This Used to be my Playground

As children run around before the bell at McGaugh Elementary School in Seal Beach, all the interesting confusion is about the constitutional limits of Pokemon speech. Judy Smith, the principal--who wears a straight green dress, a high-achieving smile and a bob haircut parted at the side--explains that she isn’t out to ban all Pokemon-related conversation, just playacting, fire-breathing Pokemon conversation, as in, Charizard--rrroarrrrrr!

“Now, if two kids are talking, am I going to intervene? No,” she tells a parent in the doorway of the school office. “But if they’re role-playing and gesturing all over the place, we’re going to move in on it. We’ve had children hurt before by pretend karate chops. An arm flung out from the body, for example, could accidentally catch another child running by.” She demonstrates, flinging a long arm out in the manner of a clothesline tackle. And accidentally catches a child running by . . . no, not really.

Smith unveiled her crackdown last spring during a tour of classrooms. Pokemon sounded groovy back then, like berry-colored surf wear. That was before images of 7-year-old card sharks, coupled with that old news item about Japanese children suffering strobe-light-induced seizures, helped push educators into product-safety mode.

Not that the children clearly understand Smith’s policy (“She said we’re not allowed to talk about Pokemon, period,” insists Brendan Strohmeier-Parmer, a sixth-grader). But it is instructive to see how a grade-school principal can still throw a good-sized shadow across a playground.

Nathan Rifkin, an animated first-grader, obsessively notifies children that their Pokemon T-shirts are “permitted,” mistaking the word for its opposite. (“Pokemon is violent,” he admits later, “because of Poison, Sleep, Confusion, Burns and Paralyzing. But I think you should be able to play it at school, because you could pretend to be Charmander and throw fire balls, and your friend--if he’s on the grass, not if he’s on hard ground--could pretend to faint and fall down.”)

Some students appear to have missed the safety-first premise completely, figuring that they’d used up the First Amendment just by overdoing it, like passengers who sing on long road trips. “You still talk Pokemon in secret, don’t you?” Sherrie Knighton asks her fourth-grade son, Adam, and he answers, “You mean--we can?”

Hovering at the edges in ball caps and surf-themed T-shirts, most parents sound willing to take relief from Pokemania however it is offered. “I’ve got no problem with outlawing speech--I’m a teacher!” Knighton laughs. A father whines: “What are 6-year-olds supposed to talk about?” to which a mother replies: “I’ve heard 6-year-olds talk about positive things. I’ve heard 6-year-olds talk about the environment.”

Just a generation ago, playing war games at school recess had been all but encouraged. “Of course, that was before Columbine, all that craziness,” says first-grade father Rusty Wood.

Still, there had never been any craziness around Seal Beach, right?

Wood shakes a statesmanlike fist. “That’s because we’ve outlawed Pokemon!”