可愛的小傢伙們
Fred Rogers：演員、製作人、編劇，主要作品《101 Most Unforgettable SNL Moments》、《Bruce Haack: The King of Techno》、《鬼馬小精靈》。
The Loveliness Of the Little Good
作者 David Brooks | 編者 Hugo TANG
New York Times words: 845
Often people aremoved to tears bysadness, but occasionally people aremoved to tears bygoodness. That』s what happens to the audiences of 「Won』t You Be My Neighbor?」 the new documentary about Fred Rogers.
大多人們為傷心動容，但也有喜極而泣的時候。比如當人們看到關於Fred Rogers 的紀錄片的時候
be moved to tears 的表達
The documentary demonstrates how Rogers』s children』s show got started and how he used it over 30 years to teach and accompany children. It describes the famous opening sequence — Mister Rogers going to the closet, putting on the sweater, changing his shoes. It describes how he gently gave children obvious and nonobvious advice: You are special just the way you are; no, children can』t fall down the drains in the bathtub.
這個紀錄片大致描述了Rogers 的職業生涯。
Sometimes he would slow down time, be silent for long periods as he fed his fish. Occasionally 「Mister Rogers』 Neighborhood」 touched politics. During the civil rights era, when black kids were being thrown out of swimming pools, Rogers and a black character bathed their feet together in a tub. After Bobby Kennedy was killed, Rogers gently explained what an assassination was.
有時候片子里會是很長時間的留白，畫面切到Rogers 餵魚的場景
There』s nothing obviously moving here, and yet the audience is moved: sniffling, wiping the moisture from their cheeks. The power is in Rogers』s radical kindness at a time when public kindness is scarce. It』s as if the pressure of living in a time such as ours gets released in that theater as we』re reminded that, oh yes, that』s how people can be.
沒有什麼特別大悲大喜的內容，但是觀眾的情緒確是被調動了起來。彷彿生活的壓力都釋懷了，觀眾看到了人最本真的東西
Moral elevation gains strength when it is scarce.
當道德感變得那麼稀有的時候，就會顯得彌足珍貴。
But there』s also something more radical going on. Mister Rogers was a lifelong Republican and an ordained Presbyterian minister. His show was an expression of the mainline Protestantism that was once the dominating morality in American life.
但作為共和黨，Rogers 也有激進的一面。
Once, as Tom Junod described in a profile for Esquire, Rogers met a 14-year-old boy whose cerebral palsy left him sometimes unable to walk or talk. Rogers asked the boy to pray for him.
Rogers 又一次讓一個腦癱的14歲男孩為其祈禱。
The boy was thunderstruck. He had been the object of prayers many times, but nobody had asked him to pray for another. He said he would try since Mister Rogers must be close to God and if Mister Rogers liked him he must be O.K.
男孩很吃驚，多有人為其祈禱，鮮有讓他去祈禱的
Junod complimented Rogers on cleverly boosting the boy』s self-esteem, but Rogers didn』t look at the situation that way at all: 「Oh, heavens no, Tom! I didn』t ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted hisintercession.」
有人誇Rogers 的這個舉動是對男孩的尊重。但是Rogers 自己不那麼覺得。他解釋自己覺得男孩這種遭遇的人一定離上帝特別近，希望男孩替自己在上帝面前美言幾句。
intercession n. 說情
And here is the radicalism that infused that show: that the child is closer to God than the adult; that the sick are closer than the healthy; that the poor are closer than the rich and the marginalized closer than the celebrated.
以下就是Rogers 的觀點裡激進的部分了： 孩子比成年人接近上帝；生病的比健康的接近上帝；窮人比富人接近上帝。
Rogers often comforted children on the show and taught them in simple terms, but the documentary shows how he did so with a profound respect for the dignity of each child that almost rises to veneration. You see his visceral disgust for shows that don』t show respect — that dump slime on children, that try to entertain them withmanicviolence.
Rogers 因此很尊重孩子，他反感那些不用心對孩子的作品。
manic：暴躁的
In the gospel of Fred Rogers, children are our superiors in the way they trust each person they meet, the way they lack guile, the way a child can admit simple vulnerability.
在Rogers 看來，孩子是最美好的存在，他們相信彼此。
At one point in the series, the tiger puppet who stood in for Rogers』s inner child sang, 「Sometimes I wonder if I』m a mistake,」 meaning, I am so different, am I a mistake? An adult character sang along and tried to reassure him that he was not a mistake, but he was not reassured. As Alice Lloyd reminds us in The Weekly Standard, 「deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex」 was a favorite maxim of Rogers.
Children are superior for their instinctive small acts of neighborliness, the small hug, sharing a toy. In 1997 a teenage boy in Kentucky warned classmates that 「something big」 was going to happen. The next day he took a gun to school and shot eight classmates, killing three. Mister Rogers』s response was, 「Oh, wouldn』t the world be a different place if he had said, 『I』m going to do something really little tomorrow.」 Rogers dedicated a week』s worth of shows to the theme of 「Little and Big」 on how little things can be done with great care.
孩子是最美好的存在，因為他們待人有禮。
Rogers was drawing on a long moral tradition, that the last shall be first. It wasn』t just Donald Trump who reversed that morality, though he does represent a cartoonish version of the idea that winners are better than losers, the successful are better than the weak. That morality got reversed long before Trump came on the scene, by an achievement-oriented success culture, by a culture that swung too far from humble and earnest caritas.
Rogers 踐行著一個長久以來的傳統，失敗也是勝利。當然這個傳統的顛覆不僅僅是因為trump， 而是我們整個文化對於成功的篤信，讓我們有了成功壓倒一切的想法
Rogers was singing from a song sheet now lost, a song sheet that once joined conservative evangelicals and secular progressives. The song sheet may be stacked somewhere in a drawer in the national attic, ready for reuse once again.
雖然Rogers 所倡導的已經遠去，但是是時候重新撿起來了。
TAG:5amClub |