Dr. Seuss won’t be canceled. Prejudice should be.
In the wake of Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, Pepe Le Pew, et al., I finally got so tired of hearing Fox News fans invoking “cancel culture” that I looked it up.
Here’s the definition I found on the Pop Culture Dictionary, consistent with others I saw:
“Cancel culture refers to the popular practice of withdrawing support for (canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive. Cancel culture is generally discussed as being performed on social media in the form of group shaming.”
My first thought is that this applies just as well to, say, censuring Republican Sen. Pat Toomey for voting to convict Donald Trump as it does to the trivial pursuits we usually hear about.
For that matter, it applies to Trump’s guaranteeing primary challenges to any Republican who has had the temerity to defy him. Or boycotting NFL football because a few players kneel during the national anthem.
But rather than quibble about whether Fox’s talking heads and assorted aggrieved Trump Republicans should be relentlessly invoking a phrase that might just as easily be turned against them, I want to do my part to inject a little common sense into the squabble about whether it’s outrageous to question certain aspects of popular children’s authors, toys or cartoon characters.
I’ll begin with this personal account. I helped introduce our 4-year-old grandson, Luke, to “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” last December. We found ourselves reading the book and watching the original video multiple times whenever he visited.
He already was familiar with “Green Eggs and Ham” — from which we routinely quote “Try it, try it, you will see” to jokingly force food upon one another. And also “The Cat in the Hat” and “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” He’ll be introduced before long to “The Lorax” and “Horton Hears a Who.”
I know we are not unique in this. Dr. Seuss is an important part of the reading list for families everywhere. He is not going to be “canceled.” Nor should he be.
But … are some of the images he has drawn over the years, particularly involving nonwhite characters, wildly out of touch with today’s standards of ethnic and racial depictions?
Absolutely. Have you gone back and looked at some of the drawings that resulted in Dr. Seuss’s estate withdrawing six titles from future publishing? I have. They are awful. We have one of the books at home.
I’m not prepared to “cancel” Dr. Seuss for some drawings he did decades ago, any more than I am to “cancel” Thomas Jefferson for owning slaves or Bing Crosby for performing in outrageous blackface during one of my favorite Christmas movies, “Holiday Inn.”
Context matters when we’re judging actions and attitudes from decades and centuries ago. I’m annoyed at some of the overreactions I’ve seen when we apply today’s standards to past actions.
But I have no problem with seeing an offensive scene left out of “Holiday Inn” when it airs today — or
Turner Classic Movies’ accompanying some classic movies with a thoughtful discussion of content that feels jarringly inappropriate today.
I see nothing wrong with reminding schoolchildren — and people touring Monticello — that by today’s standards, some behavior of our Founding Fathers, great explorers, past presidents of the United States and other past heroes was unacceptable or worse.
And I have no problem with Dr. Seuss’ publishers deciding to withhold a handful of his works from future circulation. Or consigning pervy Pepe Le Pew to the cartoon junk heap. Or even reimagining the Potato Heads for a new generation of children.
Faced with so many incredibly important problems and challenges, do we really want to waste our energy fighting about toys, cartoons and children’s books?
(The New Yorker’s satirical Borowitz Report had a funny fake headline the other day about this: “Kevin McCarthy blasts relief package for failing to address Dr. Seuss crisis.”)
It doesn’t help that we have a former president who promised his followers that he could return American life to the ’50s, an idyllic time in our history as long as you weren’t female, nonwhite, gay or non-Protestant. Way too many of them believed him.
We can’t go back. Nor should we. As screwed up as our society is in 2021, it’s infinitely better than one where so many of us were doomed to secondclass, or lower, citizenship.
And painful as it has been, we’re still learning about all the ways in which racism and sexism continue to hold people back or subject them to outrageous indignities.
The challenge for all of us is to embrace that knowledge, not rage against it. Let’s move forward. Prejudice and ignorance deserve to be canceled.