I wonder if the Fox News personalities bemoaning “censorship” of Theodor Geisel’s work realize how little regard he had for fascist apologists waving the “America First!” banner.
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That is a great question. I am a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s work. Although the racism makes me wince, I’d hate to see his stuff disappear. I’m also a big fan of Lovecraft Country on HBO, although I wish it was a little more Lovecraftian. It’s a really good show, but has too few elements from his work.
I once found myself trying to imagine a far-flung future, where all humans have intermingled to the point of homogeneity. Would we then forget all the lessons of tolerance and diversity that we previously learned?
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Again, much like the books in question, his work is not about to vanish if people don’t republish yet another anthology of Lovecraft (there are tons to pick and choose from, BTW)… No one is about to all of a sudden entirely disappear from the historical record because we decide that there isn’t really a reason to republish them again.
Even when people have made serious attempts to make people disappear from the historical record, they often fail. After the death of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who tried to make Egypt monotheist, there was an attempt to obliterate him from the record. Guess who Phillip Glass wrote an opera about in the 80s?
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I agree. I don’t think Lovecraft is being “cancelled” or on the verge of vanishing or anything even remotely like that. I was just using his work as a way of agreeing with what Bobo said. It is something that I find problematic but I wouldn’t want it gone.
Edit: Also, I’m less concerned with the author’s immortality and ongoing reputation than the works themselves, although they may not really be separable.
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That seems unlikely to happen any century soon. People of different ethnic/racial backgrounds have been “intermingling” in Brazil for half a millennium and there are still a wide range of distinct phenotypes present there.
Also, given that race is a social construct even small physical differences between populations would be enough for anyone looking for a reason to discriminate.
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I was thinking more on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years…
Edit: Also, It isn’t something I think might happen. It’s a thought experiment. Can the lessons of diversity survive the absence of diversity itself? Like what would astronomers in the a future universe think when they have only a completely black sky caused by the expansion of the universe leaving our solar system alone in the sky (yes, earth and the sun wouldn’t live that long, that’s not the point).
People, that is humans, will find and fixate on any discernible difference to create in-groups and out-groups. We could all look like clones, but the people who liked bouncy music would decide to dislike the people who like moody music.
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In a sense this is an experiment that’s already been run at least once. All humans alive today are more closely related than modern humans were related to neanderthals, yet a lot of people decided those remaining physical differences were really important for some reason.
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Sadly, you are probably right.
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That last one is especially infuriating since the actual fifth column during WWII consisted of wealthy WASP industrialists, not the people that the Japanese dropped bombs on.
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Marco Rubio would apparently like to have a word with you about disparaging Neanderthals.
I’ve seen so much over the past 4 years and I still can’t believe this is actually real.
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I would love to see Biden respond with “I apologize for insulting Neanderthals by likening them to Republican politicians.”
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This. I was pretty shocked reading old Heinlein (and having to figure out what “that’s mighty white of you…” meant), but that didn’t make it any less worth reading.
If I’ve learned anything from Seuss, if we ever get that homogenized, we’ll just have battles over which side we butter our bread on…
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Or someone will come along and create differences that never existed before, and sell them to us, so that we can have something to fight over.
Looks around
Oh… right.
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But it’s liberals that are too “sensitive”…
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I imagine he thinks he’s being cute by faking “wokeness”, but really it’s just another in a long line of conservatives not understanding that this stuff isn’t magic spells they can use in retaliation just by getting the incantation right, and they look extremely stupid (and/or like a total asshole) as a result.
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Christ, what an asshole.
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Maybe it’s cynicism, but I suspect that we will always figure a way to make in-groups and out-groups. If not based on race, then on income, career path, family ties, accents or planet of origin. I despair for our kind ever learning the joys of unity.
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Yep, dinged for Orientalism! The name, the fancy pants, the pseudo-camel, the long mustache and the shoes. And this one seals it –
Note here the shoes again – long curly toes, the peculiar cap (fezzy!) and the Arabian-nights architecture in the background.
Which seems harmless enough, especially since nowadays we use different visual shorthand to signify (and mock) people from the Middle East, but what the critics are aiming at is that the punchline is of the “aren’t foreign people FUNNY!” variety. And since a not-uncommon subject of Dr. Seuss books is a “normal” (white) kid going to – or imagining – exotic foreign lands, that line gets punched a lot.
Which is too bad, because if anything On Beyond Zebra should have been attacked from the Right, for leading our youth into occult practices. I mean, look at this!
Just the symbols you need to craft a Geiselian Grimoire for conjuring demonic Seuss-creatures!
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