We’ve seen financial bubbles in the stock market, housing market and bitcoin, but until recently we’ve never seen a bubble when it comes to classic children’s books.
That all changed last week when six books written by the late, great Theodor Seuss Geisel – aka. Dr. Seuss – were targeted by his own publishing company, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, for cancellation due to allegedly racist language.
John Balentine, a former managing editor for the Lakes Region Weekly, lives in Windham.
But surprise, surprise, each of the targeted tomes, all written decades ago, are fetching sky-high prices on Amazon.
By Sunday morning, Dr. Seuss’ “If I Ran the Zoo” was valued at $594 in hardcover and $799 in paperback. “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street” had reached $269. “Scrambled Eggs Super!” was fetching $500. “On Beyond Zebra!” was at $399. “McElligot’s Pool” reached $400. And “The Cat’s Quizzer” was at $693.84.
And good luck getting the books at those prices. To borrow a Seussism, “Oh, the places (or prices) they’ll go!” Oftentimes, depending on condition, each book was listed in the $1,000+ range. As the good doctor’s Cat in the Hat oft exclaimed, “Oh dear!”
Who would have ever guessed that Dr. Seuss books would fall victim to the cancel culture? Surely not anyone who lived in the 1980s, when Americans were still free to think and say what they felt, with no fear of being canceled.
Political correctness, sparked by President George H.W. Bush’s infamous call for a “kinder, gentler nation” and sculpted into virulent, fascist form by liberals in the 1990s and 2000s, hadn’t yet reared its ugly, diabolical head, and we all used to enjoy saying, “It’s a free country. I can say what I want.”
We used to live and let live, as Paul McCartney sang, because, frankly, we had more important things to worry about. We were in a cold war with Russia, wondering when we were all going to die from nuclear fallout.
Though I was young, I still remember wondering when the Russians would stop loving their children, too, as Sting sang, and bring an end to the American capitalist scum living across the Bering Strait.
But as communism collapsed and America grew richer and unrivaled, political correctness started taking over.
Today’s cancel culture is the result of 30 years of festering political correctness. We now have a slew of young people who love to hate, can’t and won’t tolerate diverse opinions and aren’t capable of open-minded debate.
The social media-fueled cancel culture finds something or someone new each week to ridicule in their fruitless pursuit of utopian equality. The list of gripes never ends. They can’t let it. Without it, they’d lose all meaning to their petty, self-righteous lives.
The saddest part about the cancel culture is how it’s diverting attention away from the truly sinister things being done to our country by inept, cajoling, fearful national and state leadership.
We talk about the sins of Dr. Seuss rather than the mounting national debt, made even worse this weekend with U.S. Senate passage of another $1,900,000,000,000 (that’s a lot of zeroes) in so-called “stimulus” spending.
We ignore the rise of China’s totalitarian influence around the world. We ignore our aging military fleet. We ignore inflation eroding our hard-earned savings. We ignore the lack of a challenging curriculum in our public schools.
Dr. Seuss, if around to answer his critics and survey the new world of cancel culture, would assuredly conclude, as the Cat in the Hat once did, “Oh dear. What a shame! What a shame! What a shame!”
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