QUOTE : Attend to Pooh without sentimentality and ask yourself what positive social traits he can plausibly be taken to represent. He is a freeloader whose affability extends no further than his next honey fix. Deconstructed, he is just a mouth and a digestive tract in charge of some rudimentary powers of rationalization. And when he is confronted with a different genus (the apian) pursuing its own programmed livelihood, he shows himself utterly incapable of acknowledging the Other. “The only reason for making honey,” he deduces with infantile self-in-fat-uation, “is so as I can eat it.” Community values? One for all and all for one? Furthermore, Pooh’s selfishness is no greater than that of the whole kapok menagerie surrounding him. It is only his inability to disguise or dignify raw need that renders him the touchstone of value-in-reverse. While the hidebound “Milne” is musing complacently about rectitude and cooperation, his principal creation embodies a brute-all Brechtian forthrightness about the priority of aliment over intellect—and therefore of his majesty the ego over moral claims. Every gregarious sentiment in these books stands self-refuted in the very act of articulation.