RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/and-then-they-came-for-on-beyond

Last week I learned that the copy of Dr. Seuss’ On Beyond Zebra that I and my daughters have so enjoyed for years is now officially a collector’s item. The Seuss estate has decided to no longer publish it and five other Seuss books because of their racist imagery.

I get that we might not want to be showing kids some of the images in the other books, where the only black people depicted are exotic, subservient “natives,” or the only East Asian is a Chinese person who “eats with sticks” in To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

However, I was at first perplexed as to just what was now offensive in On Beyond Zebra and had to page through it carefully. I assume that the problem is with one, or perhaps two, pictures in it that could be interpreted as “Orientalist.”

Here – and frankly, perhaps in this response to pictures in the other books as well – I can’t help seeing something more about gesture and virtue signalling than about genuine concern for shaping young minds.

* * *

Like most of the now discontinued books, Zebra is not one of the better-known Seuss titles, but it has always been one of my favorites and has long been a staple at reading time in my home. It proposes an extra twenty “letters” of the alphabet, each shown as “spelling” the name of some classically Seussian weird animal or object. The book is a wordfest, and an utter delight to read. I have especially enjoyed watching my older daughter. gradually learn to read out the passages themselves:

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/05/we-didnt-start-this-culture-war/

Kermit the Frog. Mr Potato Head. Dr Seuss. The culture war becomes more infantile by the day. Quite literally. The big talking points of the past few weeks have focused almost exclusively on children’s TV shows, toys and authors.

First Disney Plus slapped a warning label on The Muppets Show, due to the ‘negative depictions and / or mistreatment of people or cultures’ it apparently features, acknowledging the ‘harmful impacts’ these puppets have inflicted on generations of youngsters.

Then there was the de-gendering of Mr Potato Head. Hasbro announced that the beloved toy brand would drop the honorific, so as to make it more gender inclusive (while still keeping the Mr and Mrs Potato Head characters).

Then they came for Dr Seuss, as it were. Joe Biden conspicuously removed any mention of the beloved author from his proclamation on Read Across America Day this week, which was up until now also known as Dr Seuss Day. A Virginia school district also instructed its teachers to ‘not connect Read Across America Day with Dr Seuss’. Most strikingly, the Seuss estate said it would cease publishing six of the more ‘problematic’ titles.

This followed a years-long campaign on the part of some academics to repose Seuss as a racist, due to the old stereotypical depictions in some of his books (ignoring the fact that while his work reflects some of the prejudices of his time, he also satirised racism, fascism and nationalism).

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&

My February 22 post noted that the “deplatforming” of seemingly mainstream conservative voices by the Big Tech oligarchs was reaching ever greater levels of audacity. That post covered some truly extreme instances of the phenomenon, including the total blocking by Twitter on January 8 of all accounts associated with then-sitting President Trump, and the removal on January 11 of Twitter’s biggest competitor Parler from its Amazon servers and then from the Google and Apple app stores. Those examples are rather hard to top.

But those apparent successes have only inspired the deplatformers on to new gambits. Clearly, this phenomenon is not going away any time soon. Even since that post less than two weeks ago, there has been a continuing series of strikes by the big tech censors, each time aimed at someone who has transgressed the current boundaries of political correctness.

On the other hand, from observing each new strike of the censors as it occurs, it’s hard to perceive exactly what the grand plan may be. Maybe there isn’t one. This is much more like the Cambodian genocide than its Nazi predecessor: rather than the enemies all getting rounded up and hauled off at once to the extermination camps, we instead have, every few days, another one or a few seemingly randomly-selected enemies suddenly disappearing without explanation, never to be seen again. One imagines at each Big Tech company a group a several twenty-somethings, just out of college, sitting around the conference room filled with open pizza boxes, rubbing their hands together and giggling and saying things like “Let’s see who we can get away with canceling next!” OK, today this is probably happening on Zoom meetings rather than in actual conference rooms, but it’s the same idea.

I have compiled below some of the more recent deplatformings, all of which are certainly well up there on the audacity scale. Here goes:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/the_democrats_cancel_culture_is_escalating_fast.html

“Within just the past week, the Democrats have canceled Dr. Seuss, Trump’s CPAC speech, and a popular cartoon.”

When someone first does something he knows is wrong, he does it carefully, under the radar, because he fears getting caught. If there are no consequences, he repeats the act, without guilt – and if he’s actually feted for his wrongdoing, he will soon act with complete impunity. That’s what we’re seeing when it comes to Democrats erasing everything they dislike – and what they most dislike is America and any opposition to their beliefs. This week, Democrats brazenly canceled Dr. Seuss, Trump’s CPAC speech, and the Mallard Fillmore cartoon strip. In their own minds, they are unstoppable.

This week opened with the left’s war on Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss. Overnight, the children’s author who dedicated decades of his career to fighting racism is being denounced as an arch-racist. It’s true that, in the 1940s, Geisel reflected the prejudices of that era’s Democrats. However, by 1961, Geisel was writing The Sneetches, which pushed the classic liberal doctrine that racism is bad because we are all equal, regardless of superficial physical differences.

Tucker Carlson argues compellingly that today’s Democrats aren’t canceling Seuss because some of his early works traded in racist stereotypes. Instead, he says, they’re canceling him because he insisted that race does not determine who we are. Carlson’s probably right. That colorblind view of the world is anathema to today’s leftists. If you don’t believe that, just look at this little piece of racial propaganda from the Cartoon Network.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/03/the-cancellation-of-dr-seuss-should-disturb-you-because-youre-next/

Dr. Seuss has been cancelled. Some of his work has been deemed racist, and we can’t have that. On Tuesday, the entity that oversees the estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel announced it would no longer publish six of Geisel’s books because they “portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong.”

Among the works now deemed unfit for children are Geisel’s first book under the pen name Dr. Seuss, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” published in 1937, and the much-beloved, “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950. The former depicts a “Chinaman” character and the latter shows two men from “the African island of Yerka” in native garb.

There’s not much point in quibbling over whether these and other such illustrations in the condemned Dr. Seuss books are in fact racist or bigoted, or whether Geisel held racist or xenophobic views. By all accounts he was a liberal-minded and tolerant man who hated Nazis and, as a political cartoonist, mocked the antisemitism that was all-too-common in America during World War II.

He was also a man of his era. Later in life, he regretted some of his political work during the war that stereotyped Japanese Americans, which, as jarring as it might seem today, nevertheless reflected attitudes that were commonplace at the time.

But context and nuance don’t factor into the inexorable logic of the woke left, which flattens and refashions the past into a weapon for the culture wars of the present. What’s important to understand is that this isn’t simply about banning six Dr. Seuss books. All of Geisel’s work is, in the judgment of left-wing academia, an exercise in “White supremacy, paternalism, conformity, and assimilation.” It might be easy for conservatives to laugh that off as nonsense, but they shouldn’t, because this isn’t really even about Geisel.

The Left Is Carrying Out a Cultural Revolution

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/video-coca-cola-being-less-white-frontpagemagcom/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Will Johnson, the Founder of UniteAmericaFirst.com.

Will focuses on Coca-Cola & Being ‘Less White’, unveiling The sick and twisted world of “diversity training.”

Don’t miss it!

https://spectator.us/topic/beware-linguistic-trojan-horse-dictionaries/

Print dictionaries used to act as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’)

It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question: ‘What’s the book you’re never without?’ Of course, there’s no book I lug about with me everywhere, but inanity comes with this territory. I responded: ‘A tattered, duct-taped blue hardcover of my Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (based on Webster’s Third) published in 1969.’

Lame? Actually, no. Access to older analogue dictionaries has become politically invaluable.

Pre-internet, august dictionaries such as Webster’s and the OED functioned as linguistic anchors. Beneficially slow to adapt and resistant to vernacular fashion, print editions that were expensive to reissue acted as drags on popular misunderstandings (no, ‘notorious’ does not mean ‘famous’). By calling us to shared agreement on what words did and didn’t mean, hard-copy dictionaries helped facilitate clear, precise communication. But online dictionaries have jettisoned this conservative purpose. Capable of being updated daily, digital definitions change with the wind, and are eternally playing catch-up with galloping popular ignorance. The hoi polloi, not the fuddy-duddies, are in charge.

This leaves English susceptible to witlessness, yet also to deliberate manipulation. We’re not talking merely about rapidly evolving slang, but about the meaning of staple, commonplace vocabulary, revised definitions of which can slyly import partisan ideological baggage to everyday discourse.