Hey, it's Jackie, back briefly from hiatus to issue a quick update on something I feel needs to be said. I didn't think I'd be using the Dr. Seuss hashtag on Blogger again, and no, it has nothing to do with Ted Cruz. (I've never tried Green Eggs and Ham. But I do not like him, Scam-He-Am.)
. . . . .
So the Seuss estate recently decided to cease publication of a number of books by the author that, after consultation with a panel of experts, "portrayed people in ways that were hurtful and wrong." They were declared to have some problematic drawings and caricatures that were demeaning towards people of colour. Several depicted Asian people in an unflattering or prejudicial manner (as was, unfortunately, de rigeur for the WWII era), and a few others were disparaging towards Black and South Asian people, depicting them as animals belonging in the zoo. This is a bad thing anyway, but it's especially bad when we live in a time when the vice president of the United States is a woman of Black and South Asian parentage, which itself is a very good thing. Times change and so do we.
Apparently On Beyond Zebra was among this set of now "banned" books. I mention this because it's from that book where the (not racist, to the best of my awareness) Miss Fuddle Duddle also makes her appearance, from which this blog, and the identity of its author, derives the name.
I'm of two minds about this. Obviously, first and foremost as a white person it's not up to me what should be considered racist (and apparently, the pictures were pretty awful), and the decision rests with the man's estate as to what should be done with the works. But on the other hand, a part of me wonders if just those parts, or those characters, couldn't have been cut out if they didn't affect the story much, and possibly new characters introduced to replace them, so that the books could remain intact. Disney's Fantasia excised a very problematic segment where a grotesquely-drawn Black minotaur is depicted as the "servant" to a glamourous white minotaur "princess." But the movie still exists, and is a classic, dogged and dispelled rumours of Uncle Walt's purported anti-Semitism notwithstanding. But regardless, you have titles like Fantasia that can be salvaged for contemporary audiences of a more enlightened era, and then you have titles like Song of the South or a set of infamous Looney Tunes shorts that are so deplorable they can't be cleaned up or otherwise redeemed.
I'm not sure the latter applies to the "censored six" Seuss books, and have my qualms about a scorched earth approach possibly making a martyr of Seuss among the bad-faith right-wing agitators, who he most likely would have found as detestable as he did Adolf the big bad wolf. It's called the Streisand effect, such that making something "banned" only makes it more popular. The last thing that I want is to have the Seuss characters co-opted as symbols of conservative trollishness in the same manner as they did to Pepe the frog, and their German forebears did to a Sanskrit symbol of universality and peace. For my own selfish reasons, I guess, I don't want Miss Fuddle Duddle to become rebranded as a MAGA Nazi muse, a damsel in distress who needs to be "saved" from "cancel culture." (She's a Democrat and a diehard supporter of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party of Canada, after all. Well, I am anyway.)
But here's the thing: Even though the books are technically out of "new" circulation (and "collector's item" copies are selling for hundreds if not thousands of dollars on Amazon and eBay), they're not really "cancelled," per se. One, because the Internet is forever (and you just know that pirated copies will be digitized at some point), and two, because "cancel culture" isn't really a thing. It's just something for right-wingers to get mad about instead of children in cages and half-a-million COVID deaths. Three, because it's probably more likely that the kind of idiots who would go so far as to make a fucking children's book character into a mascot for their zombie brain-allergic MAGA cult probably never read it in the first place, and they probably won't, not because the book isn't available but because they probably can't read at all.
So what I'm saying is that, Miss Fuddle Duddle is safe; she's just retired and living a fabulous life in Costa Rica, far from her troublesome cousins. Her namesake is still very much active as a blogger of Canadian politics, a subject that is unrelated to the content of the book. Her signature (which you can see at the top of this page) stands zero chance of becoming a 21st-century swastika and neither do any of the other letters in the Seussabet. "Fuddle Duddle" as a phrase telling conservatives to fuck off will never, and I mean never, become a modern-day equivalent to "MAGA" or "Sieg Heil."
But I guess, it took this (this?) to pull me back early from staycation, because I wasn't going to poke my head back in until at least the end of March to see if Mister Fuddle Duddle's rocky road on COVID vaccines had smoothed itself out. Apparently it has, a little bit (though I haven't, and will not, for my own mental health, check any polls on the matter until quite a bit later); there's now a third vaccine candidate that's been approved and more are coming down the way, which should free up a little bit of wiggle room for Dearest Justin to embark on a little bit more multitasking as we start to spring forward. It might not get done as quickly as the U.S. but it's not going to be an eternity either. I think as more shots start coming in and more people get jabs over the course of this year, they'll start to realize that.
At least, I hope that's the case.
There's a joke in here somewhere. Something about living next door to an elephant who hears the W.H.O.
I'm back, Canada. Please, for everyone's sake... don't get fooled again.
