Dr. Seuss normally brings back fond memories.
The National Education Association, the top leadership of which I was once a member during the last decade, has a celebration of reading each year called Read Across America. It promotes reading and, of course, is very child-centered.
Little children, that is. Plenty of reasons for that: If you want kids to read, you want them to start as soon as they can. I was hooked on reading by four. I remember reading the Milwaukee Journal, spread out on the living room floor, to my mother--and learning new words as I spelled them and she pronounced them for me--as she made dinner. My book collection, swelled and reduced several times now and presently re-swelling, is a testimony to all that. As much of a jock that I became in high school and college, I was also a nerdish, fervent reader.
So I approached the road trips on which the NEA sent the Executive Committee members with particular enthusiasm. Sometimes we went alone, as I did to Beckley, West Virginia, and Chicago. Sometimes it was with another EC member to North Carolina, Virginia, Utah and Colorado and places damaged by Hurricane Rita, such as Galveston, Texas and Lake Charles, Louisiana. It was pure public relations, of course. After all, would some people all dressed up be able to convert kids to reading if their teachers hadn't already done so, then leave town as quickly as they appeared? Not much of a chance. We tried with middle schoolers, but it was too late by then. They were already jaded, and our entertainment quotient had been too far reduced. It was very uncool to be turned on by that, so they made a point of being very unimpressed. I remembered the body language, as used to it as I was by my classroom experiences, and I wanted to scream.
But with little kids, the magic never stopped. People were stunned the first time I hammed up a reading of Green Eggs and Ham. They hadn't seen me as someone who could possibly pull off a performance of sorts (Except I already had, in Minneapolis, when I wore a frontier-type get-up and put on a one-man show of a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, an essay for another time), especially with little buddies. After that Texas moment, the staff and state leaders relaxed. They knew I had bought in.
I switched Dr. Seuss books, though. I thought it was a good idea to stay consistent with our brand. The NEA had adopted The Cat in the Hat as the symbol of RAA, complete with the red-and-white stovepipe hat, cat get-ups, Thing-1 and Thing-2, and all the print-outs and PR accoutrements anybody could think of. It was even coordinated with Dr. Seuss' birthday, March 2, around which all activities were centered. Occasionally, it gets national media attention, which is exactly the point: Good for kids, good for our brand, good to humanize a teachers' union that increasingly gets trashed by right-wing nonsense. We are, after all, child-centered, even if we take a moment here and there to remind the world that we make a living from these efforts and that value shouldn't be taken for granted.
So I started reading Horton Hears A Who (I wore a business suit; staff wore the costumes) to various gatherings of elementary kids. I thought it was perfect for little people. "A person's a person, no matter how small," is its central theme. Maybe I could reach that little person who needed to feel that; again, a one-shot deal. The odds weren't great. But I liked the message, so I stayed with it.
The Whos of Whoville needed a separate voice, so I created a high-pitched one. "Hello, my friend, you're a very fine friend," they said to Horton, who, originally annoyed, nonetheless saved them from evil. It's classic Seuss: create a crazy place, invent a crisis and drive home a happy ending with a universal message.
Except Dr. Seuss had revealed his hand during World War II, sending forward a controversial legacy. That's being revisited with a new book about him, Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination, by Brian Jay Jones. It's no longer a secret that Geisel made a strong contribution to anti-Japanese-American propaganda in the early days of World War II, prototyping Asians as being small, hostile and threatening. It cemented the necessity of putting them into internment camps, a horrendous violation of their rights that was addressed only in the late '80s by throwing a paltry, token $20,000 in damages at whomever managed to survive it to that point.
Once NEA folks learned this, especially those from the West Coast where much of the disruption had taken place, some definitive soul-searching in the form of research was needed. Surely, we thought, there would be some semblance of contrition evident in later work. Surely, someone so in tune with little kids couldn't help but be sensitive to something so humiliating to others that some kind of make-up call would be obvious. But nobody could find anything and believe me, we looked.
The NEA did not abandon its Read Across America brand; that had been too far embedded. We lurched on with someone's chips on their shoulders and no way to remove them. It was embarrassing, and it always felt a little sheepish to continue with that shadow following us around.
Until now, that is. Jones' book reveals that with Horton Hears A Who, written in 1953, Geisel extended a post-war hand to the Japanese. The message: You are no longer inferior beings whom we defeated. You're real, you're human, and you're our friends, no matter how small, in an obvious allegory. (This from a review of the book in the New York Times Book Review, from last Sunday's issue, by Adam Gopnik.)
How could we have missed it? Well, Dr. Seuss always spoke in allegory. Why wouldn't this be different? The message was obvious, but about whom it was, wasn't. And he never spoke publicly to clarify it, either. Here's a story, he kept telling us. Make what you wish of it.
So now we know. Okay, easy for us to say after we bombed the hell out of them. But we did what he had to do to defeat that aspect of fascism--the 75th anniversary of another coming up very soon. And the message is ultimately very condescending--okay, now we can recognize your humanity, as if the Japanese were somehow sub-human beforehand. But then, they hadn't exactly projected a humanistic message, what with the vicious, despicable slaughter of 300,000 Chinese at Nanking, the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, suicide charges on various islands, and the refusal to surrender until two atom bombs had been dropped.
By welcoming them back to what we called decent civilization, Geisel, without apologizing for earlier insults, simply recognized that the world had changed and we should change with it. Part of that change takes place with new knowledge, and so I extend this to the NEA, too: We can move on. It's okay. At least, it's forgivable now. Dr. Seuss' anti-Asian poltergeist has been sufficiently addressed--by him, as we have learned, which is most appropriate. It's less than perfect, but it emits some soul. He didn't apologize, and now we don't need to, either.
Theodor Geisel's messages were never solely for younger people anyhow: They were for everybody. His Pulitzer Prize, for instance, came for his anti-war allegory, The Butter Battle Book, which I believe to be his best, most meaningful work (and which represents another adjustment to a world in which not all wars are just or valuable). With silly depictions of beings, reduced, strange vocabularies and contrived drama, Geisel uncomplicated a complicated world through, for instance, kids trapped by a foolish cat in their own homes and a country trapped by a foolish war somewhere else. It makes his legacy contiguous and, in a sense, eternal.
I mean, I can't imagine a world without The Cat or Horton or The Lorax. Can you?
Didn't think so. Thanks for reading, my friends. You're very fine friends.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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