No doubt you've heard the news that the publishers of Dr. Seuss books have decided to pull six titles from their range. The internet was a-flutter and it seems everyone has something to say. The criteria for the canceling is bewildering, as is typical of Woke logic. While some pointed out that the criteria for the books being canceled has not been applied uniformly, others noted that tomes containing similar illustrations are still available on Amazon.
The Week suggests that the latest casualty of cancel culture is "chilling" saying that people are "right to worry about harsh and unforgiving judgments of dated attitudes."
Dan McLaughlin gave a great outline of cancel culture at National Review, and pointed out that a number of Dr. Seuss books actually champion the Leftist values held by Theodore Geisel himself. He thinks it ironic that in the past, conservatives have been lambasted for being censorious, yet today "the book-banning energy is all on the left."
Tom Slater wrote at Spiked that, "The woke left rages against increasingly bizarre things, and then calls everyone else crazy." He says, "A sane and self-confident culture would not feel the need to erase any whiff of ugliness from 70-year-old children’s books and would trust citizens to read them without imbibing their implicit prejudices."
Both McLaughlin and Slater ask why parents can't be trusted to teach their children how to engage with old books. Slater writes, "If you genuinely think that building a better society starts with rebranding the kids’ toys, you have no business calling anyone else crazy." And yet, the deliberate targeting of children by the Progressive Left might be crazy like a fox.
The New York public library has said it won't remove the Seuss books from its shelves, but when current copies wear out, they will be withdrawn from circulation. While it's not necessary to fork out thousands to get hold of a physical copy of Dr. Seuss, building a library for your family is something Rev. Fisk has promoted for a while now.
A New York Times columnist has suggested Pepe Le Pew should be next. Bryan Preston at PJ Media admits he never liked the character, but sees the danger of the rapidly expanding memory-hole that Woke-ism is creating. He wonders if Hollywood will collapse under its own double-standard, creating Pepe Le Pews while letting sexual predators run the show. He writes:
"[Hollywood is] full of awful people who did and do despicable things to get rich and obtain power, and they made a sewer of our culture along the way. Harvey Weinstein was their king and they’re really not worth defending. So now do 'George Lucas appropriated Japanese culture to make Star Wars.' Because he totally did. Let’s see Mao’s House at Disney deal with that." Boom.
As we've pointed out before in Mad Mondays, thinking that we can own Woke folks by pointing out their hypocrisy is a losing game. Even the justifiable warning about slippery slopes is met with shrugs. Pastor Fisk has said, regarding our Christian witness, that sometimes defending our faith with arguments is not the best tactic. It is hard to convince those who are blinded by the spirit of the age that they are deceived.
There may have been a time when culture reinforced the idea of natural law, objective truth, and a God who is storing up wrath, but that is not the case today. As C.S. Lewis noted, we now need to deliver the diagnosis before we can even "win a hearing for the cure." Sometimes we just need to state the truth, take the heat and stand our ground.
Although we shared this before, Dr. Seuss being rapped over Dr. Dre beats is something to smile about...
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