March 8, 2021

“They cancelled Dr. Seuss,” so rang the battle cry. They are cancelling everything. Who is this infamous ‘they’? Why do ‘they’ want to run our lives? Or do they? Did ‘they’ even cancel Dr. Seuss in the first place?

I thought I should find out exactly what was going on. It turns out this mysterious ‘they’ had very little to do with cancelling the beloved author of children’s books. Six lesser-known books by the famous writer have been taken out of publication due to offensive imagery. The decision to remove these books was made by the very company that owns the rights to Dr. Seuss and controls the image and legacy of the iconic author.

Why is everyone so upset about this corporate decision?

Dr. Seuss Enterprises has stopped publishing And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937), If I Ran the Zoo(1950), McElligot’s Pool (1947), Scrambled Eggs Super! (1953), On Beyond Zebra! (1955) and The Cat’s Quizzer (1976). These books were written a lifetime ago, in another era. They were written in a time when racial stereotypes were the norm and people didn’t know any better, if they did, they didn’t care. Now we care and so does Dr. Seuss’ representatives. So it was decided these books shoul no longer be printed.

And people cry “cancel culture!”

The pushback has begun in earnest. Some are more upset at the thought of cancelling a few old and irrelevant books than they are about what those books and images represented. I understand the absurdity of it all when today’s youth has access to all the evils of our world in the palm of their hands. Meanwhile, these kids play videos games with graphic images of death and destruction;  what is a cartoon caricature to kids of today anyway?

It is from another time, another place. A place that we hope no longer exists. Some could argue that those books are part of our culture and our history. The funny thing is I never heard of any of them until this week.

After the announcement was made the value of Dr. Seuss books has skyrocketed. A copy of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street sold on eBay for $ 410.00 after starting out at $ 48.00. After the books were removed from publication, nine of the top ten, including the top four, books on Amazon‘s charts in the United States were Dr. Seuss books, though none were the books removed

I wonder if this was a very clever ploy by Dr. Seuss Enterprises… If it was, it worked well. I have read and heard more about Dr. Seuss in the last few days than I have in the last fifteen years. I was also amazed to find out that the writer of children’s books was the second highest-earning dead person of 2020, behind only Micheal Jackson.

The pushback against what was perceived as cancelling Dr. Seuss is just the tip of an iceberg that has been hovering beneath the surface. For the last few years, there has been a push back against efforts to rewrite history. It is time we recognized the inequalities of our past. It’s important to look at what has been done before and understand the wrongs that were committed. Our society needs to learn from our past; not cancel it. 

We can’t erase it. All we can do is be better.

Then I found out they fired Pepe Le Pew!

I never did like that skunk…