Like Lauren, I enjoyed Jim Windolf's insightful attack on cute culture, but I find the otters-holding-hands/Iraq War connection to be a bit of a stretch. Windolf suggests that we're asking for forgiveness through penitential offerings of cuteness, but it's not my impression that most Americans think we need to be forgiven. Maybe popular cuteness is intended "as some sort of correction" to our new status as invaders, but that presupposes a level of remorse I don't really see. Which is not to say cuteness and politics never meet; they certainly do in Japan. Here's Prince Pickles, the rosy-cheeked mascot of Japan's Defense Forces. As various government-produced comic books tell it, he is a native of the peaceful Paprika Kingdom. At first, he didn't understand the need for his small country’s defense forces. It wasn’t until the neighboring Sesame Kingdom invaded that the prince learned the value of a military. Prince Pickles makes the prospect of waging war perfectly adorable.

As Windolf implies, Americans are late to the global cuddle party—Japan is the clear leader, and though Windolf doesn't mention it, parts of Southeast Asia are way more cutified than we'll ever be. Maybe a culture as obsessed with irony as ours can only allow cuteness to cut so deep; at some point the earnestness of it all seems ridiculous to us in a way it might not to the Burmese. I predict the Brits will emerge as global leaders in the coming cute backlash. Just ask Ellie-Grace.

Tags: cuteness, Little Britain, Vanity Fair, youtube

Several times a week I walk by the marketing section of my office and see a group of grown men and women in their business-casual attire standing over someone’s computer screen giggling and cooing. Almost daily, I get an e-mail entitled, “SO CUTE I WANTZ TO DIE” or “AHHHHHHZZ! CUTEGASM!” along with a link for, say, a YouTube video of a sweet-faced pug so fat it can’t roll over, or a 4-year-old performing the Single Ladies dance. Most of these videos live up to the adorability claims of their “z”-infested titles. (Apparently bad grammar signifies something is SO cute it’s made one functionally retarded.) Though, admittedly, in order to enjoy the slew of children-dancing-to-Beyonce-videos I’ve been sent, I have to actively forget the gross reality that there are parents behind the camera who have trained their kids to be delightfully adorable circus monkeys for the Internet masses.

In the December issue of Vanity Fair, Jim Windolf tackles not only the science behind our mass addiction to Internet cutedom, but also what it could possibly mean, you know, for society and stuff. According to biologist Melanie Glocker, our brains are hardwired to react to cute in the same way they react to food or porn:

"It’s in the midbrain,” Glocker says, with a slight Teutonic accent, “which is an evolutionarily older part of the brain involved in reward processing. This region has also been shown to be activated by a variety of rewarding stimuli, including sexual stimuli, food stimuli, and drug stimuli."

This, of course, makes perfect sense—especially in addiction terms. After one cupcake, I want another cupcake. After one puppy video I want another sweet animal video, and over time my craving for an afternoon dose of cute grows to the extent where only explosively cute and rare clips like a Golden Retriever puppy spooning a handicapped cheetah will suffice. (P.S.: Will someone film that 4 me pleeeeeeeeeeeeeasez?)

But the most fascinating part of Windolf’s essay is the idea that maybe all this cute isn’t good for us. In essence, Windolf writes, cute is “soft and brain-deadening.” And to that extent, he argues the emergence of cute culture may have a political motive:

In a decade that has slapped us with a recession in the wake of 9/11 and an unending war waged in two theaters, Americans are producing a popular culture that seems to be saying, Please like us.

During the Bush years, the American image went from that of protector to invader, from defender of human rights to aggressor on the lookout for loopholes in the Geneva Conventions. It stands to reason that popular cuteness came about as some sort of correction, as a way for us to convince ourselves and our friends that we’re not as bad as our recent national actions have made us seem. Cuteness got its start as a cowardly form of resistance, a velvet rebellion led by smiley-face emoticons.

It’s an interesting theory, but I also wonder: Could the cute explosion be more a reaction to difficult times than a veiled plea for our national image? I agree that indulging in cute is, in a lot of ways, a brain-deadening exercise. So in the same way we crave a dopamine kick via DailyPuppy.com at 4 p.m. when the workday stress seems unbearable, perhaps we just want to see our First Family playing with their puppy when the recession seems never-ending?

Tags: addiction, cute animal videos, Jim Windolf, Vanity Fair, youtube

What have I learned over the past week watching polygamist Raymond Merril Jessop’s trial in the sleepy west Texas ranching town of Eldorado? Members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints save everything. And now, with the first criminal prosecution of an FLDS leader in Texas, this tendency to hoard every little scrap has come back to bite them. In trying to prove Jessop impregnated his 16-year-old “spiritual” wife in November 2004 at the sect’s Yearning for Zion Ranch, the prosecution is relying heavily on documents seized during last year’s raid. And there are a lot of them.

Rebecca Musser, who was married off at 19 to then-83-year-old FLDS prophet Rulon Jeffs, was the first former fundamentalist Mormon to take the stand, and spent several hours on Wednesday describing the church’s painstaking record-keeping practices. Musser fled the sect in November 2002, after Rulon died and his son Warren Jeffs tried to force her to marry him. Now in her mid-30s, Musser has shed her braided updo for highlighted locks, and lives in Idaho, where she has worked as a realtor and at a yoga studio. Musser, who testified against Warren Jeffs at his Utah trial, also helped Texas authorities in the aftermath of the raid.

Musser—also Jessop’s cousin—said that in each FLDS family, the father is tasked with recording all the significant events, including births, baptisms, marriages, and blessings. Those records are handed over to a bishop, who passes them on to the sect’s prophet. For FLDS believers, unless these important events are chronicled as they happen on earth and entered into a “Book of Remembrance,” they will not be credited for them in the afterlife, Musser said. “If it’s not recorded on earth, it would not be recorded in heaven,” she explained.

The Mormon fundamentalists’ hoarding problem extends beyond religious to the painfully mundane: Among the seized items was a prescription from 1988 that was written out when the victim was four days old.

As prophet, Warren Jeffs must record everything he says or does, Musser said, because he believes he is accountable to God for the counsel he gives people. A peek at Jeffs’ dictations reveals a micromanager who tailors his instructions to his followers down to the smallest detail, from specifying where a certain child should be taken to the doctor to which drapes should be used in the ranch’s temple. In Jessop’s case, the prosecution has focused on a dictation Jeffs gave in 2004 in which he says he told ranch leaders not to seek outside medical care for Jessop’s 16-year-old wife, who had been in difficult labor for three days. “I knew that the girl being 16 years old, if she went to the hospital, they could put Raymond Jessop in jeopardy of prosecution as the government is looking for any reason to come against us there,” Jeffs wrote.

The vault inside the YFZ Ranch’s gleaming limestone temple contained hundreds of boxes of these meticulously detailed records and dictations at the time of the raid. During the raid, Texas Rangers drilled through a reinforced concrete wall and breached the vault, seizing everything inside.

Since the victim in this case has been uncooperative, the fruits of the raid—including DNA evidence, Warren Jeffs’ dictations, and other records—have formed the basis of the state’s case. Without this extraordinary amount of paper, prosecutors may never have known that Jessop married six of his nine wives at the YFZ Ranch. Also using this evidence, Child Protective Services was able to conclude that one out of every four girls ages 12 to 17 on the compound was involved in an underage marriage. The Nazis, who eventually amassed 50 million pages detailing their crimes, were also thorough record keepers.

We still don’t know how Raymond’s trial will shake out, and how that outcome will influence the cases of the 11 other FLDS members slated to be tried in Texas over the next two years. But in the aftermath of the raid, I can’t help but wonder if church policies regarding recordkeeping are being tweaked. If you’re going to make a habit of breaking the law, you might do yourself a favor and not write it all down.

Tags: Mormon sect, polygamy, raymond jessop, raymond jessop's trial