Six Dr. Seuss books by Theodor Geisel (1904 – 1991) have been zotzed by the p.c. police.
Earlier today Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced the cancellation of “If I Ran The Zoo,” “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street”, “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer” because portions of said volumes “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong” by way of “offensive imagery.”
Everyone wants hateful images erased and hate speech squelched, but how aggressive and widespread will future cleansings be? And when will the dragnet extend to movies?
If there’s to be any consistency how can certain films that contain offensive content within a certain context — Martin Scorsese‘s cameo scene in Taxi Driver, for one, not to mention huge chunks of Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained and portions of The Hateful Eight….how can these films be left alone while the legacy of Dr. Seuss is shamed and to some extent dismissed?
Friendo #1: “What’s weird is that under Obama Seuss was praised, understood and wildly appreciated. In 2021 not so much. I guess no one can really argue with this. Our culture has simply and dramatically changed where the past is no longer tolerated. Or understood.”
Friendo #2: “Ugh…I want to move to Neptune. Fortunately, those aren’t classic Suess titles, but still: Erasing the past is a Marxist-fascist paradigm. You don’t erase a work of art because of stereotypes. What’s next — erasing Taxi Driver because of Scorsese’s back-seat rant? This is madness.”
Friendo #1: “Yeah, good point.”
Friendo #2: “I think most liberal/progressives think that doing this is common sense — right in line with the idea of making blackface or the N-word verboten. They don’t seem to realize that this is book burning. You don’t erase the past. At least, not in a free society. I’m also outraged at the demonizing of Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Friendo #1: “It’s really the corporations that buckle.”
Friendo #2: “The corporations love wokeness. Most of them are run by racists (i.e., the bro ‘libertarian’ fascists of Silicon Valley), but wokeness has turned out to be the greatest means of dividing and conquering their workers, and controlling their every move, that has ever been devised.
“Robin DiAngelo isn’t a racial-sensitivity guru. She’s a highly paid, whip-wielding corporate disciplinarian who cloaks her control-freak ideology in race propaganda. It’s no surprise, really, that her latest book is an attack on white progressives. I have no doubt that she’s a closet Republican.”
Friendo #3: “Even Biden broke tradition by not mentioning Dr Seuss in his ‘Read Across America Day’ proclamation He’s woke! Or at least scared of the wokesters.”
HE: During last year’s election campaigns I was nursing an idea that wokesterism and cancelling might begin to ease when Trump is finally gone. Now I’m not so sure.”
