On Ham-Handed Seussian Cancellation
I’ve looked over these discontinued Seuss books:
And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
McElligot’s Pool
On Beyond Zebra
If I Ran The Zoo
I don’t have copies of these discontinued books:
Scrambled Eggs Super
The Cat’s Quizzer
- so of course, by the Forbidden Fruit Effect, I want to see them, though I can’t.
Of the ones I have, I think that Random House’s action was ham-handed and insincere. Most of these can be completely repaired with at most some minor edits. Here are the alleged offenses:
And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
There’s a fat jolly Rajah riding an elephant. Is that a problem? Rajahs are part of India’s history. Is this sensitivity or cultural erasure?
There’s “A Chinese man eating with sticks”. Again, harmless. Is being offended by a conical hat and chopsticks sensitivity, or is it Western cultural imperialism? Either way, it can be easily fixed with a small edit and a re-drawing. I propose “A fireman who’s juggling bricks”, with accompanying Seussian drawing. But the bean-counters in Corporate would have to pay for an artist.
McElligot’s Pool
This one baffles me. All I could find were “Eskimo fish”, wearing parkas. All right, that’s not their name for themselves; they call themselves “Inuit”. Very well then, let the fish be “Inuit fish”! That even scans better. But I insist, keep the fish parkas!
On Beyond Zebra
Another mystery. The scenes shown here are too Seussian to be from anywhere on Earth. Just what culture is being caricatured with “Spazz” for the “Spazzim” ridden by the “Nazzim of Bazzim”? He’s wearing _very_ vaguely Arabic clothes, and the Spazzim is a camel-like creature with a branching horns carrying, among other things, two three-handed clocks. Who’s offended and why?
Also there’s “Flunn”, standing for “Flunnel”, a “nice softish fellow” with sideburns, wearing softish clothes, a big hat, and he’s blowing into an “o’Grunth”, a musical instrument that looks like a combination of bagpipe, accordion, and who knows what. Again, who’s offended?
If I Ran The Zoo
I grant that some of these drawings are “problematic” for hypersensitive identity-politics. There’s the Zomba-ma-Tant, where the lad hunts with “helpers who wear their eyes at a slant”. There’s the scraggle-foot Mulligatawny, from the Desert of Zind, ridden by a brave chieftain, of whom “I’ll bring one back too.” Likewise there’s the Gusset, Gerkin, and other beasts, “and eight Persian princes will carry the basket / But what their names are, I don’t know, so don’t ask it.” So if you’re looking for offense, at a stretch, then the lad’s proprietary about the chieftain and the princes. I grant that the African bearers of the tizzle-topped Tufted Mazurka are pot-bellied, have weird head-knots, and big nose-rings; a caricature. Also there’s the Russian Palooski, whose headski is redski and belly is blueski, shown being carried by a soldier (presumably Russian) with a big blue hat, red coat, big beard, and bright red lips pursed in an O.
So the professionally offended might make a very weak case for those being ethnic stereotypes. But again these wacky drawings are all too Seussian to be stereotypical anything.
Cancelling those books for alleged inappropriateness is itself way inappropriate. If you must, then the Chinese man with chopsticks can be slightly rewritten and re-drawn. The Eskimo fish can become Inuit fish with a mere text edit. The Flunnel and the Nazzim are from nowhere on Earth. I say they’re innocent!
If some humorless Grinch thinks it absolutely necessary to desecrate “If I Ran The Zoo”, then the offending pages can be deleted; an artistic loss, but we get to keep the Obsk, the Natch, the Tic-Tac-Toe, the propeller bug, the Chuggs, the Twerll, the Bad-Animal-Catching-Machine, the Iota, a weird-horned deer, another family of deer sharing horns, a family of Lunks, some Joats, a family of arctic What-do-you-know, an Elephant-Cat, a tower of six hens who roost in each other’s top-knots, and a ten-footed lion!
But I don’t think that PC has much to do with Random House’s random decimation of Seuss’s legacy. I think that what’s really happening is corporate bean-counting. Corporate wants to slim down its inventory, to boost next quarter’s profit margin; but it doesn’t want its soulless hatred of art, creativity, and joy to be too obvious; so Random House pseudo-justified its random cancellations by the pretense of neo-Puritan censorship.
If this be woke, then soulless woke is bought and sold!
May Seuss us keep
From gimlet vision
And corporate sleep!
