Before I get started here, I just want to make one thing absolutely clear: A huge chunk of Dr. Seuss’s works should be in the public domain. Titles such as The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and even the now infamous six titles that Dr. Seuss Enterprises has decided to stop publishing rightfully belong to all of us. If not for the constant lengthening of the copyright term both in the United States and abroad, we’d have a functioning public domain that would render much of the “cancel culture” nonsense moot.
That doesn’t just mean that people would be free to print and publish problematic books they like. That also means people could freely remix problematic art, expurgating offensive images and words or scaling them up to point out the ugly yet commonplace bits of racism, homophobia, misogyny, etc. that is threaded throughout our culture.
I Do Not Like Them, Sam I Am
I remember the Amy Grant boycotts. Not so much Sandy Patty, but our household was definitely an Amy Grant household. We were also Nazarenes when I was growing up, and Grant’s penchant for blue jeans, makeup and jewelry was often a sore subject for some of the more Pentacostal-leaning members of the church.
The more recent boycotts of Disney and Procter & Gamble were homophobic in nature (although there was a Satanic Panic boycott of P&G back in the 80s). I definitely remember rolling my eyes at these boycotts. Like the much more recent #CancelDisneyPlus caterwauling over the firing of Gina Carano, it’s awful hard to effectively boycott something that is as ubiquitous in your life as Star Wars, Mickey Mouse, or Crest toothpaste.
No, if you really want to put the screws to someone or something you don’t like, why stop at just not buying it yourself? You need to make sure that no one else can ever buy it. And that is the difference between boycotting and cancel culture. Commentary like @cmatchell’s is disingenuous at best.
At worst, it’s ignorant. It’s essentially a “tu quoque” fallacy, and you see it all around these days. I like to call it a “goose and gander” argument. Goose and gander arguments are often apples and oranges comparisons. You only get to a goose and gander argument by strawmanning and grossly oversimplifying the issues at hand. Popular examples include:
- If you’re a liberal pro-choicer who believes “My body, my choice,” you’re a hypocrite for supporting mandatory vaccination
- If you’re a conservative who’s pro-life, you’re a hypocrite for supporting the death penalty
- If you believe a Christian baker should sell a cake to a same-sex couple, you should also believe that Twitter ought to provide a platform for inciting violence
- If you think BLM protests are a good thing, you should also be onboard with an attempted insurrection at the Capitol Building in an attempt to overthrow the results of a democratic election
Setting aside the boycott/cancel distinction, is @cmatchell saying that Christians were correct to “cancel” Sandy Patty, Amy Grant, Disney, and Proctor & Gamble? Or is she admitting that cancel culture is wrong because the Christians did it?
Pack Up Those Things and You Take Them Away!
Dr. Seuss Enterprises is perfectly within their rights to remove a book from publication. But if you really want to disappear the books, you need to remove them from reseller platforms like eBay and Amazon. You need to remove them from libraries. You need to remove Seuss’s name from the national Read a Book Day that shares his birthday.
The decision to memory hole six (relatively) unpopular titles, if anything, feels like propitiation. Old Testament propitiation. As in, a sacrifice made to appease the gods and keep them from eating you. Or, in the case of Seuss, to keep an angry and vengeful mob from eating the Sneetches or the Cat in the Hat. Didn’t you know that the academic study that started this whole thing specifically calls out the Sneetches for not being sufficiently anti-racist and accuses the Cat of being a stand-in for blackface minstrelsy?
Something of note in all this:
They made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of those six books. They knew this day was coming, and they prepared for it. For those who are concerned about where Cancel Culture might lead, we’re already there.
This is beyond a chilling effect. Here we have, I believe, the first real example of a media company readying a sacrifice to the mobs. How many other media companies or personalities have already picked out their sacrificial scapegoats? What does this do the culture at large?
And to Think That I Saw It on Twitter
The world has moved on since I started picking away at this blog entry a week and a half ago. Pepe Le Pew came under fire for “adding to rape culture.” (Because what young man hasn’t taken romantic cues from a cartoon skunk that keeps getting shut down?) Trying to keep up with the outrage du jour is exhausting, and I think that’s part of the point. To overwhelm the culture at large. To wear us out so we just stop struggling and go along with the program.
It’s a bit ironic when you think about it, but the critical theory-types are essentially colonialists; missionaries who are forcing their version of civility on us poor ignorant savages, encouraging us to give up our heathen traditions in favor of their anointed imports and overlays. The more recent converts to this religion are of course the most devout. And like any religion during a crusade, the ends justify the means.
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