From Essays After Montaigne
As if our sense of feeling were infected, wee corrupt by our touching, things that in themselves are faire and good. We may so seize on vertue, that if we embrace it with an over greedy and violent desire, it may become vitious. Those who say, 'There is never excesse in vertue, because it is no longer vertue if any excesse be in it,' doe but jest at words.
Philosophy is a subtile consideration. A man may love vertue too much, and excessively demeane himselfe in a good action. Gods holy worde doth apply it selfe to this byase: Be not wiser than you should, and be soberly wise... The Archer that overshoots his marke, doth no otherwise than he that shooteth short. Mine eies trouble me as much in climbing up toward a great light, as to goe downe into the darke.
Was Mister Rogers too good? Every account that I've seen of him, his life, and his work suggests that he was exactly as he appeared in his show--there isn't the faintest hint of hypocrisy, pedantism, or cynicism about him or his legacy. There's no doubt that he was good, but was he too good? I intend that question aesthetically and practically, not morally.
As a child, I found Mister Rogers' Neighborhood surreally empty, even vaguely upsetting. Amid the lively and challenging spectacle of Zoom, The Electric Company, Captain Kangaroo, Villa Allegre, and Sesame Street, it seemed utterly foreign. The tumult of the rapid switching among short episodes and of the ongoing conflicts in those other shows (Bunny Rabbit and the ping pong balls, Oscar and his attitude, the sagas of Easy Reader, Letterman, and Spidey) better reflected my experience. A single peaceful, decent man telling me without irony that I was special and that he wanted to be my friend was too unrealistic for me to trust. I couldn't imagine that there was a way from the tattered babysitter's living room in which I watched him to that man and his neighborhood--it seemed to be just a figment of television, like Land of the Lost or The Six Million Dollar Man. And this was long before I understood the notions of uncool and creepy that I would later associate with Mister Rogers.
Now that I understand what I needed and wanted as a child, I recognize the sad irony that the one man who was authentic and safe appeared to me as false and threatening; that I wasn't able to listen to the one person to whom I had access who offered what I needed: support, reassurance, and calm. In all of the richly deserved plaudits I've heard about Mister Rogers since his passing, I haven't heard my experience. Is it that people who feel this way are too embarrassed to speak up, or am I that unusual?
I don't think I'm unusual. I believe that many children (perhaps most children) grow up in chaotic and unstable environments in which Mister Rogers' Neighborhood seems strange and irrelevant. He especially sought to reach those children, and he believed he succeeded, but I believe it may have been beyond even him. Of course, this is the world's failing, not his. Yet perhaps if he had let just a little bit more of the unpleasantness of reality into his neighborhood, maybe then we could have seen that what he offered us could exist in our world, that we could accept it and use it. I also find it notable that despite the universal recognition and praise he has received, there are no proteges of Mister Rogers, real or figurative, coming forward to fill the void he has left. I haven't seen anyone in television adopt his guileless, uncomplicated approach to children and their needs.
7:50:06 AM 
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