Good call MJ

Its fine to have people who are rebels in art - without them it wouldn't be art. But a childrens author who readily admits "I am of the Devil's party, and I know it" is perhaps not the best person to be influencing young people with sponge like minds.

CS Lewis did not use his intelligence to impose his own values or beliefs on children as Pullman does (in a way obvious to adults), but rather used analogy to tell a story. And yet Pullman says;

Quote

'I hate the Narnia books, and I hate them with deep and bitter passion, with their view of childhood as a golden age from which sexuality and adulthood are a falling away... I was looking at old copies of Punch , when it was infused by A. A. Milne's influence - all those beautifully drawn pictures of cutie little children that would never grow up, being sweetie little things to their mummies and daddies.'

He is bitter and twisted - the wonder of childhood is that there can be wonder - even for the most damaged children. My experience, if I have to generalise, has been that the ones that did everything their "mummies and daddies" asked when they were children, and were "sweetie little things" - are the ones that have turned out like Pullman. He twists Milton to suit his agenda but has not understood one sentance of Paradise Lost. I wonder (well not reallly) what Milton would have thought of his pied piper routine. We can't here get into the details of why an element in the US mixes politics and religion and science, and all kinds of things, so much that most people in the world rekon their opinion on everything must be wrong. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong about everything!

He basically teaches and espouses post-modernist philosophy to children - using some undefined idea he has in his mind about the value of 'love' or 'being alive' as his cloak. He is a sham magician. Children deserve better.