Killing Smurfs for a better world

SMURFS ARE those darling little blue elves from the 1980s animated children’s series of the same name. The epitome of kitsch, Smurfs have remained popular for more than two decades. There are Smurf figurines, greeting cards, Pez dispensers, mugs, books and dolls.

Now, however, there are Smurf corpses as well. The United Nations Children’s Fund plans to air a new Smurf video clip aimed at adults in Europe, Latin America and Australia as part of a campaign to raise funds for war-affected children in Burundi, Congo and Sudan.

It starts off with the familiar: happy Smurf families singing and dancing amid their cute, mushroom-shaped homes. But suddenly bombs darken the sky, and Smurf huts burst into flames. In the final scene, a surviving baby Smurf sits weeping, surrounded by charred huts and the corpses of dead Smurfs.

In an era in which representation often trumps reality, UNICEF hopes the image of war-orphaned Smurfs will be more effective in shocking people into opening their wallets than footage of real war-affected children.

“We see so many images that we don’t really react anymore,” explained Julie Lamoureux of Publicis, the ad agency that created the spot for UNICEF. “We wanted to show adults how awful war is by reaching them within their memories of childhood.”

I’m sympathetic. In 1997, I wrote a report for Human Rights Watch on child soldiers in northern Uganda, most of whom had been forced into combat by rebels. We interviewed children who had seen their parents slaughtered and who had been coerced into participating in the brutal slayings of other children. Our report generated all the media attention a human rights advocate could wish for, but somehow none of it made much difference. Public interest faded, though Uganda’s civil war continues.

This story is hardly unique. In conflicts from Burundi and Sierra Leone to Gaza, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Iraq, children continue to be recruited as soldiers. Among civilians, children are maimed and killed when they step on landmines or pick up stray cluster bomblets, and they’re often the first to succumb to the hunger and disease that accompanies war.

But it’s excruciatingly difficult to get people to stop and think about any of these tragedies, much less take out their checkbooks or call their elected representatives.

So I understand why UNICEF deliberately set out to shock with its Smurf video. Spend a lot of time around children in war zones, as UNICEF staff do, and you lose interest in good taste and the protection of delicate First World sensibilities. You start wanting to pick people up and shake them until they open their eyes.

BUT I’M NOT optimistic about UNICEF’s new campaign making a difference in the plight of children caught up in wars. The terrible irony is that, for the most part, it has generated very little commentary on children and armed conflict.

The video is making waves, but most of the controversy has been over the appropriateness of what was quickly dubbed “Smurf snuff.”

At CNN, for instance, Daryn Kagan wondered on “Live Today” if UNICEF was “going too far.” On “Newsnight,” Anderson Cooper remarked: “Sure, it’s for a good cause.... Seems like a brutal message, though.”

Viewers watch scenes of natural disaster and war on television every day with little distress, and youth-oriented cartoons and video games are full of violence. So what’s all the fuss about using scenes of bombed Smurf villages to raise funds for real children who are victims of war? Why do assaults in the world of kitsch matter more than real-world horrors?

Czech novelist Milan Kundera would have no trouble explaining the Smurf snuff controversy. In “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” he memorably defined “kitsch” as an aesthetic ideal premised on “the absolute denial” of excrement. In the world of kitsch, wrote Kundera, “answers are given in advance and preclude any questions.” Thus, “everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished ... every display of individualism ... every doubt ... all irony.”

To Kundera, there’s nothing “innocent” about kitsch: As an aesthetic form, it’s lethally effective at blinding us to suffering and moral choice. In a world full of ambiguity and pain, people take refuge in the shallow sentimentality of Hallmark cards and adorable blue elves.

So if images of dead Smurfs offend us, it’s not because they evoke images of dead humans or shock us out of any genuine innocence. It’s because they force us to confront our own hypocrisy, our willful preference for the saccharine world of kitsch over the terrifying world of genuine human feeling.

Really want to inhabit a better world? Kill off the kitsch.

And yes, it’s fine with me if we start with the Smurfs.