The Monkey's Paw vs. My Super Sweet 16

Somewhere around fifth grade, my class was assigned to read a short story called The Monkey's Paw. If I learned at the time that the story was written by English author W. W. Jacobs and published in 1902, I forgot those facts pretty quickly.

What I did not forget was the essence of the story. A mother, father and son come into possession of a monkey's paw, said to be enchanted with a spell that would allow three wishes to be granted merely by grasping the paw and speaking them aloud. After being warned by the paw's previous possessor not to mess around with it, the family wishes for a specific sum of cash. The next day, the mother and father are waiting for the son to come home from work, and the person who comes to the door instead is a visitor from the son's employer. He brings bad news: the son has been killed on the job, mangled in machinery. The visitor also brings compensation from the employer: the exact sum of money the family had wished for the previous day. After a few days, the mother and father use the second wish to wish the son alive again. Late that night, there is a knock at the door. Mother rushes for the door, assuming that it is the son returned to life. Father, mindful of the fact that the son had been mangled beyond recognition and horrified at the thought of what the reanimated body might look like, rushes for the paw and uses the third and final wish to wish the son gone for good before his wife can open that door.

As grade schoolers whose lives and times included heavy doses of Dark Shadows on weekday afternoons, Christopher Lee Dracula movies on Saturday afternoons, and Creature Features on Saturday nights, our discussions of The Monkey's Paw focused on its supernatural aspects. Did the wishing actually work, or did the family suffer a single, tragic coincidence that they inflated into an irrational belief in the paw's magic? If the paw really did work, could they have headed off future trouble by making the first wish for unlimited wishes?

But another aspect of the story lurked around in my subconscious and popped up several years later, in college. A bunch of us were killing the hours between dinner and late Saturday night partying in the dorm TV lounge, watching Fantasy Island.

(Don't get smug: the show was on for years, so some of you had to be out there watching it, too. And if not you, somebody you know.)

I don't remember the details of the episode at all; I just remember that the moral of the three stories that made up the hour was that you shouldn't go around wishing for wealth or fame or glory or status, because all that stuff brings with it problems that you can't imagine, so you're better off making the best of whatever it is that you have.

A light bulb clicked on. "Hey, that was the real message of The Monkey's Paw!" Plenty of folks in the TV lounge at the time had read the story, had it read to them, or were familiar with some variation of it. And it wasn't hard for us to think of other times we'd seen reinforcements of the "You're Better Off Staying In Your Place" message. Gershwin's "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin'" from Porgy and Bess was an obvious example. There was special scorn for the Florida Evans character from the TV series Good Times: "Ohhhh, Jaaaames! We don't need money for food if we have to get it by doing a commercial for floor wax that I don't think is the best!"

You don't want the kind of troubles that go along with wealth. Trying to get rich is going to bring you misery. You can find happiness and true nobility in the humble surroundings that are right where you are.

We weren't conspiracy theorists, and didn't decide that the omnipresence of those messages was Official Trilateral Commission One World Policy. But on the other hand, it didn't seem like random coincidence, either. It occurred to us that maybe the sort of people who approved the short story compilations on grade school reading lists and gave the green light to television scripts and movie musicals might have thought that those were fine, noncontroversial messages to spread through mass media. It also occurred to us that those people might not have been so willing to spread messages showing the happy results of overt ambition in the lower classes.

Monkey's Paw messages seem a bit harder to find these days; there doesn't seem to be a whole lot out there to tell us how great it is to be of humble station. Every now and then, some rapper or singer will let us know that it's tough to have to deal with the haters. But they've generally spent more time telling us exactly why they're getting the hate: they're not skimping on the details about the magnitude of the lives they live.

And that's the more common message in today's America. 'Tis better to live large, and to show everybody every millimeter of that largeness. As a shining example, there is MTV's My Super Sweet 16, which demonstrates just how far out of hand things can get when parents with fat wallets decide to indulge their kids with 16th birthday celebrations. Some human abilities, like the ability to learn new languages, are best developed in early childhood, so if you are above the age of consent, have ever needed to hold a job, and haven't seen the show, it's probably too late for you to develop the talent to imagine the ways the kids on the show use mommy and daddy's money to buy attention and indulgences previously known only to royalty.

Youngsters watching the show aren't being told that it's best to be satisfied with what you have. Nor do they see quaint, 1980s, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous-era wonder at the abundance the birthday kids get to wallow in. No, the moral of the story doesn't seem to be that they have lots of nice stuff and enjoy it all; it's that things won't be sufficiently fun for them if they don't get to emphasize how much they have, how important they are, and how different that makes them from everybody else. The birthday kids are notably sensitive about the preservation of the exclusivity of their largeness. The typical show subject is hyper-concerned about the making of the guest list, about ensuring that there is enough security to keep the uninvited from crashing, and about keeping the invited guests from overshadowing her entrance, stepping on her stage, or trying to share her spotlight. If any of these kids is ever pressed into service as a monarch, they've got the attitude down.

The behavior of the Super Sweet 16 teens is only natural, given the culture they've grown up in. They've heard rappers bragging about the brands they wear, carry, drive and drink, and they've gotten visual confirmation of the nature of large living from entertainers and athletes on MTV Cribs. "Diva" behavior is good, shopping is an end, not a means to an end, and the government encourages citizens to spend rather than save. Telephones aren't functional tools that last for decades, they're fashion accessories that require replacement every other year for lack of stylishness.

Somewhere, in that wide space between random happenstance and coordinated plot, the message minders seem to have abandoned the "Be Content Where You Are" idea and replaced it with something closer to "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Is Jealous Of You." It's easy to be horrified at the direction that mindset takes us. But in this case, pining away for the old days isn't quite right, either; they were just as rotten in the opposite direction.

Isn't there a happy medium? Can't we have some "up from poverty, made it big, stayed modest, lived happily ever after" stories to show our kids?