Mr Cranky has a few things to get off his chest in re the Spongebob incident.

Maybe it's all meaningless, but it seems as if some sort of boundary (or one of a series of such) has been crossed when idealogues start to worry in public about a cartoon character. It happens from time to time. There was an alarmist book published in the 1950's about comic books, written by Frederic Wertham and entitled Seduction of the Innocent (1954). Of course, some of what he wrote was true: there were some fairly depraved comic books out there. But in general he missed the big picture, and completely misunderstood the phenomenon. The same is probably true of people who keep pointing to Pee Wee Herman or Spongebob as signs of the final destruction of western civilization. They probably haven't actually watched the shows. If they had, they would realize that Pee Wee Herman and Spongebob represent the finest flowering of our culture.