Dr. Seuss plot getting lost
Everybody calm down.
Dr. Seuss is not being canceled, and his books are not being banned. If I had a little more energy, I’d put that in anapestic tetrameter.
No political party or branch of government has attempted to make Dr. Seuss books unavailable.
So when U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, addressed his colleagues on the floor or the chamber this week and said, of the Democrats, “first they outlaw Dr. Seuss ...” he was being a big lying liar.
McCarthy was actually speaking about HR 1, a major overhaul of federal election law, so bringing up Dr. Seuss was pretty random. It was also — did I mention this? — an untrue falsehood and lying lie.
McCarthy also posted a video of himself reading “Green Eggs and Ham,” which is not one of the six Seuss titles whose status caused the week’s uproar.
Kevin McCarthy is a silly person.
“Green Eggs and Ham” and, indeed, all of the most beloved Seuss titles were not affected by this week’s announcement. Dr. Seuss Enterprises — founded by Theodore Geisel’s widow to manage his literary estate after the author died in 1991 — announced that it would no longer publish six Seuss titles. The rest of his oeuvre — more than 60 books in all — will remain undisturbed.
Two of the titles — “If I Ran the Zoo” and “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” — are mid-level favorites. The other four, if I hid them in a list amid 16 other fake Seuss titles, you would be unlikely to recognize.
Just so we’re clear, Republicans, the decision came from the people who own the material. Dr. Seuss Enterprises manages the intellectual property for Geisel’s estate. I’ve spoken to many Republicans in my day, and I always got the feeling that they believed people should be able to do what they like with their property.
On the other hand, there does seem to be a newfound uneasiness with Dr. Seuss. President Joe Biden failed to mention him in this year’s “Read Across America” proclamation, which is issued on Geisel’s birthday, the same day his estate announced it wouldn’t publish more copies of those six titles because of their “hurtful and wrong” portrayal of minorities.
Again, just so we’re clear, proclamations are staff work. There’s no way Biden knew that Trump and Obama had mentioned Seuss in the past or that Seuss was notably omitted this time.
This is not the same thing as canceling or banning. It’s not the same thing as calling Geisel a racist. In fact, there are significant parallels between Geisel, born and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, and a fella from down the road, Mark Twain, who adopted Hartford as his home city.
Each man was troubled by racial and ethnic injustice and also not completely uncontaminated by it. I’ve always believed that people who are pure of heart tend to deliver a less powerful and compelling message than the messengers who know what’s right but are nagged for life by a pebble of wrong in their shoes.
If I ran the zoo, I’m not sure what I’d do. I abhor the banning of books and the sterilization of culture. You have to teach Twain, with sensitivity, to high schoolers, but maybe there’s some kind of an age cut-off. A Chinese-American second-grader shouldn’t see an offensive caricature of himself when he pulls a book off a shelf in the school library.
And we grown-ups have to admit to ourselves that some of what we loved is less innocent than we realized.
Those crows in “Dumbo” were my favorite part of the movie. They were funny and edgy, jiving out on a rail fence, and their song, “When I See an Elephant Fly” is the best song in the film. But they are unmistakably a source of minstrelsy and Black comic relief in a white movie. “But I be done seen about everything ...”
I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t appear in the recent Tim Burton remake. Crows, you gotta go.
As a kid I read and loved Booth Tarkington’s Penrod books, but there are two minor characters, local Black boys named Herman and Verman, who are so steeped in stereotype as to make the Penrod franchise a literary Superfund site.
We laughed when Robin Williams did an Indian accent or when Billy Crystal put on blackface to do an (unquestionably loving) impersonation of Sammy Davis Jr.
But it’s time to put away childish things.
It isn’t easy, fixing culture. If you keep what you love and ditch what you hate, you’ve done nothing. We will survive without any further printings of “McElligot’s Pool” or “On Beyond Zebra!”
We won’t grow by erasing their existence or embracing them in blind nostalgia. Don’t embrace or erase it. Just face it and taste it. Should it keep its place or fall from grace?
I have to stop now. Whether you write on a screen or papyrus, those Seussian rhymes are a cognitive virus.
Two of the titles — “If I Ran the Zoo” and “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” — are mid-level favorites. The other four, if I hid them in a list amid 16 other fake Seuss titles, you would be unlikely to recognize.
LeBron James is going to Georgia this weekend for more than the NBA AllStar Game.
He’s thinking about upcoming elections as well.
The Los Angeles Lakers star, one of the organizers of the More Than A Vote organization that aims to stop Black voter suppression and which played a major role in the outcome of the 2020 elections by encouraging voter turnout, will narrate an ad that will be aired for the first time during Sunday’s All-Star Game in Atlanta — in which he vows that the efforts will continue.
“Look what we made happen, what our voices made possible,” James says in the 51-second spot. “And now, look what they’re trying to do to silence us, using every trick in the book and attacking democracy itself. Because they saw what we’re capable of, and they fear it.”
With the All-Star Game being relocated to Atlanta because of the pandemic — the original plan was for it to be played in Indianapolis last month — it provided James and the More Than A Vote group the perfect backdrop to detail some of their plans going forward.
The organization’s 2021 platform, announced Friday morning, comes just days after House Democrats sent a bill to the Senate that potentially represents the largest overhaul of the U.S. election law in at least a generation. The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which charts such things, said state lawmakers across the country have filed more than 200 bills in 43 states that would limit ballot access in future elections.
And earlier this week in Georgia, state lawmakers voted for legislation requiring identification to vote by
mail that would also allow counties to cancel early in-person voting on Sundays — the “souls to the polls” events when many Black voters cast ballots after church.
“The question after the 2020 election was, ‘Will that momentum sustain itself? Will athletes stay engaged?’ And we’re saying, ‘Yes, absolutely, and here’s how,’ ” said More Than A Vote’s Michael Tyler.
“We’ve already been engaged to some degree in Georgia, which is Ground Zero for this wave of voter suppression efforts,” Tyler said. “We’ve been raising money for the new Georgia project, and we’ll use the All-Star Game to shine a light on this wave of voter suppression bills and start our 2021 national advocacy campaign and our platform.”
More Than A Vote is calling its latest plan the “Protect Our Power campaign,” which it said “will fight against this new wave of voter suppression efforts sweeping the country aimed at rolling back the gains Black voters made in last year’s general election.”
The organization recruited thousands of workers to help at polling places last year, sparked voter registration drives and concentrated efforts in key battleground states like Georgia. Record turnout led to Democratic wins in Georgia’s presidential election and two U.S. Senate runoffs.
And it’s no secret that Democrats would strongly oppose adding barriers to mail-in and early voting, both of which were major factors in helping President Joe Biden win Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes and Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff take the two Senate seats that gave Democrats control of the chamber.