Fans of Theodore “Dr. Suess” Geisel are aware that Dr. Suess Enterprises, the publishing company will cancel printings of six books:
“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises told The Associated Press in a statement that coincided with the late author and illustrator’s birthday.
“Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises’ catalog represents and supports all communities and families,” it said.
The other books affected are “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!,” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”
My personal favorite Dr. Seuss book is Green Eggs and Ham. Second place is pretty much a three-way tie between The Lorax, Happy Birthday to You!, and McElligot’s Pool. I was very fond of On Beyond Zebra when I was little, but I don’t remember the book all that well.
When I was about six, I would read McElligot’s Pool to my four-year-old cousin. When I had little kids of my own, I read them that book again and again. It’s a wonderful globe-spanning flight of fancy, with some of Suess’s most entertaining illustrations. I don’t have a copy handy, but I can remember most of the verses. I racked my brain: what part of McElligot’s Pool could anybody find offensive or harmful? Then it struck me:
Some Eskimo fish
From beyond Hudson Bay
Might decide to swim down
Might be headed this way!It’s a pretty long trip
But they might and they may.
Here’s the illustration (partial, I found a copy of the whole two-page illustration earlier today, but Twitter censored it before I thought to download.)
Oh the humanity! I asked an Eskimo how he felt about it:
Oh wait, that’s not an Eskimo, that’s a fucking wop. Real Eskimos don’t have time to be offended by this kind of thing. The Eskimo fish are portrayed as sympathetic and happy.
As soon as word broke that these titles would now be out of print, the books trended strongly on eBay, bringing in three-digit bids. Ebay reacted by scraping the books from its market, based on an offensive materials policy:
Listings that promote or glorify hatred, violence, or discrimination are not allowed.
I don’t promote hatred, violence, or discrimination and neither does anyone buying or selling these books. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is harmed by McElligot’s Pool.
This decision by Dr. Seuss Enterprises was driven largely by a scholarly analysis of Dr. Seuss’s early work, some of which was heavily satirical and used negative racial stereotypes freely. It’s probably reasonable to get offended at some of this stuff. The study would be more convincing if it showed the cartoons it spends so much verbiage merely to describe. Dr. Seuss called black people “niggers” and portrayed them as monkeys and savages. That’s unkind and it does somewhat tarnish the image of the kindly, benevolent Dr. Seuss.
Historians generally agree that the “nadir” of American race relations was in the 1920’s. That’s when you saw the highest rates of race-based alienation, division and violence. Dr. Seuss’s bigotry in the 1930’s was mild stuff compared to some of his contemporaries.
Then, there’s the war propaganda. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in a treacherous sneak attack; American Sailors and Marines perished by drowning in flaming diesel oil and salt water; others suffocated in the dark, trapped in the armored hulls of their sunken ships. The Japanese routinely tortured and murdered prisoners of war, sometimes on a mass scale as at Bataan. In Nanking, they queued up live civilians and used them for bayonet practice. Attractive females who fell into the Japanese’s clutches were raped many times a day for months or even years. In Manchuria, Japan’s Unit 731 performed vivisections and other experiments on live prisoners, every bit as sickening as anything Mengele did at Auschwitz, and on a much larger scale.
And then Dr. Seuss portrayed them with buck teeth and slanty eyes. The horror!
His stepdaughter, who seems like a nice lady, defended Dr. Suess against charges of racism, but she nevertheless agreed with the publisher’s decision to terminate the six titles. She thinks the world is hurting with racism or something and it’s time to be extra-extra nice. That would make sense if anyone, anywhere, could feel good about this. To a first approximation, nobody can. On the contrary, millions of people are dismayed if not outright pissed.
The decision to cease publication and sales of the books was made last year after months of discussion, the company said.
‘Dr. Seuss Enterprises listened and took feedback from our audiences including teachers, academics and specialists in the field as part of our review process. We then worked with a panel of experts, including educators, to review our catalog of titles.’
Random House Children Books, Dr. Seuss’ publisher, issued a brief statement on Tuesday: ‘We respect the decision of Dr. Seuss Enterprises and the work of the panel that reviewed this content last year, and their recommendation.’
Why? How can you respect that decision? Literally one-hundred percent of the market disagrees; millions of readers. And this honking prune-faced gaggle of constipated geese scowls and burns their books.
Dr. Seuss is one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century. Millions of kids learned to read, drawn in by Dr. Seuss’s loopy illustrations. He preached open-mindedness, creativity, adventure, kindness, and cleaning up messes. The legacy of Dr. Seuss ought to be defended and preserved in its entirety, even if that legacy is partly unsavory. Dropping these six titles on such specious grounds is something like treason. Dr. Seuss is important, and we can’t have valid opinions about him if we’re not allowed to know the man on his own terms.
This isn’t “censorship” or “cancel culture”. The correct word for this is genocide. If they can cancel McElligot’s Pool, they can and will cancel everything. Dr. Seuss has millions of fans, and they couldn’t defend him against a handful of lemon-sucking eggheads. Who will step up to defend Milton or Melville, Kipling or Poe? We have Professor Padilla at Princeton, a “leading scholar of Rome”; this resting-bitch-faced little scold is calling for classical studies to be abolished and the Western canon consigned to the dustbin, and the NY Times cheers him on because one time stormfront.org featured an image of the Parthenon, so that naturally proves that everything from ancient Greece on down is white supremacist. In this reasoning, everything is instantly contaminated and must be thrown away.
All we treasure, all we share, to be thrown away. Genocide.