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Notes -
An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
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You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.
It's unclear to me whether they're taking the original versions out of print or not. I'm fine with a censored version being available for purchase, so long as the originals are too. Maybe they could slap a warning label on them, like the Looney Tunes Golden Collections.
If these versions are the only ones that are going to be available, then that's disturbing. This is worse than just removing the books from print. It feels like rewriting history. There needs to at least be a note inside that this isn't Dahl's original artistic vision.
As we learned from the sudden banning of Dr. Seuss from every mainstream online marketplace, there won't be any integrity. These will be treated as the only versions that ever existed, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.
When the whole brouhaha happened, I made a point of getting every "problematic" Dr. Seuss book and finding out what exactly the thoughtcrime was (it was usually stereotypical depiction of people of non-European ethnicities, though in a couple of places I couldn't really figure out what it was). The main problem was most of the libraries I could access had rather long waiting lists on those, but I could get every problematic one eventually without paying anything out of pocket (obviously, I paid for the library from my property taxes already, but that's a different tangent). So I must conclude they weren't entirely banned, at least not from the libraries.
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If there was a peak wokeness, the banning of Dr. Seuss books would be it. It was hard to find anyone who supported that.
But it was easy enough to find people who believed it wasn't actually happening. Who rationalized it by the existence of the second hand market. Despite ebay banning resale of the books because "nobody should profit off hate." Or they rationalized it because it was only a few Dr Seuss books. It wasn't even the ones most people had heard of. Or they went full "It's a private company and they can do whatever they want."
Turns out being unable to find anyone who actually supports it is cold comfort, when it's easy to find people willing to cling to any excuse that the thing they would absolutely not support isn't actually happening. It's just right wing misinformation and scare mongering.
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The part of the Seuss debacle which really chafes my hide is the works were chosen for extinction, not even the clumsy editing of censors, or the clever redactions the liberal Geisel would have made to his own works to update them to the new ethos, were he still kicking.
On Beyond Zebra is one of my formative memories: a world tour of things so fantastic that they need to be described with entirely new letters like Yuzz, Thnad, and Spazz. …Oh wait, “spaz” is as bad in England as “retard” was here, and both are now hate speech. Ol’ Ted would have renamed it “Plazz” or “Svazz” or something.
One of the other cancelled Seuss books was a gorgeous book full of watercolors he painted, very unlike his usual cartoon style. One page would have needed editing.
BTW, Geisel was a liberal, but he also - at least for some time - held some views about racial and ethnic differences that would get him so much cancelled noways. He most likely abandoned those views later in life, but as we know, for cancellation purposes there's no excuse even for what you did in kindergarten. You can see some examples in an excellent book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss - which I fully recommend for many reasons outside finding material to cancel Geisel.
He (and later, his estate) were known for cracking down pretty hard against pro-life groups using his biggest cultural touchstone, "A person's a person, no matter how small," from Horton Hears a Who. It really refers to oppressed people-groups, "A people's a people," but it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.
I borrowed the book on his early commercial works from the library, and he was as bold as any cartoonist back then in contributing to the general miasma of ethnic caricature. He survived the zeitgeist by his children's book publishers being far more careful than he, and by shifting his views with the times as most Democrats did.
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