Last week, the Dr. Seuss Foundation decided to withdraw six of Dr. Seuss' books from publication: And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, If I Ran the Zoo, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer. The reason? Because these books contain "racist and insensitive imagery" (see more detail on the images here). A culture war debate managed to reverberate throughout the United States as a result. The Left claimed victory for decency, whereas the Right decried cancel culture like we have never seen before. There is so much I would like to cover but will probably not get to, but what I will ask today is the following: Is the Dr. Seuss controversy an example of making a mountain out of a molehill or is this incident indicative of something larger?
Like everyone else, Dr. Seuss was human. As such, he was bound to be imperfect. It is unsurprising that he was a product of his times because we all are. And just because Dr. Seuss was a flawed genius doesn't take away from the fact that he was still a genius when it came to children's literature. Dr. Seuss was a pro-FDR, New Deal Democrat that was all for the Japanese interment camps, so it wouldn't be shocking that anti-Japanese sentiment slipped into his earlier cartoons during World War II. At the same time, his stepdaughter recently said that Dr. Seuss did not have a racist bone in his body. That might be because he decried Jim Crow laws and criticized Nazi Germany. He was all for saving the environment, as is illustrated by The Lorax. The Butter Battle Book was a satirical take on the Cold War with an anti-Reagan subtext. Yertle the Turtle was Dr. Seuss ripping on the rise and fall of Hitler.
Before continuing, I want to acknowledge some valid points that those on the Left have made. For one, these are some of Dr. Seuss' more obscure works, so it's not like we're going after Seuss' more renowned works (or classics from other authors....at least not yet). Also, public libraries in Toronto and Chicago are currently assessing whether the Dr. Seuss books in reference should still be on their shelves. Two, I took a look at the images. Most were not particularly problematic, but I could see how some of them could be offensive, especially the negative depictions of Africans in If I Ran a Zoo. Third, it is not censorship from the government or a violation of the First Amendment. It is a decision by a private company to discontinue publishing its own legal property. At the same time, why is the book de facto being forced out of print? Because its sales figures are terrible? We don't know that since the Foundation refuses to release sales figures. They even refuse to point out which illustrations are problematic and provide a rationale. The most probable explanation is because it offends a small group of people.
Should we cancel something simply because there are parts that are offensive? Merchant of Venice depicts Jews in a negative light. Yet we don't cancel Shakespeare. We laud Shakespeare because he was an excellent writer who had great insight into the human condition. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the n-word more than 200 times, but we consider it a depiction of race relations in the nineteenth century. Lord of the Flies could be construed as a colonialist narrative negatively depicting indigenous people, yet we read it because of its great use of symbolism and an exploration of the myriad of emotions that exist. To quote writer Janie Cheaney, "whatever an author's faults, classic fiction offers readers a chance to experience lives beyond their own narrow and limited perspective."
There are people out there that are so easily offended or get off on getting offended that they actively look for a reason to be offended. Instead of teaching people to learn from other perspectives and interact with those who are different from you (you know, that thing called "tolerance"), our society is encouraging fragility and intellectual weakness. As Left-leaning comedian John Cleese recently said, the problem with political correctness (more on that momentarily) is that we "have to set the bar according to what we are told by the most touchy, most emotionally unstable and fragile and least stoic people in the country." But I digress....
This all brings up an important cultural question: how much should offensiveness dictate whether something should be a part of culture? Let's forget that life is the exact opposite from being one, big safe space. What offends you might not offend someone else. On the contrary, they might get a kick out of it! While we are not dealing with a constitutional issue, there is a reason why the "right to not be offended" is not in the Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence.
Who determines what is offensive? If we were subject to the whims of an individual's preferences or that of a committee or a small sub-section of society, we could not live our lives freely, especially given the subjective nature of being offended. We could not say what we want, observe whatever religion we want, have sex with whomever we want (provided they are consenting adults), buy what we want, or eat what we want. It's not as if cultural prudes trying to force their views onto the rest of us is anything new. At least in U.S. culture, such a phenomenon dates back to the Puritans. We had the Moral Majority try to force fundamentalist Christian views down Americans' throats in the 1980s. In spite of our love for freedom in this country, there has always been a prudish, morally righteous countercurrent simultaneously existing in society. And guess who the Puritans of the 21st century are? The woke Left.
There are those on the woke Left who would have you believe that the discontinued publishing of these six Dr. Seuss books is an isolated incident or it's a way to bring us closer to polite society. In their minds, they think that political correctness is merely a modern-day application of politeness and decency. "Cultures evolve. Get with the times," goes the argument. There are times where that is the case because there are norms and mores that we outgrow as a society. A good example is tearing down Confederate statues. The South lost the Civil War. Forcing other human beings into slavery wrong, as is the racism that wrongly justified it. At best, these statues should go into museums and act as a reminder as to how morally inept the Confederacy's pro-slavery stance was.
If the forces behind the cultural shifts we are witnessing were more benevolent or less inclined to grasp for power, I would be more sympathetic to their cause. However, I fear that is not the case. As I explained four years ago, political correctness is thought and speech control under the guise of tolerance and brotherhood. There was a time where the Left was all about freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Berkeley gave birth to the Freedom of Speech movement in the 1964-65 academic year. If those liberals were here now, their attitude towards the cancel culture crowd would have been "If you don't like it, don't read it!" How the times have changed!
It has gotten bad to the point where I felt the need to write a piece last July on how the social justice movement greatly parallels that of religious fundamentalism. Being woke comes with so many features of religious fundamentalism, ranging from a doctrinal belief system and wanting to control moral codes to disdain for the non-believer and a holier-than-thou attitude.
The fundamentalism of the social justice crowd unsurprisingly resulted in cancel culture, a phenomenon that I criticized last year. What makes the cancel culture mentality even worse is that it assumes guilt, turns a specific action into a general indictment of character, and then proceeds to escalate the situation in which forgiveness is not the end-goal. It also results in a mob-like, black-and-white mentality in which "if I disagree with you, not only you are wrong, you are a racist, homophobic, bigot." There is no distinction between an anti-Trump libertarian, a moderate, or a hardcore Trump supporter. To paraphrase former President Bush, you are either with the cancel culture mob or against it. It has gotten so bad that Left-leaning comedian Bill Maher acknowledge it: "Cancel culture is real, it's insane, it's growing exponentially, and it's coming to a neighborhood near you." A poll from the Cato Institute from July 2020 shows how bad it is getting. 62 percent of Americans feel like they cannot express themselves. Unsurprisingly, 58 percent of staunch liberals (i.e., the woke Left) feels comfortable expressing themselves.
If you need another example of the black-and-white mentality (pun intended), look at the shift in how we express societal views. There was a time where being non-racist was the ideal, which it should be. Racism is stupid and not conducive for a democratic society. I personally don't associate with racists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, or homophobes. I am one for non-racism, much like in Dr. Seuss' The Sneetches. If you read The Sneetches, you will realize that it a series of allegories pointing out the stupidness of racism, much like Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles did. It was nice to have the goal of race not mattering. It was Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream! However, we have reached this point where race is a big deal and that The Sneetches is now considered problematic. This trend towards anti-racism is perturbing that it got me wondering how much the obsession of race from the anti-racists was starting to resemble bona fide racists.
Aside from the Dr. Seuss reference, the reason why I bring up the anti-racism trend is that it is another manifestation of how the woke Left would love to do nothing more than control the cultural narrative. It might seem tame in comparison to Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution or how the Third Reich had a Chamber of Culture to deem what is culturally appropriate. Conversely, as this woke mentality permeates schools, corporations, and other cultural institutions, it will gain more traction. Ultimately, what I want to point out is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As long as there is a human desire for more power and control over others' lives, freedom will always be on the defensive.
How do we deal with such moral prudishness affecting our freedoms? I sure do not trust the government to be objective in this endeavor. Creating a bureaucracy to deal with this, especially with a Democratic Congress and presidency, will hardly be objective. Such actions would only lead to greater authoritarianism and more cancelling things not considered palatable to the Left. The slippery slope need not be inevitable. We need to do what we have always done in history when "the man" has his boot on our collective throat: defy the establishment. How? Some thoughts. We get more involved in the political process to make sure the government doesn't strip us of our freedoms. We create alternate institutions to counter the wokeness. We call out the B.S. when we see it and we don't cave into the politically correct. We live freely and have our lives be a testament to the importance of freedom. Making sure that we fight against authoritarian trends, whether they come from the Far Left or the Far Right, is how we make sure that American culture is not actually cancelled.
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