Learning from the LEGO Movie. “Everything is awesome Everything is cool when you’re part of a team. Everything is awesome, when we’re living our dream.”** I woke to discover the Lego Movie theme song had hijacked the normally blank spaces of my morning mind. Horrors. As pernicious as “It’s a Small World,” I cannot silence it, no matter how fiercely I reject the premise. Everything is decidedly NOT awesome right now. The jarring discord between that cheery refrain and the stark reality of this post-democratic dystopia pains me like cat claws on a chalkboard. If you’re blissfully free of this not-so-awesome earworm, I urge you not to Google it. I do take comfort in knowing that creator Andy Samberg actually apologized for its creation: “Yes, I do apologize for that. Especially to everyone out there with kids. That’s a hard row to hoe. But we didn’t write the hook, you know? We inherited it, and we just added some dumb raps.”*** I haven’t seen the LEGO Movie in exactly eleven eons–doesn’t 2014 sound that long ago now? So why, in these times of exalting the worst and jailing the rest of us, why is this saccharin song now my unwelcome […]