An Expotition from Social Media, I

One of the lovely things about the Winnie the Pooh books is how remarkably insightful they are about human nature.  A number of grownup adaptations and commentaries exist that play upon this fact—The Tao of Pooh comes to mind—but I have always thought it part of the charm of the books that the characters, despite displaying sometimes grownup foibles, always do so in a child-sized fashion.

 

Only recently did I realize that this remarkable pastiche-like quality of the original Pooh stories, this pint-sized adultness, lends itself admirably (as perhaps the author of the aforementioned Tao book realized before time) to explicating the behavior of an era of gallon-sized childishness.  What better allegory could there be (for example) for a certain mode of grownup discourse marred by childish foibles than the following (taken from the seminal chapter “In Which Christopher Robin Leads an Expotition to the North Pole”) :

 

“Hush!” said Christopher Robin turning round to Pooh, “we're just coming to a Dangerous Place.”

“Hush!” said Pooh turning round quickly to Piglet.

“Hush!” said Piglet to Kanga.

“Hush!” said Kanga to Owl, while Roo said “Hush!” several times to himself, very quietly.

“Hush!” said Owl to Eeyore.

“Hush!” said Eeyore in a terrible voice to all Rabbit's friends-and-relations, and “Hush!” they said hastily to each other all down the line, until it got to the last one of all. And the last and smallest friend-and-relation was so upset to find that the whole Expotition was saying “Hush!” to him, that he buried himself head downwards in a crack in the ground, and stayed there for two days until the danger was over, and then went home in a great hurry, and lived quietly with his Aunt ever-afterwards. His name was Alexander Beetle.

 

And so here we are, n'est-ce pas?