I am a child of public television, in important ways. What I mean is that I reliably saw Sesame Street and Mr Rogers for the first five or six, or maybe more, years of my life.

Sesame Street was wonderful--I imagine it still is--but it had a fundamentally shallower effect on me. I remember it helping me learn to count, to know my letters, to develop people skills. Some of its songs are deep in my most basic memory; I believe I know the Ladybug song just because I heard it multiple times on Sesame Street, and the song about the two little girls and two little dolls and two kitty cats has been with me for almost my entire life; I bet I heard it first when I was one year old, and it still has a melancholy-inducing effect on me, for reasons long lost in the past. (Maybe I had had a squabble with my mother that day, or maybe the sky was grey; who knows what shapes a one-year old’s emotions? Who knows what shapes a fifty year-old’s?) I would be a poorer person without Sesame Street.

But I also remember Sesame Street as having two features that kept its effect on me somewhat superficial. First it had a deeply, if covert, prescriptiveness about it, a prescriptiveness that it could never openly acknowledge. It presented you with a vision of the world that you should approve, and a way of being in the world that was one you ought to participate in. And it didn’t invite you in: it merely told you to join up. It never admitted this, but we can: there is something deeply and problematically Kantian about Sesame Street.

Second, and not entirely unrelated to that, there’s a deep reflexivity to Sesame Street as well. It worked on multiple levels; adults could enjoy it too. The duplicity of the audience left the show winking at half of it all the time, and the other half knew it as well, and that meant it could never be entirely sincere. Performances were about the adults performing, as much as they were for the kids. Since its early days, it has become a thing to perform on Sesame Street—so that Sting comes to Sesame Street, or Elvis Costello, or Gloria Estefan, and you know they’re there as themselves. There’s a performativity to this, and that’s what the adults enjoy. Sesame Street calls attention to the performers and the actors. Sesame Street is, in a way, all about itself.

This was not the case with Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It may sound like I have killed Slavoj Zizek, put his body in a giant food dehydrator, ground it to powder, and snorted it up like freebased cocaine, but there’s no other way to say it: There was no hectoring normativity in Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood, camouflaged with the divertissements of Bakhtinian carnival, as there was, however distantly or covertly, in Sesame Street. There was a singular purpose, ruthlessly serving the central aim of its creator, and that was to speak to children. Actors could appear on it, but they would be instruments of the show’s purposes, it would not be a backdrop to their magnificences. Adults could watch it, but they would have to watch it as children.

The reason for this is simple, I believe: Mr Rogers disbelieved that we ever got over the condition of childhood, so he spoke to everyone in the same way. This is not to say that Mr Rogers disbelieved in adults, though there’s a fine pastoral tradition that recognizes, after centuries upon centuries of bitter experience, that in fact there are no grownups. He knew we grew into adults, but he also knew the adults we grow into, we grow into from children. It is a therapeutic insight, it is a Freudian insight, it is a Romantic insight; but it is also and more fully a Calvinist insight, an insight deeply rooted in the Renaissance pedagogy and the Augustinian theology in which Calvin was grounded: how we begin inflects everything else about us. This is why Mr Rogers could sound, on shallow glancing acquaintance, to be speaking in a merely therapeutic idiom; but if you asked why, and stayed for an answer, you would see him speaking through that, more deeply beneath that, to a profounder need than simple adjustment or reconciliation. He was about transfiguration. Here, everything was designed to communicate one message, and one message only: you are special, and I see that, and I like you for who you are. O sancta simplicitas! There is a purity of heart to Mr Rogers, and a singularity of will, that gave the Neighborhood a ruthless literality, a terrible sincerity, that he clung to all the days of his life. Or, perhaps, that clung to him.

Another way to say this is that Sesame Street is witty and hip, while Mr Rogers is square; Sesame Street is lured by earnestness, while Mr Rogers is enthralled with sincerity; Sesame Street is dissolotuely clever, while Mr Rogers is fanatically wise.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to trash-talk Sesame Street, but to praise Mr Rogers, in all his idiosyncratic, weird fabulousness. For because of his wisdom, Mr. Rogers speaks in a deep way to the human condition, at least as we experience it today. For small children, in my experience at least, more visibly, more self-consciously than the rest of us, need sincerity, hunger for directness, are trying for the first time to handle this existence called life and are desperate for any help they can get, and they have not yet learned to be ashamed to ask for it. Mr. Rogers offers, in this way, counsel—and counsel is, as Walter Benjamin knew, a rare commodity in the modern world. 

It may seem odd to think of Mr Rogers as a public theologian, but I've got to say, it's hard to imagine a more widely and deeply influential, or more truly creative, public theologian over the past half-century than him.

And so I come to the main point. Tom Junod has just published a really interesting piece in the Atlantic, reflecting on Mr Rogers, twenty years after he wrote a famous article on him, because the article is about to become a movie.

Two things about the piece speak to me in different ways.

First, the awareness of the need, for all of us kitted out with a “modern” subjectivity, for recognition and for mercy--a twofer required by our sense that we are real but ought to be seen to be real by others, and our sense that the moral expectations put upon us are simultaneously enormously debilitating and enormously disciplining. The simultaneous event of recognition and mercy comes to us as transfiguration--both a registering of what we have done, and a prophecy of what we can nonetheless be. Luther, Nietzsche, Foucault (to a degree) all recognized this; here's how their descendant, Mr. Rogers, worked it out:

A long time ago, a man had seen something in me I hadn’t seen in myself, and now I was watching him see something in me and couldn’t help but ask, all over again: Who was he? Who was I? And what did he see? “You love people like me,” Matthew Rhys tells Tom Hanks. And when Hanks asks, “What are people like you?,” Rhys answers, “Broken people.” And that broke me, though I had never uttered those words to Fred in my life. He saw something in me, yes. Did he also see through me? Was my brokenness so obvious to him back then? Was Fred’s offer of friendship also a form of judgment?

Note that last bit: that the affirmation, the yes, also came along with the no. Our ability to hear the "no" is correlatively amplified by our deeper hearing of the "yes", but perhaps the obverse is not as true.

Second, the question of the tone of Mr. Rogers's example in "public life", which in his case was, brilliantly, centrally, the medium of "public television." Whatever else he was, he was gentle. But by being relentlessly gentle, he could also be gently relentless, and make us feel moral formation as a good Calvinist can: not with melodramatic violence, but with the drip-drip-drip persistence of patience, employing the vehement medium of time, like water on stone. This made his vision of public life a matter of some tension in our impatient age:

…what makes measuring Fred’s legacy so difficult is that Fred’s legacy is so clear. What he would have thought of Pam Bondi’s politics is one thing; what he would have thought of Pam Bondi is quite another, because he prayed for the strength to think the same way about everyone. She is special; there has never been anyone exactly like her, and there never will be anyone exactly like her ever again; God loves her exactly as she is. He repeated this over and over, and that his name was invoked as a cudgel by activists who probably shed tears over the documentary has haunted me since I first saw the video from Tampa. It isn’t that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered _because_ he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one.
He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don’t know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers.

The existential profundity of the message is real. It may not be a “universal” message today—reaching all humans across the globe—but it at least properly encompasses “all sides” in the tumults of America today, because it addresses us on a level more fundamental than that on which we express our distinctive outrages and fears. And the civic generosity of the message is real as well. His generosity of spirit, of speaking to, and even with?, publicans and sinners and Democrats and Republicans, in a way speaking to them by speaking to us in a condition before we are specified in the determinate armor of our particular ideological fortifications—that generosity remains, at least graciously, at least from time to time, a possibility we might see on the horizon, and reach for, and maybe, imperfectly, seize.

But can we do both, and at the same time? Is it possible to keep these two insights together? Can the existential profundity of the message, be joined to the civic neighborliness of the form? That seems harder today, to Junod and also to me.

But I confess to being weirdly cheered by how his piece almost ends:

…that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

Yes, like the “Tank Man of Tiananmen Square”, like the Eastern European intellectuals I spoke of in an earlier post, Mr. Rogers is less of an agent and more of a witness. In a busy age, and a noisy moment, maybe we need to figure out how to be witnesses again, anew.

One ought never to forget he was a Presbyterian minister, and he saw his mission as a vocation, a calling, and also a sending. He was a messenger, an evangelist. (Indeed, he was officially licensed by the Presbyterian Church to be a minister in the medium of television.) The message he conveyed was on his lips but also in his life, in the way he exhibited the message, and in how he delivered it.

There is his witness, and if that witness stands in mutely eloquent rebuke to all our evasions of neighborliness, it also stands as mutely eloquent example that we may find it possible, sometimes, to follow. In another tradition, not unimaginably distant from Rogers’ own, we can hear Rabbi Hillel’s saying, captured in Pirkei Avot:

If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

I suppose part of the great wisdom of Mr. Rogers is that he always knew the time was, somewhere, somehow, always now. Behold, now is the acceptable time. Do we have the grace to see that? If not, where can we find it? These are not rhetorical questions, for me at least.