via law professor Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy, I found this delightful little blog post comparing English Bears and American Bears.
Bear with me as I take a bearly deserved break from serious blogging.
On the English side, we have one of my favorites, Winnie-the-Pooh.
Pooh is first presented as highly imaginative, if somewhat absent-minded. In the first story he tries to fool a hive of bees by disguising himself as a small black cloud in the sky. But he is worried that he still looks like a bear covered in mud and holding a blue balloon, so he asks Christopher Robin to help by holding an umbrella. "Well, you laughed to yourself, 'Silly old Bear!'" says the narrator, addressing Christopher Robin, "but you didn't say it aloud because you were so fond of him."
Soon, however, Christopher Robin loses any reservations about calling Pooh a silly old bear. Sadly, Pooh internalizes the characterization. Their eventual dynamic is summarized when Christopher Robin is dragging him down the stairs by one paw …
hmmm. I can bearly bear to think of pooh bear being abused. Silly old bear.
On the other hand, are American Bears really more more assertive and autonomous than English bears? Or just more brazen? Here’s one of my favorite American bears:
Also (overly?) self-confident is the muppet Fozzie Bear, who is pursuing a career as a stand-up comedian, despite the fact that people often throw rotten tomatoes at him.
Fozzie gets by with the bear minimun of talent,
I think I agree with Ilya Somin, who says: “The definitive study of Anglo-American literary bears remains to be written, even as its absence gets ever more unbearable.”
And here’s a little music to make your day more bearable:
