Thursday, March 4, 2021

Celebrate National "Read Across America Day" (aka Dr. Seuss' Birthday)! CANCELLED


Theodor Geisel’s Dr. Seuss books are so popular, and printed and reprinted in so many editions, that you can find used copies of classics like The Cat in the Hat on eBay.com for under $5—shipping included. You can typically even snap up a first edition of something like Hooray for Diffendoofer Day! for just $4.99, plus $3.45 shipping. Yet on Tuesday, sellers suddenly inundated eBay.com with new, pricey Seuss listings. A 1964 edition of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street went onto the site at an astonishing $400!

Though that sounded expensive, within an hour some 140 would-be sellers had examined the listing. A newer, less prestigious Grolier Book Club edition of the same book was offered for a more modest $80. By 11:30 Tuesday morning, someone had already snapped it up. The buyer must have considered himself fortunate, because by noon a similar edition of the book had already received 17 offers, in the process getting bid up to $127, with four days left to go in the auction. Potentially the biggest jackpot of the day, however, would go to the person listing an edition of 13 stories of Dr. Seuss, all packaged together. Several hours and 20 bids later, the price had hit $162, with six days of bidding left.

Book collectors are an enterprising lot. The sudden online Seuss surge was the result of news that Geisel’s descendants, who have controlled the rights to his books since his death in 1991, had decided to stop publishing six of his titles (Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat’s Quizzer) because critics allege that they contain racist or insensitive imagery. An academic journal, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, has even accused Geisel of white supremacy for a “preponderant influence or authority demonstrated by White characters over others” in his books and for Orientalism, defined as distorting “differences between Middle Eastern, Southeast Asians, South Asians, and East Asians” and portraying these “cultures as exotic, backward, uncivilized.”

It’s hard to know what was more shocking: that the beloved Seuss and his seemingly innocent narratives had become the subject of the cancellation cult, or that there was a journal apparently devoted to ferreting out racist imagery in children’s books. The books haven’t exactly been hiding somewhere, unread. Publishers have sold an estimated 600 million copies of Seuss, many of them presumably read by parents, teachers, librarians, and assorted other educated and tolerant people over many decades and lauded by prominent politicians, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris. It took a peer-reviewed academic journal to persuade us—or at least to persuade Geisel’s family—that the children’s book master was in fact a bad influence. (Not missing a beat, the Biden administration subsequently declined to mention the author’s books on Read Across America Day, held annually on Geisel’s birthday.)

One irony of this latest cancel-culture episode is that Geisel himself was a man of the Left, a progressive who opposed fascism, decried “red baiting” in the 1950s, and devoted an entire book to educating kids about the budding environmental movement of the early 1970s, as described in a 2011 article, “Dr. Seuss’s Progressive Politics.” With the outbreak of World War II, Geisel even put aside writing children’s books and worked as an editorial cartoonist for PM, a liberal New York newspaper published during the war and noteworthy for refusing to accept advertising so as not to compromise its values. Geisel’s cartoons from that era revealed a man who vigorously opposed fascism, steadfastly supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s prosecution of the war, and lambasted the president’s congressional opponents, especially Republicans.

When Geisel resumed writing children’s books after the war, it was with an eye toward shaping young minds. As entertaining as the Seuss books are, you don’t need to be a literary critic to see the messages in many of them. Horton Hears a Who!, a book about an elephant who persuades his neighbors to protect a small, vulnerable group of people known as the Whos, is seen as a “parable about protecting minority rights,” a plausible reading of a book by a man who, in a 1947 university lecture, urged writers to avoid racist stereotypes. In Yertle the Turtle, an arrogant king of his local pond is indifferent to the suffering of his subjects, who complain, “I know up on top / You are seeing great sights / But down at the bottom / We, too, should have rights.” The Lorax, adapted by Hollywood as both a TV series and a movie, tells the story of the Once-ler, a creature who finds and cuts down a precious tree to sell and is warned by the Lorax, who “speaks for the trees,” of the consequences of a business built on using up natural resources. Geisel himself called the book, published in 1971 in the wake of the first Earth Day, “propaganda.”

Not surprisingly, social media became a battleground over the family’s decision to cancel the six Seuss books. One defender of the move said that it was time for critics to “evolve.” But Geisel has hardly had that opportunity himself. The academic attack on him in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature includes a section on cartoons he published during his college years in the 1920s deemed anti-Semitic and anti-black. It apparently counts for nothing that, for the rest of his life, he pursued progressive causes, decried the targeting of Jews in Germany, criticized the segregationist policies of the U.S. armed forces during World War II, and became an early supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. The Geisel episode is further evidence that, these days, anything remotely suggesting an unacceptable opinion by twenty-first-century standards, issued at any point in an artist’s life, is sufficient cause for cancellation.

In a sensible world, Geisel’s heirs would leave it to parents, educators, and librarians to determine whether Dr. Seuss books should remain available to kids. After all, it’s not as if five-year-olds are logging onto eBay and ordering copies of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street on their own—especially not at today’s prices.

30 comments:

  1. What pathetic bullshit. Proof you are losing the culture war. Instead of being outraged by anything of consequence, you focus on inconsequential and imaginary outrages concerning things that haven't happened.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There wouldn't be a National "Read Across America Day" w/o Dr. Seuss. Now the day lives, but its' inspiration has been cancelled. It begs the question though, "What's the inspiration for the empty shell label of a day now, dumbed down propaganda?"

    *shakes head*

    ReplyDelete
  3. ps- Bein actually g outraged about some racial insult or perceived sleight is about as inconsequential and imaginary an outrage as one can ever experience.

    Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
    How all occasions do inform against me,
    And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
    If his chief good and market of his time
    Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
    Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
    Looking before and after, gave us not
    That capability and god-like reason
    To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
    Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 40
    Of thinking too precisely on the event,
    A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
    And ever three parts coward, I do not know
    Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;'
    Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
    To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
    Witness this army of such mass and charge
    Led by a delicate and tender prince,
    Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
    Makes mouths at the invisible event, 50
    Exposing what is mortal and unsure
    To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
    Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
    Is not to stir without great argument,
    But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
    When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
    That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
    Excitements of my reason and my blood,
    And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
    The imminent death of twenty thousand men, 60
    That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
    Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
    Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
    Which is not tomb enough and continent
    To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
    My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
    Exit

    ReplyDelete
  4. You are a liar. There was a national reading day under Clinton and Bush and they did not mention Dr. Seuss. *shakes head*

    ReplyDelete
  5. Liar?

    lol!

    Launched in 1998 by the NEA, Read Across America Day was created as a way to encourage children to read. It later developed into a year-round program, with special celebrations in March.

    “One of the reasons we partnered with Seuss 20 years ago in 1997 was to kick-start this program,” NEA spokesman Steven Grant told the School Library Journal in 2017. “That was the strategy up front, so kids would see Dr. Seuss’s 'Cat in the Hat' and spark some attention.”

    ReplyDelete
  6. ...but apparently the "white guy" has outlived his usefulness, and like the magical "white savior negro", must disappear into obscurity so that the "whitewashed" minority protagonist can catch a little spotlight. DAMN!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Newsweek: Former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did not make any Read Across America Day proclamations. However, former President Barack Obama began a short-lived tradition by mentioning Dr. Seuss in each one of his Read Across America Day proclamations from 2009 until 2016.

    ReplyDelete
  8. And, if the Geisel heirs are virtue signaling progressives, I'd think you'd be happy that the president isn't using his bully pulpit to hawk their products and make them money. Nobody is stopping you from celebrating the birthday of Dr Seuss or buying Dr Seuss books, if that is what you want to do. QED Dr Seuss has not been cancelled.

    ReplyDelete
  9. After 20 years I'd have thought the program would have been kick-started a LONG time ago. It's about time they stopped promoting one author over all others if the linkage was only intended as a kick-start.

    ReplyDelete
  10. So they purposefully white-washed a government program by featuring a white savior? How commendable! Perhaps we should do the same for Kwanza next December.

    ReplyDelete
  11. btw - Can I buy one of the banned Seuss books on Amazon? So much for "not being cancelled".

    ReplyDelete
  12. So they purposefully white-washed a government program by featuring a white savior?

    No.

    btw - Can I buy one of the banned Seuss books on Amazon?

    No. Because no Dr Suess books have been banned. You can't things that don't exist.

    btw, the Amazon page for "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street" says there are "34 Collectible from $285.79". Which is nuts. But it is an example of how the free market works. Go ahead and buy one if you want it so badly. You can afford it.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I don't know what eBay's reasoning is. I doubt they're all progressive liberals though. I don't agree with the decision. You better snatch up one of the Amazon copies. Or one copy of each of the six books. If you want to complete your collection.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I probably have most of them already, but thanks for the thought.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I don't know. Maybe they disappeared. If Dr. Seuss's birthday was cancelled, that must mean he never existed.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Geisel's heirs want to commit "genocide" against that which makes them $33 million a year? Your delusions are laughable. But mostly annoying.

    ReplyDelete
  17. The Geisel heirs are merely fighting a rear-guard action protecting their future profits as the genocidal (cancel-culture and people) Democrat Party purges the world of "racism."

    ReplyDelete
  18. Once again, it's ALL about "purity" of thought.

    ReplyDelete
  19. Not being racist isn't "genocidal". That's stoooopid.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Who said that a reactionary racist like you wasn't all about purifying his own race and punishing others to keep them down?

    ReplyDelete
  21. Like who? Minus FJ? He's the only other commenter in this thread. Although "Minus FJ" and "Joe Conservative" are the same person. I don't give a shit about "purifying" squat. And I'm not for keeping anyone down due to race.

    ReplyDelete
  22. So do I. You just don't want any lower class whites and all non-whites learning kung fu or studying Western Civ and living "above the veil" with the other University Discourse privileged Ivory Tower dwelling Lily-White Brahmins.

    Why was his hair tinted with gold? An evil omen was golden hair in my life. Why had not the brown of his eyes crushed out and killed the blue? –For brown were his father's eyes, and his father's father's. And thus in the Land of the Color-line I saw, as it fell across my baby, the shadow of the Veil." - WEB DuBois, "The Soul of Black Folk"

    ReplyDelete
  23. You prefer a Caste System superimposed on top of your racial system... with the White working class at the very bottom, "Untouchable Deplorables"

    ReplyDelete
  24. Progressive Liberal Bias' reside at the TOP of the Intellectual Caste System, truth be damned!

    ReplyDelete