means taking something that doesn’t belong to you.”

No room, of course, in the SS script for why the cookie-less exist in the first place: because of societal dispossession, repression, and, well, theft.  No room for moral outrage at the fact that masses of cookie-less are born into a world they never made where billions go hungry and ill-housed while a wealthy minority lives surrounded by extravegant opulence.  No sense of justice in the demand of equal cookies for all. 

“Cookie-Hood” felt sad and ashamed.  He thought he’d been doing something good and just, but really he’d been doing something wrong. 

He’d been stealing cookies that didn’t belong to him!  Bad cookie puppet!!

The other puppet animals were confused. 

What to do now?  And what about the cookie-less?

Not to worry!  Semase Street’s wise and benevolent adults had a solution. 

The solution is….currency.  Puppets and people don’t have to steal cookies from the rich because, the father figure explained, “we can all go to the store and buy cookies.” Yes, all of can us get as many cookies as we want with a magical medium called…..drumroll…ta-da….MONEY.

Because everybody’s got money, right? 

Money is equality. 

Who needs Robin Hoods when we’ve all got that great universal leveller and destoyer of hiearchy and inequality called money. 

Three cheers for money!  Hooray for the means of exchange! 

“Cookie-Hood” (Cookie-Monster?) was happy because he remembered that he just gotten his allowance.  He held up a little bag of coins and shouted, “Hooray, let’s go the store and buy cookies.”

He wasn’t worried anymore about whether other people have enough cookies.  Now he just cared about getting his own.  He knew that other people get money (allowances) too. 

Before going to the store, however, Cookie-Hood had to take back the surplus cookies he’d stolen from the privileged few. 

I was left to wonder how long it will take Cookie-Hood to figure out that some few people’s allowances are 500 and more times bigger than other peoples’ allowances. 

Here’s my idea for a future SS episode: “Cookie Hood changes his name to ‘Money Hood’ and Robs a Bank.” The adults can send “Money Hood” back to the bank with his ill-gotten green, explaining to him that people don’t have to steal money….they just have to get jobs. 

Everyone knows that jobs pay a lot of money to everyone who wants to work, right? 

Hooray for jobs.  Get a job!

The next show after that can deal with the blue puppet animal’s childish struggle against the authoritarian structure of the capitalist labor process. 

Paul Street is a writer, speaker, activist, and historian.  His books include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm Publishers, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge, 2005); and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in and Around Chicago (Chicago Urban League, 2005).

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