Arthur's hidden agenda

My kids sometimes watched the PBS children's show "Arthur," but I'd never really paid any attention to it. Until today. Today I watched an episode, and I have to say, I was appalled by what I saw.

"Arthur" is about a bunch of animals who go around wearing clothes and acting like people. Although I'm not fond of such shameless anthropomorphizing, that's not what I find disturbing about the show. The real problem is how these animals act. First of all, Arthur, the main character, is an aardvark. Aardvarks are African animals. Take a look at this picture:

Does that look like an African to you? Me neither. It looks like an American. And not an African American either, if you get my drift. That's more than a little odd, don't you think?

Now take a look at this character:

That's Arthur's friend Binky. He's not a hippopotamus, as I thought for years, so it's OK that he doesn't look African. But Binky is a dog. What's wrong with that, you ask? This is what's wrong with it:

That's Arthur's pet dog Pal. Get it? Arthur has a friend who's a dog and a pet who's a dog. But if dogs can walk upright and talk and go to school, how can they be pets? They can't be. What they can be is slaves. Pal is Arthur's slave. This PBS children's show promotes slavery, plain and simple.

And another thing, all these different species go to school together and work together and so on, but have you ever noticed that there are no hybrids in Arthur's world? That's right. The animals in Arthur's world may pretend to get along -- when they aren't enslaving one another -- but at the end of the day they stick to their own kind. Aardvarks marry aardvarks; bunnies marry bunnies; dogs marry dogs; no mixing allowed.

So there you have it. The hidden agenda of this purportedly "wholesome" PBS children's show is revealed: it promotes racism, slavery, and segregation. Disgraceful. My children will never watch "Arthur" again.