Learning Day: Melanie's Marvelous Measles (Patreon)

Joy is hidden all around us. In a subtle glance from a beautiful stranger. In measles.

Melanie's Marvelous Measles is so much more what it sounds like than you think. It's a 2012 book about a girl named Melanie who has the measles and she loves them. Everyone wants those measles. It is set in our world and it is not satire or allegory. That's Melanie on the cover (diseased), praising her creator for her pox-covered tummy (shown).

Melanie's Marvelous Measles was published only 11 centuries after we learned measles was bad by Stephanie Messenger. This is a small point, but that's not her real name. Writing a pro-measles book and changing your name from "Bailey" to "Messenger" is needlessly sinister. It's like writing 2 + 4: Seven Fun Drano Recipes for Kids by Safety Mathmaster. Or maybe it's like writing How To Not Destroy Pizza by The Noid. It's frustrating to me in a way I'm not explaining well. I can explain Stephanie well, though. She looks like a dance teacher whose top Yelp review is "she attached the top half of my daughter to the bottom half of a missing ice skater to fix a tap competition. didn't even win, the top of the skater is still unaccounted for. two stars"

To round out the Melanie's Marvelous Measles team, the book's illustrator is a Dutch artist who honed his skill by accidentally clicking on something that said CARTOON-ify yourself for FREE in 2011. This next part won't be fun, but Stephanie reveals her tragic origin story on the dedications page.

It's very sad, but Stephanie's son died and she blamed it on vaccines. Everyone grieves in their own way, and this woman decided to get revenge on vaccines through any means or treachery. Obviously she's wrong, but it's the kind of righteous, foundational wrongness none of us will ever fix. You can't resolve a showdown with Cobra Commander by showing him a chart, and Stephanie "Messenger" is absolutely the Cobra Commander of children's literature. This book is an easily thwarted terror plot to infect the world with measles and nothing else.

Another dumb thing about Stephanie is she thinks you can cure anything with fruit and sunshine. Maybe she's right, I'm not a nutritionist. Maybe all medicine has been fake for 3000 years. All I know is you can't do a penis reduction surgery with a pineapple. Or could you? Hold on a second.

You totally can. It hurts, but not as much as that bill for 480 pesos does, am I right? Where was I? Oh fuck, right, that book where the Australian lady wants to give kids measles. God damn it.

The text is tiny, centered, and not punctuated properly, almost as if an idiot tried to write a children's book. And while Stephanie's mission may be urgently insane, her writing is in no rush to get anywhere. She writes like she's giving a second grade book report on her own book. Tina gets to school, can't see Melanie, and we get a lot of seating chart details. None of this will ever be relevant. Stephanie just seems to like describing where children would have been sitting, were they to have been there. If Melanie's Marvelous Measles gets adapted into a Netflix show, a depressingly not impossible idea, it will be episode 3 before we finish the first establishing shot.

Let's skip past the chair stuff and get to attendance. It's a classroom of six children, so this only takes three pages. The missing girl, Melanie, doesn't answer when her name is called, and only then does the teacher remember her measles. "Oh, of course, the highly infectious, potentially fatal disease in our community I was told about a few minutes ago," says the good teacher, Mrs. Spencer. It'd be like saying, "Melanie? Where's Melanie? Ha, I forgot about the snake still dragging her away. Everyone, let's all hope for fewer snakes around Melanie's neck, because the liberals won't let us pray at snakes."

Two children, Jared and Travis, have an argument about whether or not vaccines are good. Jared argues on the side of vaccines because they prevent deadly diseases. Travis says that's a lie because he hasn't had any vaccines and he has never died. The author, a stupid fucking psychopath, declares this a victory for Travis.

And don't worry, readers, that smug little bastard Jared will get his later.

Tina's brother, Sam, got so sick from his MMRV shot they had to put him in a SAM shirt so they could identify his remains after he was melted by vaccines. So Tina never got vaccinated because her parents wanted to "play it safe."

There are a lot of persuasive arguments people have made against this insane talking point, and I'm about to try another one, so feel free to skip ahead a few sentences if you already know vaccines are fine. For every 1000 cases of the measles, 1 to 3 people die. According to the National Safety Council statistics, that's the same as riding 6371 miles on a motorcycle. People do that all the time without dying, but when it happens, your obituary isn't going to include the word "unexpectedly." The point is, I'm wasting my time. I'm gesturing at the lack of sorcery all around us to reason with someone who has already lit a witch on fire.

The author and "illustrator" are weirdly deliberate about how Tina's after school snack is an apple and a glass of water. This is the act of a monster. This is what you give your kid when you want them to grow up to murder children out of an ice cream truck. If my kid failed cursive because she tried to buy cocaine from an undercover cop I'd hand her a bag of Teddy Grahams and a Coors Light and say, "I'm disappointed, but not 'glass of water and an apple' disappointed." An apple and a glass of water is something I offer to a play date when I'm too cowardly to call my daughter's friends little pieces of shit. And I'm not. I'll say that right to Janessa's face while I'm tossing her a full size candy bar.

Tina goes to a rural school with a 50% vaccination rate and is being raised by a conspiracy theorist, so she sincerely thinks diseases chase after you like Pac-Man ghosts. There are a lot of down sides to it, but being stupid sometimes rules.

Tina's mother, the most any character has ever been an author-insert, explains that measles is fine. At first, she tries to simply downplay the symptoms. Instead of "a six day rash" you get a couple spots! Instead of "pneumonia" you "can feel very hot for a day or so." And then she gets bold. Stephanie Messenger decides, fuck it, this is for kids. And like me, kids have no idea when motivated liars are trying to trick them. So she stops spinning things and straight-up says, "For most children it is a good thing to get measles." It's one of the most irresponsible things I've seen anyone say to children and I'm American. My president once spent five minutes telling the Boy Scouts of America about his buddy's sex boat.

Tina's mom keeps going. She says, "Many wise people believe measles make the body stronger and more mature for the future." And yeah, uncited "wise people" who wildly disagree with the medical consensus are a bad source, but Tina just learned diseases aren't ghosts two sentences ago. You can't expect her to ask, "Are these the same 'many wise people' who run your supplement MLM, mother?" Instead she says this:

I feel like even the most brain-wormed Facebook mom would snap back to reality if they were making dipshit anti-vax arguments and their child said, "You talked me into it! Measles sounds like the plan for me!" Either that kid is making fun of you, or this has gone too far and gotten too real.

Again, look at it. "That sounds good to me." she says. About the fucking measles!

But it does nothing to slow down Tina's mother. In fact, talking her daughter into wanting measles has only raised her confidence.

"As usual her mother had the answer" is such an amazing thing for an author to write about her self-insert character. "The genius mom, her mind thick with her own research and whose local teens were wrong about not pulling off her purple leather jacket, effortlessly persuaded her daughter to get sick. She winced at her violently tight pants. Tina's mother was still a perfect size 12, though every year pants manufacturers use less and less material in an effort to swindle consumers. And before you ask, no, pants are not ghosts. Usually."

Tina's mother talks about when she was a kid and parents would use a case of measles as a fun way to infect all the children. Which means she's either mixing it up with the chicken pox or this first grader's mother is at least in her late 50s. That seems unusually old. I'm starting to think some of the details in this anti-vaccination propaganda for children might be wrong. It gets worse, by the way. Despite everything you've already read, you might not believe this next page:

Tina is so convinced by her mother's half-remembered lies, she wants to go get measles right this very second. And the naturopath Skeletor writing this book thinks, "That sounds like a great idea," then types those very same words. She is finally so anti-vaccination she has become pro-measles. There's no other way to put it. If measles wrote this book it could not be more pro-measles. Nobody should be able to get this crazy. If a grasshopper typed this the other bugs in its community would know a fungus had germinated into its brain.

Tina's mother calls Melanie's mother to ask if they can come over to catch the awesome disease measles. She also equips an anti-measles melon because some part of her still knows deadly diseases are bad.

This entire universe is being imagined by a woman who boiled her sanity away in forbidden subreddits, so add Melanie to the list of characters super excited about the measles. "Look at my sickness, behold my foul spots!" she shrieks at Tina. "I love them, diseases kick ass!" Tina shrieks back. "And they are so pleasant, no harm has come to me at all!" replies Melanie. And that's probably enough for even the slowest of readers. If after all this you can't tell the author has lost her mind, you deserve to die of those measles she talked you into.

We find out here that Melanie was vaccinated! So the author is saying that in addition to killing you, they don't work! Tina's mom hands her a cantaloupe and tells her vaccinations are a lie and the cure for measles is red. "I'm not kicking you the fuck out of my house," replies Tina's mom, surprisingly.

You can tell Stephanie Messenger is a good mother because she has no idea how children play or talk and she hopes they all get measles. And you can tell she's a good listener because she missed it when every person she's ever spoken to said, "That doesn't sound right." Melanie's Marvelous Measles is something a clown would use to patch a circus tent if he was out of human skin.

Melanie returns to school about 16 days fewer than the recommended measles quarantine period in an act most people would call biological warfare. Unfortunately, Tina was unable to catch the disease. Her mom thinks it's because Tina eats so much raw food, but she is deranged on a cosmic level and it's equally plausible they were at the wrong child's house or this was all a cantaloupe hallucination. But it was not all for nothing. Remember Jared? That vaccinated son of a bitch who thought he was so smart?

Ha ha he got the measles. But his case of the measles isn't good for him because, as never mentioned in the book until now, Jared eats unhealthy snacks. I think Stephanie Messenger was trying to end the story with a dramatic reversal, but missed so hard she accidentally came out against measles. She made Jared an advocate for vaccines and had him pay for his hubris by… killing him with a disease nearly eradicated by vaccines? Or maybe he's a metaphor… the last voice of reason in Stephanie's head fading away while his snacks, every last one of his delicious snacks, watches. I don't know why I'm trying to figure it out. This is aggressively not art. This is someone too stupid for the modern world but too beardless to blend in with the apes.

But Stephanie does know better than to end her book on a rashy child corpse and a bag of cheezish-brand cheese lugnuts. There's one last page, and it's a message of hope.

I promise this is a solvable riddle: Without scrolling down, can you guess what that message of hope is?

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You were right! It's that some day we can all get the measles!

Yay! Hooray!

Warning: this information is for information purposes only. Consult your guava dealer before trying red.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Patrick Herbst, who has a new book coming out next week, "Swallowing Radium Is Good For Your Bones! A Kids Guide To Radionuclides."

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