It was not long ago that Vice President Kamala Harris found it advantageous to go on Twitter and wish the late prolific poet Dr. Seuss a happy birthday. “Happy birthday, #DrSeuss!” she wrote, further quoting him, “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
Michelle Obama once read Seuss’s iconic books to children in the White House. Both his quirky Christmas poem about the Grinch and his goofy paean to environmentalism featuring the Lorax are now such prominent fixed points in popular culture that they rival Mom, apple pie, and Mark Twain in their very American-ness.
Perhaps that is the good doctor’s problem. Now, much like Twain, Seuss is being shamed, canceled, and removed from school. A group of people referring to themselves as “educators” began raising a stink last month over some of his works, intimidating Loudoun County, Virginia, into dropping its long-standing celebration of Seuss on Read Across America Day due to “racial undertones.” These same activists have now intimidated Dr. Seuss Enterprises so much that the company is removing six of his titles from print due to racially insensitive images. After the titles quickly sold out at Amazon and were selling for hundreds of dollars, eBay removed all listings of the canceled books.
Do they have a point? To be sure, no one would publish such drawings today, but no, they really don’t. Anyone saying they are hurt or offended by this material is just play-acting.
For example, in And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, conceived in 1936 and first published a year later, there is a drawing of what is supposed to be a Chinese person running along, wearing Hanfu shoes and a conical farmer’s hat, eating from a bowl with chopsticks. Are we really supposed to lose our heads over a beloved children’s author, drawing in 1937 upon what must have seemed then like exotic wonders from Chinatown? Are we to believe that the real-life Seuss, a committed anti-Nazi and anti-racist, really meant harm by this allusion, or that those who read it should feel harmed somehow? Doesn’t his intention matter?
Seuss ought not feel bad. It is not his fault. There has been a rash of this lately. Schools have been equally busy banning everyone from Homer to Shakespeare to J.K. Rowling. The last thing students need, in the view of the new revolutionaries and their denialist enablers, is exposure to actual thinking from the past. Thinking, you see, has a way of being tainted by multiple value systems, some of which are incompatible with contemporary sensibilities. Thinking is challenging. And worst of all, thinking doesn’t go well with the victimhood-worshipping public self-gratification that these people refer to as intersectionality.
It is not hard to discern what is going on here. People who react to mild insensitivity from ages past by banning texts do not belong in education. They are un-educators who make war on culture and on intellectual curiosity. Deeply ignorant of what they criticize, they are nonetheless ever-willing to feign grievous personal offense based on the most superficial reading of whatever author or text everybody is supposed to be offended by on any given day. They view this offense-taking as healthy for their self-image, as damaging as it is to the broader society.
Most people have reacted to this understandably, buying Seuss’s books in large numbers and also selling them on eBay for the exorbitant prices they are suddenly fetching. But that’s not enough. It is time for people to start pushing back — to tell the cancelers all to go to Hell.
Their anti-intellectual ways are poisoning all of the nation’s formerly liberal institutions. Consider, for example, how the New York Times’s editorial board in 2011 was so absolute in its defense of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that it railed against an edition that replaced the N-word with “slave” — a change, which, in fairness, might have suited a younger audience by making the volume more accessible.
“The trouble isn’t merely adulterating Twain’s text,” the New York Times’s editors wrote back then. “It’s also adulterating social, economic and linguistic history. Substituting the word ‘slave’ makes it sound as though all the offense lies in the ‘n-word’ and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. Worse, it suggests that understanding the truth of the past corrupts modern readers, when, in fact, this new edition is busy corrupting the past.”
They had a good point. But one can hardly imagine the outlet’s editors bothering to defend Twain today, considering their unwillingness even to defend their own colleague, science reporter Donald McNeil, from obviously unfair attacks by the new Jacobins.
McNeil, clearly intending no offense, had uttered that same offensive slur years earlier in the course of asking a question about an incident in which someone else had used it. The incident was recently exhumed, and he was forced to resign when the New York Times’s cowardly editors folded under pressure from a cadre of young and bloodthirsty employees, whose work output is a lot less impressive than the hot glow of their embarrassingly incessant outrage on Twitter.
Twain might have been a great author whose books drew back the curtain on the vile nature of slavery and racism, but he used icky words, and he lived in an icky time when people had icky ideas. Off with his head!
The same is now true of Seuss. He may be a towering literary giant, at least in terms of popularity, his work replete with unmistakably anti-racist themes (as in The Sneetches and Horton Hears a Who) and even left-wing ideas that such ideologues would appreciate under other circumstances. But that’s not good enough for these new revolutionaries. To them, context and intention provide no extenuation.
If there is one lesson to be taken from this, it is that not one inch must be given to these destroyers of culture, for once you show weakness, they will never stop. Do not give in to their demands. Do not fire people based on their accusations. Do not ban the books they find offensive.
Cancel them instead.
