Hurts your eyes, doesn’t it? That’s the Naughty Corner From Hell. We call it the Ludovico Naughty Corner. It’s where toddlers go when they’ve been very, very, very bad. When they’ve done something far more serious than just smear a tube of lipstick across your carpet or taken their Crayola Washable Marker to the decidedly unwashable cat. When they’ve done something that undermines the very fabric of Western Civilization. When they’ve stolen pickles or chocolate or small rubber duckies made by nine-year olds in China.
Stealing is bad. Don’t do it. If you’re a parent, and you stand by and do nothing while your toddler – who has only the flimsiest grasp of property rights in advanced capitalist cultures and must be taught, and taught well, the principles of private ownership and the evils attending to transgressions of same – pockets a miniature cucumber, you should be punished, too.
You should be locked in a room, strapped in a chair, watching clips of Winona ripping off Saks – spliced with scenes from the musical Oliver! and David Hasselhoff’s videos played backwards – on an endless loop, with the soundtrack to WonderPets running at full volume.
Then maybe you’ll give this whole oh-she-didn’t-know-it’s-only-a-pickle-a-chocolate-a-ducky claptrap another think. ‘Cuz one ducky is all it takes, people. One ducky is all it takes before ALL the toddlers are snatching duckies and taking our credit cards and and drinking our beer and calling for revolution and turning North America into a Mini-Maoist wasteland, littered with beer-sticky sippy cups and crayon-scrawled placards and cheap-assed Made In Alberta duckies and ruled by a bicky-sucking, blankie-toting military prole dictatorship.
Which is why, whenever WonderBaby snatches a pickle from the produce aisle or pockets a stray binky or lifts a rock from the fountain outside of the casino in Niagara Falls, we do something about it. We set her right. We reprogram her.
The fate of Western Civilization depends on it.
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