When the first of his books came out, the pantheon of primary readers was anchored by a trio of pallid characters: Dick, Jane, and some damn dog Spot. They did boring things — run! play! — in various boring ways, enervated by cold porridge prose.
Then along came Dr. Seuss. Off kilter drawings, quirky rhythms, and hare-brained adventures.
He is how I learned to read. I made my parents read those things to me until I had completely memorized them, a process made easier not only by their novelty, but by the cadences shoving the words into my brain. Having made the connection between sounds and words and letters, learning to read came effortlessly.
So how to view Dr. Seuss?
Poisonously, of course:
In the fall of 2017, there was a furor involving Dr. Seuss, the first lady and a school librarian that many people found surprising and disconcerting. In celebration of National Read a Book Day, Melania Trump had sent a parcel containing 10 Seuss titles to a school in Massachusetts.
What could possibly be wrong with this, providing such a powerful tool to help children read?
Lots, apparently.
At that point, we were well into the first year of the “Resistance,” and the librarian, Liz Phipps Soeiro, wanted to make various political points. Attacking Dr. Seuss was one of them. “Dr. Seuss is a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature,” she wrote in an open letter to Mrs. Trump, adding: “Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes.”
Being woke must be a real burden; but then, the savior business is never easy.
To be completely fair, Mr. Geissel was not without sin.
… in Geisel’s juvenilia, his early political cartooning and some of his first books for children, he evoked ethnic and racial caricatures that were common in the early 20th century and that, by the lights of the early 21st, appear shocking and shameful.
…
Is the full body of Geisel’s work fatally tainted by “harmful stereotypes”? Do the origins of the hat-wearing cat really lie in minstrelsy, as Kansas State University professor Philip Nel and others believe? And if so—assuming these transgressions are detectable to the civilian eye, which is not a sure thing—do they outweigh the joy and love of reading that Dr. Seuss brought to all sorts of children and families?
The author, Mrs. Gurdon, misses a critical point: the librarians presumption of an inborn moral superiority superpower.
This librarian is not alone. Everyone of these wokelings, the ones who want to tear down statues, rename buildings, or rubbish people like Mr. Gessel are, must be, asserting that their wokeness is timeless. That had they been alive in Dr. Seuss's time, they would have been just as enlightened as they are now. We must trust their judgment not as some post hoc virtue signaling, but rather as coming from a deeper place accessible only to the vanguard, give them special dispensation to decide for the rest of us which parts of our culture must be excised.
Thus, the first question to be asked of the this librarian, and every one of her ilk: Just who the hell do you think you are?
