Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  At last, the very worst occurred. We eco-geeks got hold of the story, and that was when the shit that was already hitting the fan began to stick. According to its green defenders, the stick is important not because it is iconic or because it promotes discovery or innovation—indeed, even the detail that sticks might actually be played with by children drops out of the story at this point—but rather because it is “ecofriendly,” “the ultimate disposable, biodegradable, versatile, multipurpose plaything.” These ecobloggers celebrated the stick as “sustainable, recyclable, and upcyclable.” One exclaimed euphorically that “you can even turn it into mulch when you’re done playing with it!” which made me imagine tearing a stick from Caroline’s little hands and jamming it into my tractor’s wood chipper.

  I don’t want to rain on any parade that puts a humble stick in the lead float—after all, if Silly Putty and the Easy-Bake Oven can make the National Toy Hall of Fame, who am I to whine about the stick having its day in the sun?—but there’s something creepy about this whole business. As the viral contagion of the stick story spread, I found myself possessed by a desire to shake Curator Man and his army of zombie bloggers and yell, “Hey! Wake up! Y’all are talking about a fucking stick!” But once the stick’s coronation was hijacked, what had been a plaything was transformed into Captain Ahab’s doubloon, Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, Citizen Kane’s Rosebud: not a window onto childhood play but, rather, a mirror in which obsessed grown-ups saw nothing more than the reflections of their own faces. The stick’s induction had been distorted from a celebration of how kids play into an ideological skirmish into which adults brought their own values and obsessions. At this point something in the stick story was lost forever. After all, isn’t the beauty of a kid playing with a stick precisely that it is never our stick but always already theirs, that their imaginative powers define its shape, name, and use? It seemed to me that we pathetic grown-ups wanted to usurp the magic of the wand: to name and claim it, to wield it as a shield against time and tide.

  That’s the first thing that’s suspicious about this stick story. Who could be so pretentious as to assume that a bunch of grown-ups—even worse, “expert” grown-ups—could possibly be capable of selecting toys for a National Museum of Play? The real experts, who are obviously the kids, hadn’t been asked about any of this—including whether the idea of a National Toy Hall of Fame makes any damned sense in the first place. And what about the fact that all the negative connotations of sticks were being glossed over by these blithe stick enthusiasts? The sordid etymology and usage of the word stick offers a powerful reminder that the stick we might imagine as a medieval knight’s sword in fact has a double edge. What about “stick-in-the-mud,” “stick it to them,” or “beat him with a stick”? What about the wonderfully imaginative denigration of a pompous person as having “a stick up their ass” or the fact that soft speaking is enabled only by the carrying of a “big stick”? How about the derogatory slang terms “dip stick,” “dumb stick,” “dick stick,” and “weak stick,” or “to give stick,” which means to disparage or criticize, or the suggestion that one “stick it” (in their ear or elsewhere)? Or the unfortunate transformation of perfectly decent food like bread and cheese into sticks; or, conversely, the use of the stick to skewer and roast things, like squirrels? And what about chopsticks, which Americans would starve if forced to eat with, or the stick shift, which we can’t drive, or the 1970s hair band Styx—which isn’t quite the same, I know, but still makes my point that for every two sticks lashed together to make a mast or rubbed together to make fire, two others are used to make nunchucks or a crossbow. For every bouncing pogo stick or stirring swizzle stick, every forked dowsing stick or sacred rain stick, some poor stick figure ends up swinging from the hangman’s gallows. For every burnished walking stick there is a cancerous fire stick, for every joy stick, a night stick, for every prayer stick, at least one stick of dynamite.

  Of course the stick lovers don’t tell you any of this. They’d also like you to forget the main thing sticks do, which is to poke your eye out. Even if a lot of things in life are “better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” one thing that is not in fact better is actually being poked in the eye with a sharp stick. Indeed, the same people who are now swooning nostalgically over their own stick-blessed childhoods are also yelling at their grandchildren to put down the goddamned stick before they put somebody’s eye out. Let’s face it, sticks are dangerous. And if you look at what kind of imaginative play the old-guy stick lovers valorize, it is invariably martial. One man unironically opined that what he most missed about his lost youth was the nurturing imaginative play by which he “could pretend that a stick was a big bazooka.” Bazooka Lover had plenty of company. The most treasured memories of childhood play reported by these respondents featured the stick as rifle, shotgun, machine gun, sword, knife, spear, bow, arrow, harpoon, spear gun, blowgun, and even pipe bomb (good old pipe bomb!). One guy enthusiastically described the good fun he had while attacking his siblings with a stick that he pretended was a “Borg prosthetic arm/gun.” Another waxed sentimental over the character-building effects of a spirited round of “Dodge the Stick,” a game that, from what I could make out, basically amounts to throwing sticks as hard as you can at another person’s head. But in addition to the Good Old Stick! crowd valorizing the violent imaginative and literal uses of the stick, they were also smug. Here is a representative posting: “The toys we in the older generation grew up with, like the stick, fostered the imagination. Nowadays, children sit in front of a computer screen playing video games that teach them violence and disrespect. It’s no wonder kids these days are obese and ignorant.”

  The targets of this abuse didn’t waste any time in putting down the Game Boy and chicken nuggets to give Gramps a piece of their mind. To their credit, the folks in this second wave of responses to the stick’s ascension were more playful than those in the Good Old Stick! faction. Some mocked the stickophilic sentimentalists with sarcastic remarks like this one: “The sticks we had when I was growing up were way better than the ones they have now.” Others used humor to fight back against the characterization of American youth as depraved because they play with computers instead of sticks. My favorite of these technophile back-talkers was the kid who wrote wryly, “I have an old Atari 2600 that I use as a makeshift stick.” Yet others used hyperbole to ridicule the violent tendencies of the Good Old Stick! folks. “In a related story,” wrote one mockumentarian, “the National Child Toy Safety Commission has issued a recall on the stick, identifying it as the nation’s most dangerous toy. The Commission is now in negotiations with leading environmentalists, who make access to sticks easier every year.”

  One especially witty blogger imagined comments that might have been posted to Amazon.com by consumers who had heard of the stick’s new fame and rushed out to buy one. One of these fake postings, from a mom and stick purchaser, describes the trauma suffered by her son after he discovered the troubling indeterminacy of the stick’s meaning. She advises that parents “speak to the neighborhood kids in advance to reach a consensus as to what The Stick represents.” Another, posted by the wonderful “Grandpa Dan” (who, of course, writes from Florida), reads as follows: “The Stick will never be beat. And it’s a great bargain, too! The wife and I bought a single Stick, sawed it into five pieces, and now all our young grandchildren are having a grand time talking on their ‘cell phones.’”

  But the best was yet to come. The debate about the stick soon spawned a number of playful mock campaigns to have various other items inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame. Among these nominees were the leaf, bubble wrap, the Popsicle stick, the log, the egg carton, shadows, the pillow, the vibrating dildo, the shoebox, dirt, the snowball, and Pete Rose (after all, Rochester is only 174 miles from Cooperstown). But the mock campaign that gathered the most momentum was the one agitating for inclusion of the rock in the National Toy Hall of Fame. As a first move, the rock advocates appropriated the discourse
of racial justice to argue that the elevation of the stick over the rock was a clear case of bias, pointing out that sticks had received preferential treatment for far too long. They also observed that “sticks and stones” had long been associated with one another—in various cultural contexts, including the breaking of people’s bones—and it was thus unfair that the stick alone should receive recognition. The rock folks gave hundreds of examples of the wonderful ways in which rocks foster imaginative play. Taking a page from the battle plan of Bazooka Lover and his ilk, for example, they pointed out that a stick’s ability to be a gun is in no way superior to a rock’s ability to be a grenade. I found this hard to argue with. Finally, the rock people emphasized the precedent of the toy Pet Rock, which in the 1970s swept the nation and made so much money for its creator that the guy became a millionaire overnight and at last achieved his lifelong dream: to own a bar in Los Gatos, California.

  The persuasiveness of the rock campaign caused me to wonder not only about sticks and stones but about all the toys that have been inducted into and rejected from the National Toy Hall of Fame. As it turns out, debate has surrounded these selections from the very beginning. When the inaugural class of 1998 included Barbie but not Ken, a group of college students complained of sexual discrimination, arguing that Ken deserves equal billing with his female counterpart—who, they pointed out, is insipid, emaciated, and nippleless and, furthermore, has poor taste in purses and terrible gaydar. Some Marxist critics declared that the induction of the Radio Flyer wagon, the Duncan yo-yo, and the Crayola crayon constituted the baldest form of product placement advertising. Wouldn’t the generic wagon or crayon have been good enough, or was the Hall of Fame taking kickbacks from these companies? When Monopoly was the only board game included in that first class, the aficionados of everything from Candy Land to Parcheesi to backgammon went wild—not to mention the evangelical Scrabble-ites, who had plenty of choice words for the Hall of Fame after their snubbery (if that’s even a word).

  This debate surrounding the choice of inductees became an annual ritual; most interesting is how regularly adult obsessions were reflected in these bizarre skirmishes over toys. While the Ken doll faction was clearly in it for the laughs, the Raggedy Ann fans—who actually call themselves “Raggedy Fans” and who in many ways disturbingly resemble a cult—were in genuine fits from the beginning. It wasn’t so much that Raggedy Ann, whose oft-recited pedigree dates to 1915, was rejected—it was instead the fact that Barbie, that mindless slut, had been inducted with the very first class. The Raggedy Fans took to the warpath and for four long years endured repeated defeats until, at last, in 2002, came the “magical moment” (their words) when Raggedy Ann became the twenty-sixth toy to join the ranks. During those four years the Ann cultists collected more than eight thousand petitions but still had to endure the humiliation of having been outgunned by the Mr. Potato Head lobby, which, after suffering a similar defeat in the inaugural year, had their man in office straightaway in year two.

  My study of inducted and rejected toys also revealed the precedent that indirectly enabled the stick’s ultimate success: the surprising choice, in November 2005, of the cardboard box. The box was an influential inductee, because it was the first plaything not produced by a toy manufacturer to have made the National Toy Hall of Fame. Once the humble box had cracked the dam of the hall’s logic, other toys not made to be toys couldn’t be far behind. The affinity between the cardboard box and the stick was in fact remarked upon by many folks who responded to the stick’s induction. One would-be parodist offered the Onion-esque headline “Stick Enters Toy Hall of Fame, Cardboard Box Snubbed,” only to be informed that, in fact, the box was already in. Many parents liked the choice of the box because it confirmed their observation that no matter how much dough they shelled out for toys, their kids preferred to play with the boxes in which the toys came. As a parent who has spent too much time repairing overengineered toys, I too approved of the box and stick, both of which I added to my personal list of Things That Actually Work, which until that time had included only WD-40, bourbon, and Moby-Dick.

  I also found it instructive to consider some of the National Toy Hall of Fame’s selections in light of its explicit criteria for inclusion. For example, while I’ll fight the man who claims that the Slinky doesn’t “possess icon status,” it is harder to see how the Atari can be said to “have longevity.” The Atari was inducted in 2007, by which time it had been obsolete for decades, and to make matters worse the Atari shared the class of 2007 with the kite, which is a three-thousand-year-old toy. It is also difficult to see how some of the inaugurated toys “encourage discovery,” unless, as in the case of Play-Doh and Silly Putty, the discovery is simply that it is better if you don’t swallow it. And can we legitimately claim that the jack-in-the-box works to “promote innovation,” given that playing with this toy amounts to mindlessly cranking it up, scaring the shit out of yourself, and cranking it up again, over and over? It even took the play “experts” until 2009 to admit the ball and until 2013 to open their doors to the rubber duck, thus finally ending their ill-advised stonewalling of two of the most universally beloved toys of all time.

  Then there’s the problem of the still-rejected toys. I note that after the embattled first year of the National Toy Hall of Fame’s existence, when every nut who could click a mouse raised hell that their favorite toy had been left out in the cold, the panel of wise toy experts responded in year two by rejecting both the soccer ball and baseball glove, thus ensuring that they would piss off every person on earth. As with the Raggedy Ann standoff, adult obsessions were at the heart of these debates. For example, after being judged unfit for service in the Hall of Fame for several years running, GI Joe went commando and was carried into the hall in 2004 on a testosterone-driven groundswell of support from advocates whose appeals sounded as if they had been excerpted from speeches by General Patton. Gender politics were equally transparent in the induction the following year of the Easy-Bake Oven, which, though reviled by feminists as a symbol of the subjugation of women within a hegemonic patriarchal system of exploitative domestic servitude, was celebrated by other women as “really cute.” The museum capped off its long run of poor choices in 2014, when it rejected more than a hundred worthy nominees—including such truly pleasurable toys as the Slip’n Slide—in order to induct the Rubik’s cube, which is not a toy but rather a heinous torture device intentionally designed to fatally deprive innocent children of their self-esteem.

  I ultimately decided that to settle the troubling matter of the famous stick I would have to consult a real play expert. Hannah seemed to me the right choice. She’s thoughtful, asks good questions, and doesn’t jump to conclusions about anything other than the need to take care of her little sister and eat ice cream immediately. She has informed opinions about things she has experience with, and clearly she has experience playing. One morning, while driving the girls to school, I told Hannah all about the Strong National Museum of Play, and the National Toy Hall of Fame contained within it, and about the stick. She listened carefully, raising her eyebrows a few times.

  “Who are the kids who get to decide which toys are allowed to be in the Hall of Fame?” she asked.

  “They aren’t kids,” I explained. “They’re all grown-ups.” “That’s weird,” she said. Little Caroline nodded in agreement. “Kids have a lot more practice playing. Why don’t they ask kids?” I told her I didn’t know. Hannah said she could understand why somebody might think of a stick as a toy, since kids could use sticks to . . . and then she breathlessly listed about fifty uses of the stick that had never occurred to Curator Man: a bridge for an ant to walk across, a hole poker for making secret caves, a fencing foil for sister Caroline, a key to a magic ice castle, a cloud scratcher. “Yeah, a cloud scratcher!” Caroline repeated enthusiastically.

  Next, Hannah wanted to know how the grown-ups decide what’s a toy and what isn’t. “If a stick is in there, how about a whole tree, which is better, because
most kids love to climb trees. Can that be in there?” I told her I didn’t know. Hannah has always loved learning the names of flowers and trees, and so she also wanted to know what kind of stick it was. Was it a stick from a Utah juniper, or a Jeffrey pine, or maybe a Fremont cottonwood?

  “Nobody ever said what kind of stick it was,” I replied. Now Hannah frowned in earnest. Caroline followed suit, shaking her head side to side as if perfectly disgusted.

  “They put it in a museum without even learning its name?” Caroline asked, incredulous.

  I was nonplussed by how quickly the girls’ simple questions were exploding the pretensions of the National Toy Hall of Fame, and I was quietly embarrassed that their best questions had never occurred to me. But Hannah’s next question was especially provocative.

  “When kids visit this Hall of Fame, can they play with the stick?”

  I paused before replying.

  “No. They can’t. The stick is in a display case on a wall in the museum.”

  “Really?” she asked, her voice alive with genuine surprise. “Why do they call it a Museum of Play if you can’t play with the stuff there? Maybe they could make the case with a lid, so you could just get the stick out. Or maybe they could have lots of sticks, so if me and Caroline and a bunch of other kids showed up we could all have a stick to play with. Why don’t they do something like that?” Caroline nodded her assent as I once again told Hannah that I just didn’t know.