Doodle and Shmoo

Meet Shmoo. I discovered this little critter at Walgreens and just had to have him. It may well be the best $5.99 I’ve ever spent:

This little fella scared the daylights out of my foster dog, Doodle. He didn’t know what to make of it. As you can catch at the beginning of the clip, my wife complained that Shmoo’s presence was spooking Doodle so badly that he wouldn’t approach his food bowl to eat, even though his bowl is at least 10 feet from where I was sitting.

This little thingamajig is like a cross between a Koosh ball, a tribble, a day-glo hedgehog, a squishy sea urchin, an inside-out intestine, an alien signaling device, and a silicone breast implant. It’s hard not to personify it because it exudes so much personality and the hairs, or cilia, or villi, or tentacles, or whatever, seem to move of their own accord, lending the thing a certain undeniable air of life.

My wife, Lauren, decided to name it Shmoo. She chose the name because squeezing it reminded her of the way yeast cells bud when they are sexually reproducing.

Coincidentally, it also happens that the legendary cartoonist Al Capp created some creatures for a story arc of his masterwork, Lil’ Abner, that he called shmoo –  or shmoon in the plural – that were a satirical commentary on the reactionary and hysterical nature of GOP hostility to the Democrats’ New Deal, which spawned wide-spread journalistic analysis, and a best-selling book that’s still being reprinted. Later, biologists working on yeast were put in mind of Capp’s creatures by the shape of budding yeast cells, and thus dubbed the process of yeast reproduction shmooing. My wife’s observation contained a species of cyclical irony; naming a cute, blobby imaginative creature for a biological process that was itself originally named for a cute, blobby imaginative creature.

The Shmoon struck a major chord in American post-war culture and became a major, grassroots phenomenon. You think Pokemon was big? It didn’t hold a candle to the broad and cross-generational appeal of the shmoon. They later became unbearably infantilized by crass media-conglomorate attempts to co-opt the shmoo meme. Many of my generation will have vague memories of vaguely shmooish creatures from Saturday morning cartoons, but shmoon never really worked when divorced from their deeply political roots in the American imagination.

Even as late as the 1970s shmoon continued to be wielded as a sly stick
in the eye of elitists. They made appearances in
M*A*S*H as a sotto voce comedic foil to the Boston Brahmin
character, Winchester. Kindly, but tough-as-nails Colonel Potter kept one that he bought for his
grandson on his office desk – I always knew that guy was a liberal.

There is something agreeably subversive, populist, and deeply Democratic about a shmoo. Shmoon are silly and lovable, as well as being a witty rebuke to the self-serving credo of conservatives that a caring and equitable society will ultimately undermine personal initiative and harm the commonweal.

So there you have the reason for the existence of this blog in a nutshell. Even when I start out to be completely pointless and whimsical, I somehow manage to bring it back to a polemical point. I’m incorrigible, and can’t help but write a political blog.

Footnote: Not really apropos of anything other than a marvelous little wrinkle in the shmoo meme, I couldn’t resist sharing this little gem that combines an exploration of the shmoo as the conservative symbol of the collapse and degradation of society, with the saccharine kitsch of commercial shmoon, and a witty nod to the immortal movie, Heavy Metal. Be warned, if you haven’t seen Heavy Metal (.torrent), you won’t get 90% of this skit, and will be scratching your head for about 4 out of its 5 minute length:

And thus the cycle of pop-cultural masturbation is complete for another blog post… Oh, and if you haven’t seen Heavy Metal, you won’t get that, either…