First, they came for Harry Potter: too few gay and transgender characters, apparently. Then, they came for Power Rangers. It turns out that, in one of the earlier series, the yellow ranger was Asian, the black ranger was black, and the pink ranger was female.
Then, they came for The Simpsons, because Apu and Dr. Hibbert were voiced by white actors. Then, they came for Paw Patrol. In an age when police are supposedly oppressing black people, Chase, the police dog, is altogether too sympathetic. Then, they came for Mr. Potato Head because — well, actually, I can’t quite work out what his offense was, but doubtless, it was something abominable.
It was only a matter of time before the Left’s inquisitors set their sights on the reassuringly goofy Dr. Seuss, whose catchy rhymes and mildly psychedelic images — loopy, complex machines with no straight lines — taught three generations how to read.
The good doctor, Theodor Geisel in real life but never actually a doctor, has had six of his books canceled — literally canceled, in the sense that they will no longer be published. So much for the idea that “cancel culture” is a myth invented by oversensitive conservatives.
Among the titles are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo. We are told by the company that oversees his corpus that they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” For example, one of the sights seen on Mulberry Street is — brace yourself — a Chinese man in robes eating from a bowl with chopsticks.
Observe how the purity spiral works. You prove your sensitivity by taking offense at something that no one else has spotted — the more innocent your target, the better. Anyone can kick up a stink about The Story of Little Black Sambo or Tintin in the Congo, so criticizing them does not provide an especially high status. If you want respect in the eyes of the woke, you need to find something that was previously regarded as utterly harmless.
Dr. Seuss is certainly that. Looking from the outside, I’d say he was the definitive American author. His birthday has become National Read Across America Day. Former first lady Michelle Obama used to read his books to children in the White House. No other writer, not Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain or William Faulkner, established such a hold on the national vernacular. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that Time’s 1994 headline “The Gingrich Who Stole Christmas” defined how that Republican leader was seen by half the country.
Of course, the very fact that Dr. Seuss is an American icon is part of the attraction for his detractors (see also Jefferson, Thomas). Even so, he is, on the face of it, an extraordinarily odd choice of target. German on both sides of his family, he was an early and committed anti-Nazi. His cartoons lampooned both European dictators and the Americans who wanted to stay neutral. He particularly disliked Charles Lindbergh, whose America First Committee opposed the sending of aid and provisions to the beleaguered democracies.
True, he said some harsh things about the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and portrayed them viciously in his cartoons. But his attitudes were hardly unusual in a nation at war. What was unusual was his change of heart when peace was restored. Visiting Japanese schools after the war, he was deeply moved by the ambitions of the children he met, growing up as they were in a defeated and occupied country. His feelings took shape as Horton Hears a Who, dedicated to the Japanese academic who had hosted him, a book about valuing everyone: “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
How very small, though, was the person who came up with the idea of halting publication of children’s books to which, until now, it had not occurred to anyone to take offense. What infuriates me about the episode is not the idea that artists should be suddenly and retrospectively targeted on grounds other than the quality of their art, nor is it the essentially arbitrary nature of these cancellations — adultery, tax fraud, and assault are generally fine, provided you didn’t say the wrong thing about a minority group.
No, what is really outrageous here is the way we keep indulging a lunatic sect, simply because we find its self-righteousness intimidating. My guess is that this decision originated with a young employee or a group of young employees. Publishers around the world are increasingly quailing before the demands of their 20-something staffers, similar to the respectable Chinese allowing themselves to be paraded through the streets by student mobs during the Cultural Revolution.
But, seriously, Dr. Seuss? This is getting completely out of hand.
