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 ChineseAmerican 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.