People of my generation learned to read with Dr. Seuss. Sure, there were some child-like hijinks in the doctor’s prescriptions but to many toddlers the rhyme and rhythm were music to the ears, tonic to the souls and tutors to the unschooled. Mostly, they were exactly what Dr. Seuss intended them to be – entertaining, mischievous children’s literature.
Dr. Seuss succeeded for nearly a century. In that time, millions of children learned to read and Dr. Seuss was awarded numerous prizes. President Barack Obama lauded him in 2016: “March 2 is also the birthday of one of America’s revered wordsmiths. Theodor Seuss Geisel — or Dr. Seuss — used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear.”
Dr. Seuss is the Left’s latest victim. They cancelled him. eBay has banned many of his books including “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.” (while continuing to sell Mein Kampf). The company that survives him, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, grovels that, “These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.” The cardboard cutout passing for the current President of the United States or America has expunged Dr. Seuss from his proclamation celebrating Read Across America Day.
(But he didn’t do so in a press conference, because he doesn’t do press conferences. He’s gone longer without his first press conference than any president has gone in over 100 years. Perhaps his only moment of semi-cognition came in front of a camera a few days ago when he asked himself aloud, “What am I doing here?” Get ready for President Kamala Harris.)
Dr. Mengele got better press from the lefty media than Dr. Seuss is getting. So is Dr. Seuss really Subversive, Racist, Misogynistic Seuss? You decide. Here’s a link to Mulberry Street.
If he is indeed racist, he’s in pretty good company. Amazon reports that sales of Mulberry Street are up 50,000% since the cancelation of the good doctor. I think you’ll decide, as all those Amazon customers apparently have decided, that the answer to my question is no. He’s not racist. So ask yourself, why has the Left bothered to cancel Dr. Seuss?
I suggest there are two reasons. One, the Left just likes to flex their muscles. It’s the same reason they burn and loot. It’s because they’re bullies. It’s because they can.
Two, they truly want to extinguish those values that President Obama characterized as “universal values we all hold dear.” The Left’s mission is to burn down Western Civilization. They’re not sure what they’ll rebuild, but they don’t care. Hateful, angry, violent people aren’t builders, they’re burners.
the Aspen beat 
I have been waiting and waiting for some sensible adult to stand up to the Leftists and to tell them their cancelling of various people, books, movies, and so forth as well as their ever growing list of “objectionable” words and phrases, are nonsense. Decades ago, we started with a noble idea, equality for all, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex. Now we have descended into a state that is far from one of serious people attending to serious problems.
I agree with your narrow point, but on a broader level I disagree with it.
The Left seeks to cancel Western Civilization. I mean that quite literally. This is indeed a “serious problem” being attended to by “serious people” on both sides. This is war and our entire culture is at stake.
And who will save us? The Courts? The Army? Like Religion and The Academy, they’ve been infiltrated. It’s time for beating ploughshares into swords.
Chad, have you ever tried to attack an Apache Helicopter or an Abrams Tank with a sword?
No, violence in the problem, not the solution. (And swaggering talk of violence is just juvenile.)
The solution is activism. Boycott companies. Write letters. Don’t be shy about respectfully speaking your mind in social settings. Speak up. Too many conservatives think that “fighting for the cause” means self-satisfying whining on Facebook. In reality, fighting for the cause is real work.
Fully agree. I was using “swords” figuratively, in contrast to passive inaction. Your sword is your keyboard, for example.
There goes banned book week.
Some unpublished Seussian text:
“Slow Joe Biden is rapidly ridin’
Over the hill with Dr. Jill.
And now he’s hidin’
While his mind is slidin’
Down the other side.
Poor Joe, such woe
the woke Zeitgeist will blow,
Now that our foe
Has seized the tide
And cancels what we know.
Decades ago, before the internet, we ridiculed West Germany for censuring Donald Duck for not wearing pants.
Censorship is back!!!
Thanks for the link to the book! Of course, there’s nothing wrong with it.
I have cut my financial links to Amazon, using an alternate credit card and buying things locally wherever I can. I will not renew my Prime membership when it come up.
Scare crow has been removed from all presentations of The Wizard of Oz including text, photos, and videos; His portrayal as a gender male and as a mindless fool discriminates against Democrats in particular and all politicians in general.
The Communist Manifesto is available on Amazon! Interesting that these woke nazis are worried about Dr. Seuss is banned but not the Communist Manifesto or Mein Kampf! This is simple asininity.
I hope you realize, equating the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf is a thought crime.
“Is Mulberry Street racist?”
Of course it is. **Everything** is racist.
As Patrick Henry once said, ” Let it come”.
Until the vast majority of the populace suffer under a tyrannical system, they just won’t wake up, and act up , decisively enough to change things.
The mealy mouthed suggestions to email people in charge who don’t give a damn about your emails, and ” speak up to a few niegbbors”, won’t have a bit of effect upon those with the power to shut you you up.
The behavior of Jews (and citizens of good will) in Germany in the 1930s testifies to the truth of your second sentence.
But looking at that sentence from the leftist (Marxist) point of view, it is the vast majority of women, people of color, and so on that HAS suffered under the “tyrannical system” embodied in the “1619” version of American history, and now these “oppressed” classes ARE acting “decisively enough to change things.” And, boy, are they changing things! Everything from sexual identity to the meaning of “Huckleberry Finn.”
You say, “Let it come,” but it HAS come and is now upon us like an avalanche. It’s 1641 in England, 1788 in France, 1916 in Russia, almost 1984 in Orwell’s novel. What is left to wait for? The Woke Gestapo is about a block from your front door, having already stolen an election, fabricated a fake, Reichstag-fire “insurrection” out of the January 6 event, and unleashed the thought police upon the world of commerce, entertainment, and religion.
What is left to wake up to?
Just to provide a concrete exemplar of your characterization of leftists as bullies who loot and burn because they can, it’s the The Joker in “The Dark Knight,” whose actions have no rationale other than that he “likes to see things burn.” Of course, he is simply a variation on the far older figure known to the Western world as Satan. In other words, the sociopathic anarchists acting out in Portland, for example, night after night after night are best understood as “demonic” — as possessed by demons.
Since The Enlightenment, to be sure, we have grown uncomfortable with what is called “demonizing” people we don’t like, and with the whole concept of “spiritual warfare,” but it’s time to concede that ancient understandings are perhaps more to the point than those provided by modern social sciences and political philosophies. The Left is infernal. Period.
This is the first time I’ve read “Mulberry Street”. Ironically, I was eating my lunch, sushi, with chop sticks at the time. So maybe I’m not a racist. I’m not sure what the ‘cancellers’ would make of that.
My conclusion is that I think the reporters for print, television, CNN, FOX, New York Times, all of them, read this book as children over and over again without ever reading the last page. They learned how to embellish the simple facts to the point of absurdity but never went back to just stating the simple facts.
Somehow it doesn’t matter how angry I am at the toppling of my country in front of the whole freaking world – no one is DOING anything! I realize that only 4% of Americans participated in our revolution in the beginning, but we don’t even have that? Surely a few good citizens have the courage to come forward with more than just words and lead us out of this nightmare. Or not. Trump did a helluva job kickstarting it, but c’mon man – we’re better than these thugs.
Glenn, your production is brilliant, completely, unqualifiedly, brilliant!!! Particularly, or at least at this point, regarding this pathetic effort on the part of the desperate libs/lefties/”progressives”/moral relativists/subjectivists/humanists/secularists/Democrat goodns. Thank you!!!
Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, et. al. may not have lived to see it, but the triumph of the Frankfurt School has been absolute.
Greeat blog you have