Friday, Dec. 21, while enjoying a brief unencumbered morning in bed, I triggered the TV and up came my trusted Channel 8 and the PBS Kids program. Something about the characters, sound and conversation caught my attention so I decided to watch for a while to see what pre-school and kindergarten children might be learning this morning.

Admittedly, the chatter and tone of the conversation was somewhat difficult for my senior ears to follow, but it seems the sun was being dangerously blocked out by a flying pig that was careening toward earth. The solution for the problem was to gather a variety of miscellaneous parts from various Washington Monuments to build a shaky but suitable new monument with which to catch and properly display the pig at the very top!

I am far from an expert in subliminal communication, but it seems to me there might be messages buried in there about the foolishness of our monuments and glamorizing “pigs” in Washington. What was clear is that the one sensible, tall, conservatively dressed adult in the cartoon was the female president, as opposed to the short, bald, babbling male vice president.

There was an attempt to teach a minor lesson in subtraction and to introduce the word “obelisk” to the children’s vocabulary, but it seems a little unnecessary (inappropriate?) to be broadcasting such an agenda to 4- and 5-year-olds at 6 a.m. Just sayin’.