Do your shoes control you?

Sometimes it's tempting to turn this blog into a series of commentaries on Pocoyo (don't worry, I won't really do it, but the Spanish cartoon does open so many amazing ideas in little kids' heads...).  Here's one I found particularly interesting:

Like many other things we buy, Pato's shoes seem at first to be magical: they allow him to do things he never could before, they give him and intense kind of joy... and they make him better than his friends.  It's what we want from our athletic shoes, isn't it?

Pato soon finds, though, that the magic in his shoes isn't completely under his control.  In fact, they soon control him much more than he controls them.  Though the metaphor is childish and drawn in primary colors, it is also quite honest: Rita and I were just in Los Angeles, for instance, and found the bus and metro to be much better than anyone thought, and we were amazed at the friendly atmosphere in public transit.  In contrast, most people drove their cars alone, with a grimace on their faces, and then had to pay $10-25 a day to park.  Might these cars be like Pato's shoes?  After all of the financial and emotional investment we put into them, we simply can't take the bus.  The car, to some degree, comes to control us.

Marx says this about the products we consume, words that seem even more interesting today than in the 1950s when he wrote:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Pocoyo shows some of these theological niceties, more exactly how the shoes come to function as a magical power outside of ourself, not too different from a charm in animist religion.  But in general, Pocoyo is quite a bit more fun than Karl Marx... and it has better colors.