2004 commemorative Theodor Seuss Geisel United States Postal Service stamp

1,172 words

Dr. Seuss is CANCELED.

The publisher of the famous children’s books author announced this week it would suppress six of his works due to “racism.” Multiple school districts eliminated Dr. Seuss from their libraries. And, the worst insult of all, President Joe Biden erased Dr. Seuss from National Reading Day, an event originally meant to honor Theodor Seuss Geisel’s birthday.

Predictably, conservatives were outraged by this development and complained that this was one of the worst excesses of cancel culture. (Seuss’s books became best-sellers on Amazon during this hoopla.) The conservative backlash prompted the Washington Post’s Philip Bump to ask: “If curtailing racist imagery in Dr. Seuss is ‘cancel culture,’ what, exactly, is your culture?”

The question, as stated, is dumb. Bump claims harmless stereotypes need to be wiped from our society to achieve real progress. The journalist says Dr. Seuss’s depictions of African tribesmen and Asians are “hurtful anachronisms.” The ideal world, according to this journo, would not allow any of these stereotypical depictions to survive. That’s a call for radical cultural erasure, which should worry all sensible people.

This opinion is shared by most of the liberal commentariat. What’s most interesting about Bump’s opinion is how he describes conservatives’ cultural attitudes and why they’re so mad about cancel culture. “People who perceive criticism of the casual racism of the past as criticism of their own behavior or as a reminder of how the world around them is changing,” he writes. “It’s not that some Dr. Seuss books are being taken out of rotation. It’s that Seuss is a benchmark for a particular sort of American upbringing. Calling out Seuss’s — infrequent! — racist imagery is therefore an attack on that view of American identity.”

Bump says it makes for the perfect political focus for conservatives: “Attacking ‘cancel culture’ simultaneously allows the right to reinforce a sense that the world is changing around them and to blame the left — read: the media, technology firms — for attacking tradition or conservative values.”

This rings true. Ordinary Americans feel particularly aggrieved by the effects of cancel culture because it seems to steamroll over their cultural heritage. But what kind of cultural heritage do these boomer conservatives uphold? It’s not monuments dedicated to their ancestors or some shared folk culture — it’s Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head.

A week before Dr. Seuss’s cancellation, Hasbro announced that Mr. Potato Head would ditch the Mr. and now be gender-neutral. This caused similar fury among conservatives who could not believe the potato figurine would lose his detachable mustache. One conservative even made a meme Valhalla for all the canceled figures. It included fired Star Wars actress Gina Carano, Aunt Jemima, and Paw Patrol.

Colton Duncan on Twitter: “Our Cancelled Characters welcome a new hero today. Pour out some Syrup for Mr. Potato Head – he saved our lives, we are eternally grateful.