I am an idiot Sam I am.

I have been listening to progressive sham.

I need a helping of Green Eggs and Ham,

A Cat in the Hat and Horton too,

To clear my brain from cancel culture poo.

As the modern world cancel culture stupid increases, I find myself looking for that cat in the hat to loan me his tall chapeaus for my exploding brain. “Offensive” has become an art imbibed by those with time on their hands. I guess COVID lockdowns have given the intolerant tolerant more time to up the ante on dumb.  But before putting all the blame on the pathetically inane, I also blame the families of past authors and public figures who are drinking the same Kool-Aid and throwing their relatives who afforded them their comfortable existence under the proverbial bus.

Dr. Suess is the newest victim to the cancel culture offensive morality police. Those of us endowed with the gift of the pen and gab have been preparing “you”, the docile public, for months of the pending censorship doom. A slow progression toward elimination of freedoms enjoyed for two hundred years by Americans in the good ole US of A. Disguised as sensitivity and anti-bigotry narrative, morons have managed to hijack education, universities, politics, and now literature and art. “Offensive” was the cry of the booted Nazi as he burnt Jewish literature in the streets of Berlin. It was the cry of the Bolsheviks as they confiscated literature deemed “offensive” to the Motherland.  Censorship for the good of all is censorship for the good of none.

Like a bulldozer cutting through dirt and thrash, the cancel culture fascists are going after what is deemed in the world of dictatorships as “harmful” to society. Their society. The bulldozer has gone after past presidents to include Lincoln, the champion of emancipation from slavery. It continued down Sesame Street, putting Big Bird, Bert, Ernie, Elmo, Kermit, the Cookie Monster and other “undesirables” on the Most Wanted List. Rumbling down the street the progressive bulldozer will eventually come after your Bible, Quran, and any other book deemed “offensive” by a minority of soft brained morons.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was a genius. He managed to write simple repetitive prose which allowed kids as young as toddler age to start reading. My children both started reading at three years of age, thanks to Dr. Seuss. His books took children to a world of imagination and simple ethics by defining right from wrong in a manner that was non-threatening and easily understood. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas personified good over evil with cutting edge creativity portrayed in the Who’s innocence against the Grinch’s wickedness, who at the end felt the “spirit” of Christmas and converted.  A library of well thought children’s literature that educated young minds through the quagmire of life. Imaginative narrations that sought to teach and remind that albeit the world is diverse, and often difficult, it ultimately can reform and be good. A genius in simplicity.

Enter the pinheads. According to the family of Theodore, they received complaints from teachers, academics, and specialists about the books being non-compliant in diversity. A good reason to revoke some teachers’ certificates, fire morons on campuses, and ignore those who think they know better than we do. These mental midgets found the books rife in “orientalism, antiblackness, and white supremacy”. You heard that right folks. Dr. Suess wore a white sheet and burnt crosses on front porches. According to intellectual buffoons like “researchers” Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens, in the 2,240 characters created by Geisel, only 45 were of color. Messer Ishizuka and Stephens wrote a paper on Research on Diversity in Youth Literature and “studied” 50 Dr. Suess books written over the span of 70 years. They decided that some books smacked of “orientalism” because characters were drawn wearing turbans. Can’t make this up. The angst didn’t stop there: even the “animals transmitted” orientalism, antiblackness, and white supremacy. The “study” went on to conclude that throughout his books, Dr. Seuss “degraded and dehumanized across his hundreds of racist works.” At this point, I don’t know who is worse, the research idiots or the yahoo family.

To put everything into perspective: Theodore Seuss Geisel was anti-isolationist and critical of anti-Semitism. He was anything but a bigot. During WWII he brought attention to the evil of Nazism through his political cartoons that were scathingly in-your-face in revealing the Jewish plight in Europe. This has been lost on the ignorant critics like Messer Ishizuka and Stephens’ labeling of Geisel as a “racist political cartoonist”. The idiocy of that statement is further compounded by the fact that in 1939 Geisel faced opposition as an avid supporter of Jews at home and abroad. The US under the FDR administration was not very open to receiving Jewish migrants. But that’s not all. Under the same administration, an executive order was signed ordering segregation in wartime factories, prompting Geisel, a big civil rights activist to publish cartoons against this order, making him a “rare voice” during war time. Another little-known fact about Geisel; he wrote “Horton Hears a Who” as an apology for the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII. He wrote the book after a visit to Hiroshima, Japan. He also apologized for a cartoon he had published stereotyping the American Japanese as the enemy.  

“Offensive” has become the passport to a cancel culture that is intolerant, prejudiced, bigoted, and ignorant. If we have to start cancelling offensive material, how about some Rap songs rife with violence, vulgarity, and demeaning to women? How about censoring politicians as they label opposing opinion or people as racist, deplorable, stupid, and other descriptive verbiage of that ilk? How about certain Congresswomen calling Jews ‘little Benjamins”? I’m constantly offended at stupid. I find our Speaker of the House offensive. She gives women a bad name. I find Mrs. Clinton offensive. She gives pant suits and truth a bad name. I find Congresswoman AOC offensive. She gives brains a bad name. I find most mainstream media offensive because they bloviate.

The destruction of literature and art is nothing new. Dictatorships and totalitarians find them offensive and unacceptable because they open up minds to possibilities adverse to the mundane. Freedom of thought is not conducive to control. Control the brain and the rest of the person follows. Books written in the past give us a glimpse into the good, bad, and the ugly of a world our parents and grandparents lived in. Those written today illustrate our persona in a moment in time that generations from now will hopefully learn from. Each word, picture, idea, and sentence is written with the author’s or artist’s view of the world as he or sees it at that particular moment in time. It will live forever to either admire or admonish. Whichever one it falls under, future generations will and should learn from it. No good is accomplished without the evil that precedes it. If we are to learn from our mistakes, we must maintain a copy of those mistakes for posterity and not to be repeated. It was through the written word that we learned about the horrors of the Holocaust and slavery. That might all change if we allow the cancel culture morons to succeed.

Horton saved Whoville

Ain’t that swell,

He saved it from evil

But who can tell?

We need a Horton

We need him right now,

To save our Whoville

From the cancel crowd.

We need the Cat

To show us more tricks

On how to stop madness

From spoiling Whoville.

I say to all Whovilles

Don’t let them get away,

With taking our books

Our literature away.

Let’s get the Grinch

To play a cool trick

And drive all the pinheads,

From Whoville forthwith.

Dr. Seuss decision followed lengthy study of racist themes in his books (nypost.com)

8 Of Dr. Seuss’s Best Political Cartoons (theodysseyonline.com)