Originally published at: Watch: Ben Carson reads his anti-cancel culture poem on Fox News | Boing Boing
…
7 Likes
It’s notable that all the folks on Fox News who decided to turn the Dr. Seuss thing into a week-long news cycle have shied away from showing any of the actual content being pulled from publication. Nobody is trying to take away Green Eggs and Ham or The Cat in the Hat but you’d never know it from nonsense like this.
27 Likes
That’s exactly the goal. They want to make it seem like all of Dr. Suess’ books are being pulled from publication, that he’s being entirely banned and “canceled”.
20 Likes
You know who decided to take those Dr. Seuss books out of print?
The publisher.
So the “live free or die” crowd wants to dictate to someone what they can and cannot do with their own intellectual property.
23 Likes
I remember hearing from a delivery guy to our building that “the government is going to ban all fat in foods!” He thought all the talk about banning “trans fat” meant everything was going to be low fat from now on. He got this idea from listening to talk radio all day. Yes, it’s a deliberate tactic to rile people up.
15 Likes
That’d be the day…
6 Likes
I hope he doesn’t butcher brains
The way he butchered these refrains
And that his sutures are elite, or
At least neater than his meter
15 Likes
It’s like telling someone who has an old racist tattoo that they aren’t allowed to cover it up after they belatedly come to realize how offensive it is.
11 Likes
The only one of those books I know is Mulberry Street, which is mostly interesting because seeing an airplane and a Chinese person in a city is more exotic than seeing a horse-drawn carriage.
“Some old, non-classic children’s books are going out of print.”
“Fine, I hate books and children.”
“They contain some racist stereotypes.”
“WHAT??? THESE NEED TO BE KEPT IN PRINT FOREVER!!!”
Do they not realize Seuss was also antifa?
13 Likes
Not to mention an environmentalist. Lord knows the right wingers have spent years and years dissing the Lorax.
15 Likes
They don’t like to cancel books except for all those books they want to cancel. Degrading racial stereotypes are sacrosanct, but two gay fathers, Harry Potter witchcraft, The Handmaid’s Tale, etc., etc., ad nauseam…
I dunno who they are trying to fool. Their favorite people loved to cancel books…
9 Likes
I’ll bet Mr. Carson defended “And Tango Makes Three” when it came out… /s
5 Likes
I’m actually having trouble finding actual pics of the disputed content. Maybe my Google is weak. I know I have read some of those books as a kid, but at the time nothing hit my radar. But I also wasn’t looking at it with a critical eye. I have found one image that looks like it was stereotypical Chinese-esque dress and hair styles on some characters, I assume it was from one of these books. (If someone made a post of all of the problematic pages, I would like to read that.)
So I found this old newpaper page stuck in a book at random from 1926. In it there is an ad featuring a black face caricature for some sundry goods sale. I am sure in 1926 no one gave it a a second thought, it was just one of those things. Today you see it and it is like, “Yikes!” At some point, these images were phased out. It is why now most of us go, “Yikes!” when seeing it in the wild.
So it seems to me, this is the same thing with the Dr. Seuss books. Something most of us didn’t pay much attention too because it was just one of those things. But slowly, more and more people were like, “Yikes!” and thus the publishers decided to remove 6 books out of dozens. When you actually boil it down to the issue at hand, it is an odd hill to decide to die on.
Also as a side note, they are conflating this issue, with the fact that some reading program decided to highlight some different, more diverse children’s book recently, and they think that is “cancelling”, vs just expanding the focus.
1 Like
This is the one from And to think I saw it on Mulberry Street.
It’s now deemed outdated and offensive because
- It uses the pejorative “Chinaman”
- In addition to the stereotypical garb and hair the guy is literally yellow
- It presents the idea of an Asian person as something every bit as exotic as a procession of circus animals and brass bands and airplanes dropping confetti
So imagine what it would be like to be the only Asian-American child in a class full of Kindergarteners while the teacher gets to that page and all the other kids turn to look at you.
16 Likes
I don’t know about yous, but I don’t want that f’er to be poking around in my brain, like ever.
8 Likes
“Yikes”.
3 Likes
Has someone done a list of all the liberal and socialist literature that has been cancelled by Fox News?
Just for reference, the first books burned by the Nazis were research papers on LGBTQ+. Transgender research was put back decades because of that. Do not let the history be erased or forgotten.
12 Likes
Or telling Fox News they have to rehire Bill O’Reilly despite him costing the network a bunch of money to settle a lawsuit against Fox and Bill.
4 Likes
The whole thing is so obviously an entirely cynical, disingenuous attempt to whip up the base in a culture war. They’re not even trying to hide how bad faith their fauxtrage is.
Apparently demanding that the Seuss estate be compelled to engage in certain speech. Oh, the irony that the right-wing crowd is pretending to be anti-“censorship” while they’re the only ones demanding the right to dictate the contents of someone else’s speech in this situation.
All the people who were raised in, and subsequently escaped from, white conservative evangelical Christianity in the '80s and '90s in this country are now laughing at the idea that conservatives are against “cancel culture,” given the wide swaths of popular culture they were trying to destroy.
The pictures of Africans in the other book are soooo much worse, too:
9 Likes
