The Barney Retrospective

Why in this world where uncertainty looms over all of us like a dark spector, was there ever created (even though dated) the likes of one Barney - aka "The Purple Dinosaur Sensation"?
Somewhere in the time since my daughter's birth, was given to my wife and I a recording of Barney. The recording of this once very popular children's program deals specifically with Mother Goose rhymes.
It's cute! Garsh darn it all, but it is!
I have watched this program several times, and never alone mind you. My daughter, at first, was as mindless of the program as I was turned off by it, and now she is becoming more aware, as I am becoming mindless of the multitudes of obnoxious candy-colored scenes and backgrounds - not to mention Barney's own much heralded optimism.
"Super-diiiiii-duper!!!"
I remember being younger and thinking to myself that a person would simply have to be nuts or high to watch this bilk. Indeed, I was part of a more subtle, less controversial Mister Roger's Neighborhood and I placed a great deal of stock in the "Electric Company", which starred the very young Morgan Freeman, Bill Cosby, and the timeless Rita Moreno.
I am indeed dating myself.
But Barney, the purple dinosaur...
Why this program is built on this non-sensical, over-stimulated, super-compliant, cult-like exuberance! It's nuts - I tells ya - nuts! If Barney tells your kids to drink the Kool-Aid, why he's so nuts about it himself that they all just might do it.
When Barney asks for help, the kids on the program jump with hypnotized smiles at the chance.
Weird.
And then there are the colors. In Japan, when Pokemon was sweeping the nation, there was a national complaint that the multitude and the frequencies between electric colors were so energized that they were sending kids into convulsions and fits on their living room tatami mats. Flashes of bright reds and blues can put a lil' Japanese kid down faster than an elementary school bully. Barney uses these color schemes to make the kids more irritatingly optimistic - welcoming.
I recently bemoaned to my wife about how "joy" escapes me. She and my daughter both know how to make me smile, and I get aggravated when that pain in arse - reality, steps in and wriggles its ugly truth, but that Barney... that purple T-Rex, with his never-ending supply of love for the kids and creative optimism is starting to get my daughter's attention. She watches with her eyes half glued on him and then back on me watching her.
It is like some left-wing conspiracy where everything is rosy and pleasant, where the funds are never-ending and the land has become that of milk and honey.
What's wrong with that?
Under a set of Christian values, Barney is sort of the pinnacle of the way a human is supposed to be - minus the girth and purple skin of course. He is optimistic, joyful, unconditionally loving, educational...
It has always been said that it is hard to smile and harder to make someone else do it, but that it brightens the day of the person recieving it... who in turn gives it away. And maybe that's what Barney is all about.
Barney was perhaps created because these days when the norm is confrontation and anger, deception, perversity and greed - going the opposing direction is the new epitome of cool.
As for me, I have always tried to be like Marlon Brando or the Fonz - hair and all, but maybe, for the sake of my daughter, I should get myself a pair of bright purple pajamas and sing her some happy songs on my "guit-box".