"I don't lite Lightning Mateen. I lite Chit Hit. Chit Hit ish tool. He bash and trash all the tars out of the race. That's tool."

Deciphering a three-year-old can be an arduous task. It is easier than deciphering a two-year-old, but not by much. With a two-year-old you've got, at most, a thousand words that might be burbling through the marbles. The average three-year-old's vocabulary is much larger. All bets are off.

This is what Sam was saying: "I don't like Lightning McQueen. I Like Chick Hicks. Chick Hicks is cool. He bash and crash all the cars out of the race. That's cool."

Understanding all the words doesn't help if you don't have the cultural literacy of a three-year-old. Or, in this specific instance, a the cultural literacy of a three-year-old boy in the year 2008.

It's possible that somewhere in the world, perhaps in one of those tribes in the Amazonian rain forest that have yet to be discovered, that there is a three-year-old boy who is unfamiliar with the tale of Lightning McQueen and Chick Hick and Mater and the Hudson Hornet in the movie Cars. My guess is, though, that those "hidden" tribes have DirecTV dishes and even those three-year-old boys are smitten, too.

Lightning McQueen is the good guy, a brash rookie who falls off the map for a week, learns the value of friendship, teamwork and self-sacrifice, and then proceeds to lose the big race--but win big in life. My older son Max loves Lightning McQueen. Loves him.

Chick Hicks is modeled on Dale Earnhardt--down to the mustache on his GM grille. He wins races by knocking out the competition. Max thinks this is cheating. Sam thinks this is cool.

This is a side of Sam that few people see. At preschool, he is mostly sweetness and light. He doesn't hit or bite or scream or throw tantrums--normal behavior for kids in his class. During the last couple of months, he has started to blossom socially and act out a bit more. But people keep telling him he's cute, so he tends to act cute.

At home he hits. He kicks. He pounds. He throws things. Not out of anger--well yes, sometimes out of anger, but most of the time just because he feels like doing it. He knows it's wrong, but he doesn't care and he doesn't seem to mind the consequences.

Sam is simply a boy who likes to get people's attention by hitting them, jumping on them or the like. The person whose attention he craves the most is Max. And as Max is a much more private person who is perfectly happy spending hours in his room creating, well, creations, the attention Sam craves is not always forthcoming. So Sam hits Max. A lot.

This, by the way, is what Chick Hicks does. He gets attention by winning races, and he wins races by hitting people. Sam's attraction to Chick makes all the sense in the world.

But since the movie paints Chick as the bad guy--he wins the "Piston Cup," but he's shunned by the fans and the press for his unsavory tactics--there are few Chick Hicks fan clubs. In fact, I've never met another Chick fan. Even the most aggressive hitters and biters in Sam's class love Lightning McQueen. You're supposed to love the hero, not the villain. I think this unfortunate worldview is driven into your brain a couple days after birth.

Max is generally an amiable sort. He's everyone's friend at school. He does all the right things (or most of the right things, anyway) and is genuinely upset when he's not behaving correctly. He's always been that way. He's much nicer than Lightning McQueen, actually.

Sam has very little respect for the "right" way to do things. In his world, there's his way and the wrong way. He'll brook no discussion of a "right" way if it isn't his way. Sam, too, has always been this way.

What I'm hoping is that a little bit of Sam will rub off on Max. Max needs to learn how to break the rules now and again. And it would be nice if a little of Max's social niceties would rub off on Sam. Not so much that Sam becomes a Lightning McQueen fan--these days, I often root for the antisocial villain myself. But I never dug the villains or antiheroes as a child. I had to get old enough to understand that the world isn't painted in black and white.

Sam seems to already be there. A couple minutes after he was born, he fixed my wife and me with a look that said, "You're full of shit, and I know it." He's already a handful, and he's a decade from his teenage years. Hoo boy.

Looks like we're in for a fun ride.

Jon Worley's favorite character in Cars is the stoner VW bus.