In this 70th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is now available for pre-sale at amazon. Publication date: 9-14-21: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593086880/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_5BDTABYFKRJKZBT5GSQADarkHorse merchandise now available at: store.darkhorsepodcast.org Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bre...
rings* *phone rings* *phone rings* *phone rings* *phone rings* *phone rings* *phone rings* Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
Live stream our 70th, I believe.
It is.
70th.
My goodness, that is a lot of live streaming.
Much more than I ever imagined, you know, back, for example, in high school.
Yes, indeed.
I was thinking small back then with regard to live streams.
Right.
No, I just, much more limited.
But no, it turns out there's more room on the internet than we imagined back then.
Yes, indeed.
Back in 1987.
1987, the date of our graduation, as I recall.
I sort of recall.
Indeed.
Yeah.
In which you gave a resounding speech.
I gave a speech, which I did not prepare well enough, but I think it worked out.
Let's put it this way.
Story of your damn life, man.
I did graduate, so.
All right.
So welcome, everyone, today.
We are going to talk a lot about Dr. Seuss today.
And in preparation for that, what I tweeted in anticipation of today's show, on a fine weekend day a few months before May, two people will talk about walking the walk and feeling like frogs in a rather warm pot.
So we are going to begin today with a poem that you have written, and you are actually a remarkable poet.
And then we're going to talk about some of the amazingness that is Dr. Seuss, some of the lessons that he has taught nearly all of us over the years, and then we're going to talk about some of the current pushback against Seuss.
But first, just a few announcements as usual.
Please consider joining us on one or both of our Patreons.
At either of them, you can get access to the Discord server where there are lively conversations going on.
and various other benefits at each of those, at Brett Weinstein or Heather Hying's Patreons.
And we want to say, as we have not maybe said in a few live streams, how grateful we are for all of your support, especially as things continue to go off the rails in surprising and new ways.
We are so grateful to know that there are people out there who are appreciating what we're doing and the way that we are allowing ourselves to think in public.
Indeed.
A couple mundane things.
One, we had a lovely conversation with the Coalition of the Reasonable Group this morning.
You did on your Patreon.
My Patreon.
I will say, be aware the time has been shifted to 9 o'clock.
That is a permanent change to give us room before live streaming.
That time will also be 9 o'clock for tomorrow's conversation about evolution.
Also a benefit of the higher tier Patreons for you.
The higher tier Patreon.
So please join us at nine and we will find a way to change what it says about the timing on Patreon.
It's simple.
Let's just move on.
All right.
But in any case, there is that.
We will be giving away another invite to Clubhouse because we have not destroyed enough lives yet by our accounting.
And all right.
I think with that, We are.
Oh, if you want the invite to Clubhouse, I believe you put hashtag Clubhouse in the chat.
Someone in the chat will.
I don't know.
Will tell you what the correct procedure is.
OK.
Okay.
So, without further ado, we are going to talk about Dr. Seuss, beginning with a poem that you have written this week.
I have written a poem.
I will say I'm a little nervous about reading it.
It is possible to lose a cadence in there, and I beg your forgiveness if that happens.
But, without further ado… Oh, wait!
It appears to be… So, I have not heard it yet.
I'm looking forward to it.
And it appears to be written by one Dr. Weinsteinium, which is how I refer to you sometimes when you call me on the phone and we yell at each other.
Yes, there's a story behind this.
We'll get to it later, but this is Let Loose the Seuss by Dr. Weinsteinium.
My sense is that now they have gone far too far.
The offenses they claim have grown just too bizarre.
They say Dr. Seuss wrote books that did harm, that we shouldn't be fooled by his fanciful charm.
But they must assume that we're dumber than dumb, that we'll take their word and go numb and succumb.
But I think they've guessed wrong, or at least we can hope, that no one of sound mind could be such a dope.
Like everyone else, Dr. Seuss had his flaws.
He made some missteps and got dirt on his paws.
But he owned his mistakes, made amends, and grew wise.
Illustrated his growth, as his heart grew in size.
Seuss was a model of how we should behave.
In confronting our flaws, we should all be so brave.
And if we are able, put lessons to rhyme.
For a rhyme drives a point with rhythm through time.
As for those with an urge to burn witches and books, we should face them with courage and Seussian looks.
We should block them with baffles that baffle them good, so our descendants will know where it is that we stood.
Let them read, Dr. Seuss.
Let them read it, I say.
Let them read the whole catalog.
Don't you take it away.
It's not yours to take.
It belongs to us all.
Your authority's fake.
And your bluff we now call.
Straight to hell with this wokeness.
Kids can handle the truth.
Acquisition of nuance is the purpose of youth.
If we shield them from slights, jabs, and bumps, they'll grow weak.
They'll fear violence and innocent words that we speak.
And who wants to live as a quivering wreck?
Minds like a sieve hiding under the deck.
Have them come up.
Stand out tall and robust.
Although history's full of events most unjust, that's not the whole story.
No, not by a lot.
We've made progress aplenty, in both fairness and thought.
Though we've miles yet to go, and we've no time to rest, the West is best suited to master this test.
So we must protect it, stand fast and defend, values that must never be brought to an end.
Equality is good, a most worthy objective.
It must be defended from naive invective.
Now we must keep on and continue to strive.
To keep progress going and keep hope alive.
Doesn't matter your color, your sex, or your creed.
Opportunity is the thing all Sneetches need.
Irrespective of stars that they have or they don't.
Regardless of things that they will or they won't.
We know how to fix this.
It's in all those books.
Lodged now deep in our minds, in the crannies and nooks.
Have a look and you'll see.
Seuss is in there, I swear.
So give him a good dusting off if you dare.
He taught us a lot that we now need to know.
How is it he knew all the places we'd go?
I'll now leave you with this.
One final thought.
I'm aware of the hard place in which we're now caught.
And I've noticed the rock that is blocking our exit.
I know all about Trump and Joe Biden and Brexit.
I've read about COVID and lockdowns and masks.
In light of all that, I have the smallest of asks.
Can we please cut it out and not cancel and mock?
Can we team up together to dislodge this rock?
Because we do need to exit this historical phase.
Do you get it yet?
Or must I rephrase?
We're all in it together.
You can like that or not.
Bound up as one, we will prosper or rot.
We have one tiny earth.
It's all that we roam.
That's what astronauts tell us when returning home.
And I'm sure that they're right, as I'm sure you're aware.
So treat this rock and each other with the greatest of care.
All right.
Oh, that's wonderful.
That's so good.
Thank you.
So two points about it.
One, liberalism is back and it rhymes.
And two, Dr. Kendi, I want to talk to you about anti-racism and what's wrong with it.
So please come on Dark Horse.
I don't... I'm not sure that Kennedy deserves to be anywhere close to that poem.
Or the oeuvre of Dr. Seuss.
I hope that I'm wrong.
I hope that he can rise out of the divisive nastiness that he is helping propagate in the world and respond to you, as he has failed to Coleman Hughes, for instance.
Wow, that's truly remarkable.
Godseus did so... I don't mean to call him Godseus.
It's alright.
Okay, I'll call him Godseus.
Godseus did so many amazing things, and I have heard some of the weak defenses of him.
Sound like, oh, but aren't they fun books?
Aren't they warm books?
Aren't they inviting and lovely?
And okay, but that is the way in, right?
That is why people are interested in going.
Just as I believe, and I'm not familiar with this part of their work, but both Orwell and Huxley wrote a bunch of highly analytical, fairly abstract essays.
What we know of them are 1984 and Brave New World.
These are the dystopian futures that they imagined for us that were also reflected in the rest of their thinking, but we do it through narrative and through imagery and through fiction and through poetry.
That's the best way in.
Here are just a few of the lessons, many of which you have alluded to or directly brought up in that poem of yours that I find in Lessons of Seuss.
The value of compromise, the problems with simple rubrics, which is to say he was against reductionist thinking, embracing who you are, not going along with the crowd, rejecting simple phenotypic markers as indicative of the value of a person, He was anti-war, anti-fascist, like actually anti-fascist, and anti-utopian.
He saw the value of reaching beyond your own pre-existing beliefs and biases.
He recognized that we are not the only beings of worth or value on this planet, and he saw the wonders of childhood.
And, you know, there's so much more, but just a few, and let's just talk as we go through these.
With regard to a few of those themes and what they're in, you know, the value of compromise and the limiting nature of stubbornness and the problem with simple rubrics, I think is beautifully outlined in a relatively poorly known story that was published in the same volume as The Sneetches, which I will talk about more, but I've talked about several times on the show, right?
And the star-bellied snitches and snitches without being, you know, it's MAGA hats and it's masks in every situation at all times and, you know, it's just these simple tribal markers that reduce us all to little tiny characters and therefore reduce our humanity as well.
It's an arbitrary phenotype, whether that's something you put on your head or something that you are born into.
That's right.
And as I said here, arbitrary phenotypic markers.
But the Zacks is one of my favorite stories.
At one point this week, I was so distraught.
I was just so unnerved by the state of the world.
I pulled down the stairs to the attic, and I announced to you and Zach, who happened to be in the same room, I said, I'm going to the attic.
I'm not coming down.
And you thought I might be serious.
I was not.
In fact, what I was actually doing is I told you as I was halfway up the stairs, I'm going to find the carefully binned books of children's books that our children had and that we have saved for their children's children to find whatever Dr. Seuss books we still have.
Unfortunately, I didn't find as many as I might have wanted, and I'll show a couple of them shortly.
Actually, before we get to where I was going, one of them I did find was this clearly from my childhood, because it's in terrible shape, was one of the cancelled books.
We're not going to talk about the cancelled books yet, but to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street is here.
Loved and broken, spine-wise, from the probably late 70s.
But one of the sets of books that I'd had as a childhood that didn't make it into our adulthood included The Sneetches, which itself included the story of the Zachs, which I have now ordered and it is actually available, but I don't have it yet.
So I only have the text for it.
So there's nothing to show here, Zach, except that I'm just going to read this remarkable story, originally published in 1961.
Um, that people even who love Dr. Seuss may not be fully familiar with.
One day, making tracks in the prairie of Prax, came a north-going Zax and a south-going Zax.
And it happened that both of them came to a place where they bumped, there they stood, foot to foot, face to face.
Look here now, the north-going Zax said.
I say, you are blocking my path.
You are right in my way.
I'm a north-going Zax and I always go north.
Get out of my way now and let me go forth.
Who's in whose way, snapped the south-going Zax.
I always go south making south-going tracks.
So you're in my way and I ask you to move and let me go south in my south-going groove.
Then the north-going Zax puffed his chest up with pride.
I never, he said, take a step to one side.
And I'll prove to you that I won't change my ways if I have to keep standing here 59 days.
And I'll prove to you, yelled the south-going Zax, that I can stand here in the prairie of Prax for 59 years, for I live by a rule that I learned as a boy back in south-going school.
Never budge, that's my rule, never budge in the least.
Not an inch to the west, not an inch to the east.
I'll stay here not budging, I can and I will, if it makes you and me and the whole world stand still.
Well, of course the world didn't stand still.
The world grew in a couple of years.
The new highway came through and they built it right there over those two stubborn zacks and left them there standing, unbudged in their tracks.
Somehow I think I've never heard that.
Yeah, it was one of my favorites.
My father, as I remember it, read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish a lot to me when I was very young.
His two favorite books to read to me as a child, one of them is not Dr. Seuss, but one of them was Green Eggs and Ham, and the other was Ferdinand, the story of the bull who was too sensitive for the job to which he has apparently been born, who likes to sniff flowers rather than fight other bulls to the death.
Um, so, um, the, the Zax is exactly as we've been talking for months now, for, you know, tens of episodes, dozens of episodes, um, indicative of the problem of simple rules that you are told by an authority and that you cannot waiver from even in the face of a situation which clearly warrants it.
Yep, we do a good job.
I'm looking for a moniker that fits.
Those of us in the We Remember How to Think social group do a good job of pointing out the importance of nuance, but I think what you're saying is that actually Nuance is a companion of dynamism.
Yes, that these two things are really what we're talking about.
And you know, we've talked elsewhere about the hazard of fixed rules with respect to raising children or governance that fixed rules get gamed and therefore what you need is discretion built into systems, but that is Clearly evident in many, many Seuss stories.
Yeah.
And in fact, I mean, related to that, which it's not in my notes here for today, but another value and virtue that we have talked about a lot and that I, from the very beginning of running those study abroad trips that I did and then that we did in the end, Is the value of serendipity, of leaving yourself open enough that you can find yourself in a situation where you could be surprised, where not everything that happens to you is predetermined or pre-imagined, either of those things.
And how can you experience serendipity by putting yourself in situations that you're unfamiliar with, and how can you be open enough to receive the values of that serendipity when it happens?
Well, you have to not be operating by these simple rubrics.
By, well, I heard that if I go outside my house, I must wear a mask.
I'm not sure exactly what that simple rubric will do to block serendipity, but certainly it impinges our humanity.
Not being able to walk around outside alone in nature without a mask, for instance.
So the thing about serendipity, I think, is also close kin to the idea that the fact of something having value is not necessarily connected to your ability to describe what that value is, right?
That there is, you know, the pursuit of serendipity involves Going somewhere or engaging in something and not knowing why.
And I think one of the things that Is very clear.
And you raised it in the beginning, your beginning comments about the idea that, you know, a tepid defense of Seuss is that these are just fun kid stories.
Yes.
No, they are not.
These are both serious stories.
And what people don't get is that the purpose of childhood, you and I know this very, very well, because evolutionarily, this is an obvious fact in some ways, as much as many people in the area miss it.
The fact of our very long childhoods is about the complexity of our adulthood.
It's about building adults who can handle it, right?
And so Seuss, whether he was explicitly aware of this or not, was very much about creating adults with capacity.
And so those stories recede into history.
You go years without thinking about them sometimes.
But they also, as I allude to in that poem, are In us.
And one thing that I was shocked about, I would say in my life I have written two poems that I regard as significant enough to remember where I've put them, let's say.
One of them was about the telomere work, and the other one was this one.
Incidentally, that poem that you wrote about the telomere work was very well received by Dick Alexander, your advisor and one of my mentors.
Who also wrote poetry.
Yes, he did.
You know, I would say, for my part, I can't write a serious poem, but I can write an ironic poem, right?
But here's what I discovered in writing this.
Oh, I don't think that distinction is right.
I think the poem you just read to us is serious.
Oh, I'm not saying it isn't serious.
Goofing off is serious business, right?
So, here's the interesting thing.
So, I wrote the Telomere poem in 1998, I think.
I did not realize at the time that it was Seussian.
Right?
And it is.
In what way?
You're not speaking merely of the meter, presumably?
The meter, the cadences, the license, there's a lot in it that is actually explicitly, well, implicitly Seussian.
At some level, all of us who use the English language a lot and with some creativity and who were exposed to Annie Suess growing up, as most English-speaking kids who were exposed to books at all, were exposed to Seuss growing up are downstream of Seuss, and so therefore have onboarded some of the Seussian thinking and cadence as part of why there is objection to it.
It's so ubiquitous.
This is what I'm getting at, is that this stuff is actually so deeply written into our linguistic software that That it actually comes out in ways that we have no idea we owe to this pathway.
And so the fact that if you were to compare this new poem, which I think it took two hours to put it together, it just sort of very naturally emerged.
And it's called Let Loose the Seuss?
Let Loose the Seuss.
If you compare that to the other poem, On the optimism of aging gerontologists, you will find that they actually sound… they're unmistakably linked in the way that they function.
But anyway, my point is, all right, how much… there's a tremendous amount of profit to the little linguistic games that Theodor Geisel put us to, that caused us to build circuitry that we use all the time.
I have no idea it came from him.
And that this now, you know, at the point that Seuss is under attack, right, because of woke nonsense, it suddenly comes flowing out, and you're just amazed at how actually easy it is.
That stuff, it's very deeply wired in.
So in part, my point is, Those books are for children.
They are about creating adults with high capacity and therefore the idea of cancelling them is a more of the same it's of the same sort as Deciding that math is no good and so anyway the We will get there, of course.
But the discovery of how deeply wired in that stuff is, is something that I think it is worth investigating.
In fact, I would say anybody for whom Seuss was important should sit down and just try to write a few verses and see if it ain't there.
Yeah.
And I guess we could ask, you know, it's an evolutionary question to ask, are we all downstream of Seuss, or was in fact Seuss effectively channeling something older yet that is in the cadence of the English language, that is a way for deep lessons of English?
To be remembered and to be created and shared, such that, you know, there is something distinctly Seussian and I haven't thought about it formally enough to identify, you know, like an excellent linguist would be able to come up with it right away, come up with a number of the features right away.
But I think we are, as we have said now, we are all downstream of Suess, but also he wouldn't be as important and ubiquitous as he is, nor would many of us be so able to immediately find something in ourselves that felt Suessian if he wasn't effectively channeling something far older, something more basic, fundamental to what English is.
So again, this is one of these things that we will find out if I know what the hell I'm talking about, but I think it's iambic pentameter.
No, I think it's something a little bit different, actually.
I ran into it today.
It doesn't sound like, for instance, the Shakespeare that is iambic pentameter.
I'm not going into rhyming schemes here.
It obviously isn't strict iambic pentameter, but the question is, is it borrowing from that same kit?
I really don't want to go here.
There are a lot of rhyming schemes, and I don't think it's useful for us without having thought about it.
I'm sure that just as you can build a phylogeny of languages, which is remarkable, and at some point on here we'll share some of what that looks like, but it's noisy.
It's far noisier than a phylogeny of organisms, For instance, because there's a lot more reticulation, because there's borrowing, because linguistic appropriation, you know, a subset of cultural appropriation, is rife and common and glorious and wonderful.
And so you can't just build a simple branching tree, it constantly reticulates back onto itself.
So too, rhyming schemes will be like that, but even more so, even more reticulate, even more coming back on themselves.
But I think just naming the one that we all know and saying, oh, this is that, there are a bunch of them.
And I don't know which kind of thing he tends to use, and it's obviously multiple ones.
So I'm not going to get on board claiming it's the one that we all know the name of.
I mean, A, as I was writing, I kept wondering how much iambic pentameter was in this thing because there are places where it does sound like the Shakespearean kind of pattern.
Anyway, we'll find out.
All right, where are we headed?
So, a number more themes and just the wondrousness of Seuss before we start talking about what is As your poem implies and as you began to imply there, some of the stuff that is happening right now is a pushback to him.
Among other books that see the value of compromise, how limiting stubbornness can be in the problem with simple rubrics, I would put Green Eggs and Ham in that category as well.
It teaches the value of trying new things and reaching beyond your pre-existing biases.
In the same vein also, but with an obviously explicitly anti-war message, we have the Butter Battle Book, which is wonderful.
One of my favorite books that I remember from growing up that I actually don't find in our set – it's coming, but it's not here yet – but I don't think we actually read to our children, so I wondered if it wasn't that good.
And went looking this week, is I had trouble in getting to Sala Salou, which actually, okay, we've got an epic tabby on the table trying to make trouble here, but I can, I think, just show... No, actually I can't, hold on.
Boy, is my computer not working nicely with me.
Not really, thank you.
Not right now.
Okay, so this is just the cover.
Yeah, please, thanks.
I had trouble in getting to Sala Salou.
And it is, you know, it's in one way, it seems, I think, because so many of the stories of Dr. Seuss are these, you know, humanoid or catoid critters on adventures, right?
That it seems like this just warm and fantabulous story making.
Hey Zach, can I have my screen back?
Thank you.
Storytelling.
But really, I had trouble in getting to Solace Allu, which is longer than Zach, so I'm not going to read it all, is, as I see it, anti-utopian.
It's this kid, really, this humanoid character.
uh who imagines that if that he you know sees the troubles he's having where he is and some character comes up out of nowhere and says i'm going to the place where there is no problems come with me and they run into problem after problem after problem upon getting to get there and he finally arrives at the gate and there's a thing in the lock and so you can't get in but the gatekeeper says ah but i'm going down the road to the next place that's perfect why don't you come with me kid And the kid says, you know what?
No, I'm actually going to arm myself with the skills and the tools that I need to defend myself against the stuff back in my home.
And I'm going to go home.
I'm going to live where home is.
And I'm going to be strong.
And I'm going to become, you know, obviously I'm using the modern language, but I'm going to become anti-fragile.
And I'm going to see what I can see about where I am and find the values in it and become stronger in it as opposed to constantly chasing a fantasy that does not exist.
I wonder, so you're right, that sounds perfectly anti-utopian.
And the question I have is, so I didn't know this book.
Yeah, and I still haven't shared it with you, sorry.
But I wonder if, I wonder whether or not you would find that people who had a childhood relationship with that book had an immunity to utopian thinking at some level.
I would not be surprised if a, you know, if this, I mean, in some sense, I'm wondering a little bit, thinking about, you know, what we've barely touched on here, which is that actually in some ways the poetry is the easiest part, right?
The really difficult part is the illustrations, which are amazingly evocative.
Yeah.
In some ways it's psychedelic experience for people who can't have psychedelic experience because they're children, right?
And so the point is this the world that is presented in these books is a place that you would very much want to go and see and spend the afternoon and then look around and engage the strange creatures and Just while you're talking, Zach, can you just show my screen?
I'll just scroll through some of these images from Solace League.
We're not going to read it, but just as you're talking about like being able to, you know, it's children who are in some ways living psychedelic experience on every day.
And then they mature out of it, and then maybe they can choose to engage in it explicitly and intentionally.
But that is part of what Seuss allows you an inroad into.
Right, but you know the thing is psychedelic experience is for both better and worse about mind hacking.
And so the point is that in the wrong hands that can be a disaster.
In the right hands, if somebody who knows that utopianism is an attractive idea that results in atrocities, and they try to teach you this lesson in a fanciful, harmless way, in effect, this is the evidence of the opposite, that this is the safe way to discover It's not that the language is violence, it's that the language is the antidote to violence.
It is the way that you can discover that something violent lurks in your desire to perfect the world.
In this case, the fact that you can't get to Utopia isn't the endgame if you try.
Right.
But nonetheless, you know, every time I see these illustrations, there is some childlike part of me that wants to see that contraption, definitely wants to look at trees that look like those trees, whatever they are, you know?
Right, wants to see the trees, wants to figure out if the physics of that crazy thing actually works.
Right, exactly!
And you know, every time we do see really weird trees in the world, Right?
Baobabs or whatever.
Right.
You and I always comment on the Seussian nature of certain things.
The first time we saw baobabs in Western Madagascar, both of us were like, this is a Seussian landscape, 100%.
And then, oh my god, South and Southern Madagascar with the Dideriaceae, those crazy tall – like, everything in Madagascar practically is Seussian.
It is.
It is a Seussian place.
And I mean, that's part of also – so I think you can give me my computer back now, Zach.
That's part of the basis, I think, for the cancellation, too.
Again, I want to talk about what's amazing about him first here, but the fact is that he was, I believe, an American and a white guy with the somewhat, but really not very, but somewhat provincial worldview of a guy who was rooted in his particular space and time.
And to the degree that he had been elsewhere, and he saw the amazingness of what was not his home, what was elsewhere for him.
He reflected on it with admiration and joy and love and amazingness.
And yes, there was some racist stuff in the early, early stuff of his.
But his reflections of people who haven't had my experience, my Seuss' experience, actually live these amazing other lives is exactly what we should all be hoping for.
It is what the value of travel is.
It is what the value of reading stories from other cultures are and talking to people from other places and engaging with everyone as if they have something valuable to offer.
And goddammit, it's perfectly democratizable.
So in a sense, unfortunately, and you know, as a liberal, and I'm sure as a fellow liberal, you will resonate with this, one of the great shames of the West is that our schools are radically unequal, right?
If you've got money, you get better schools, and that matters, right?
You can't easily democratize that.
It should be democratized, we should ensure it, but you can't easily do it.
On the other hand, Seuss books are very inexpensive.
And the point is, anybody who speaks the language is in a position to benefit from them equally.
And so, you know, I really do feel as an adult that some fraction of the schooling that actually worked for me came from Seuss without ever stepping in a classroom.
Yeah.
And, you know, Given that it's, I mean, the great thing, and this actually goes to Mark Rober's point about the Mario Brothers effect, he calls it, that the motivational stuff on the screen that causes you to learn the pattern of hitting buttons is a model for education.
You and I have said that education shouldn't be painful.
It should feel like games and experiences.
things that you want to do so you don't even know you're in school.
Well, this is like that.
It feels so much like fun that it is now failing to have the proper defense because it seems frivolous when it is anything but.
It is highly constructive.
Yeah.
No, the concern now is being dismissed as if it's, A, more right-wing nuts who are complaining, and why the hell do you care?
It's children's books.
At the same time that all the modern children's books that I can find – actually, I didn't go looking at children's books, but a few years ago, as I've said on this livestream before, I went looking for young adult books, YA books, at Powell's, at the extraordinary, massive independent bookstore in downtown Portland.
And I was appalled at the choices available and really could only find books that are now considered classics like, you know, like S.E.
Hinton, The Outsider... The Outsiders?
Yeah, yes.
And such that weren't just so broken by wokeness that they read like a slog.
The art, of course, is compromised when the ideology is first and foremost.
There's a reason that Soviet propaganda, for instance, didn't pass for lasting art.
Right?
Propaganda is propaganda, and most good people, without ever thinking about why or being conscious of it, be like, okay, if ideology came first here, this isn't fun, and it isn't probably right either.
Or at least it causes people, almost everyone, to sort of go, wait, what is that?
What actually are they trying to do to my head here?
Well, it's an analog, really, to the comparison that we used to make in the teaching environment, that the proper role of a professor is to teach you how to think, not what to think.
We used to say that a lot.
And in this case, I feel like the thing about Seuss is that he very much taught you how to think.
And the details of what is in the books are irrelevant.
For one thing, they're so fanciful that they don't Yes.
map directly.
It's the general lessons and the ability to play with language and all of those things.
And so, you know, the comparison between some finger-wagging YA book that tells you exactly what to think about some complex topic and pretends it's simple versus, you know, Suze who takes – shows you just how complex simple things can be made Suze who takes – shows you just how complex simple things can be made if Yes.
It's a power tool.
Yeah.
It is.
It's a power tool.
Maybe we talk a little bit more about the sneetchism, or maybe you really, between what we've said on this show before and what you say in your poem, that's sufficient.
But it's exactly about the virtues of not paying attention to, frankly, arbitrary phenotypic characters.
When you're deciding who to associate with, what to identify as.
Obviously, being Being female, being black, being from Eastern Europe, you know, whatever it is, whatever it is that you were born as, that you had no choice in and you cannot change, does partially define who you are.
And it means that there are differences between you and those people who do not share that particular marker.
But the idea that that should rise, in primacy to define who you are and who your social groups are and give you a sense of whether or not you belong in a place.
You know, even when society, you know, does have vestiges or often more than vestiges of actual racism, of actual sexism, whatever it is, individuals should obviously be doing The opposite of that.
And that, I will argue, is actually necessary, if not sufficient, to change the society-wide racism, for instance, that persists, right?
Like, it's individuals first.
And frankly, a lot of the crazy that's happening is, again, this conflation between individual and population.
And the people who are making the woke arguments can't keep it straight, like they don't actually know what they're doing.
And they will say things, for instance, about the sneeches, that it makes the mistake of arguing that we need to ignore our oppression.
No, no it doesn't.
It says, don't identify as the thing that is oppressed.
And as more and more and more people do that, And recognize that whether or not you have a star on your belly or not is actually not indicative of any deeper truth about you.
Then, then we will start to see the big, you know, the wheels of state start to change.
Yeah, it's, well, I'm struck by, I actually now feel shortchanged given the depth of these lessons, because, you know, you and I had only partially overlapping Susean experience as a child, and I almost feel, and feel actually some sense of loss now with respect to our own kids, that we didn't, you know, recognizing the value We're recognizing the full value a little late, I think.
And the idea is actually, I don't know how many things there are buried in all of those stories that are of high value and capable of sort of like mainlining, you know, pre-proto wisdom into a child's mind.
And, you know, I didn't have the Sneetches.
I didn't know about the Sneetches.
I should have had the Sneetches.
Butter Battle, I think, emerged a little late.
A little late, yeah, for us.
But anyway, shouldn't we have had all of them?
And shouldn't we have put our kids through all of them?
And shouldn't this be sort of baseline?
Well, we had, I mean, we shared Sneetches with our children.
I don't know where it's gone.
I've begun to order them up so that we have them, and not just in PDF form.
There are six that will no longer be available.
We have the one from my childhood.
Anyway, let's talk a little bit more about some of the lessons, the virtues and wonders.
Sneetches, of course.
Here's an actually anti-racist, by which I mean like actually anti-racist like actually anti-fascist, not the modern instantiation of either Kendi's anti-racism or the Yahoo's on the streets Antifa, anti-phenotype-based judgment of yourself.
Is this book The Shape of Me and Other Stuff?
Which is about curiosity and about accepting and loving who you are, whatever shape you are.
And it's like, you know, the modern woke language around, you know, fat shaming and beauty norms.
Well, God, the shape of me and other stuff is exactly that lesson.
And again, it tells it through this amazing, fantastical, perhaps hallucinogenic set of illustrations.
And language in which two kids are just sharing ideas about what shapes they might have been.
And it might be, if memory serves, I don't have it here, you know, a chair or a butterfly or a whale or a truck or, you know, any number of things.
And it lands on the message of, effectively, love who you are.
Love who you are, and I also, I doubt this was in any way explicitly on his mind, but I also find, you know, in what we have ended up focusing on in our classrooms, the consideration of You know, the shorthand in our world is that, you know, we are fish, right?
Right.
It's a very shocking concept.
It's also not shocking if you understand the deep story of how evolution works, right?
That we would be fish is not so crazy.
But it also, you know, the idea of… It's an important category that is real and doesn't mean what most people think it means.
Right, it doesn't mean what most people think it means and, you know, as I tried to Make clear, and the thing I wrote on this topic is that the... Not the Let Loose the Seuss, but the article on being a fish.
On being a fish.
Was that the marvelous thing about the recognition that, you know, we are fish, that seals are bears, is that it allows you to understand what kind of process evolution must be.
If seals are bears, what kind of process is evolution?
It is the kind of process that can take a bear and turn it into a seal, right?
And then you can kind of infer a lot about it.
What?
Which eat fish.
Which eat fish and are fish.
So isn't that marvelous?
But anyway, I mean, so I don't think he was pointing in that direction, but I do think there's a way in which, you know, all true stories reconcile.
And so to the extent that revealing to a child this lesson about their particular Shape is actually, you know Adjacent to a lesson a lesson about oh actually what did happen to our shape and isn't that interesting?
Yeah It's it creates fertile ground It does.
Okay, a few more lessons with the books attached.
This is not a comprehensive list, but a lesson to children that they should reach for the stars.
Oh, the places you'll go, right?
A lesson that we are not the only beings worthy of consideration on the planet.
I would say both the Lorax, obviously, which is about no one is speaking for the trees.
It's an early environmentalist message.
And also Horton Hears a Who.
Yep.
Right?
So that one, I don't know how we ended up with what is called a party edition.
I'd like to go to that party.
I don't know.
It's glittery.
I mean, it's not glittery, God forbid, but it's like it's shiny.
It's metallic.
Thank you.
It's metallic.
So I don't know what makes this the party edition of Horton Hears a Who.
I honestly cannot figure that out.
But this is explicitly, again, hallucinogenic, fanciful, amazing imaginings of what other worlds look like, and a belief that other worlds exist, which is amazing and forward-thinking and expansive and allows for hope.
And a belief in their value.
Whether or not you can pinpoint either exactly where they are or prove to other people that they exist or what their value might be.
They have value.
Other people have value.
Other worlds have value.
Other ways of being have value.
And have you encountered the story of Horton Hears a Who in preparing for today, or did you know it before?
I don't really.
You mentioned something, and I will just set up for you to read it, read the dedication for my great friend Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan.
Right.
Which is going to be relevant here.
Yes.
So apparently the story, Dr. Seuss, was demonstrably anti-Japanese, and in a way that was perfectly mundane in the run-up to our entry into the war.
But in any case, he made cartoons.
Actually, Zach, do you have that fifth column cartoon?
Let's see what you got.
Yeah, perfect.
So this is, this is proceeding from this anti-Japanese trope of basically Japanese Americans as a fifth column.
And they are... So it says, I can't quite read it, it says, waiting for the signal from home.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Anyway, the Japanese characters… So this is from during the war or before the war?
Yeah, I think this is just prior.
This is before the internment camps, I believe.
Yeah, so it's certainly unfortunate.
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
It's, you know, patently racist.
Well, it's patently racist, again, in a way.
Exactly, of the moment.
Yes, the country was racist enough to corral its own citizens and violate their rights.
And depending on when it happened, it was literally during a world war in which, you know, in which this was the enemy.
Right.
So, well, this wasn't the enemy.
These are Japanese Americans, but where Japanese people were the enemy.
And so, okay, there's racism in this to be sure.
But it is anyway, it is a measure of his mindset, which would have been perfectly in keeping with many people.
But so after the war, he apparently went to Japan and had an awakening experience.
The dedication of that book reveals that he made friends in Japan.
And Horton hears a who?
And he was in Kyoto.
Yes, so Horton Hears a Who is the is basically his.
Encoding of the lesson that he had learned from his bigoted mindset to his egalitarian mindset.
It is his encoding of that lesson in a book for children.
And so, you know, A plus, right?
I don't know that you necessarily get an A plus for just simply never having had the bigotry if you just simply grew up in a situation that didn't create it.
But to get over the bigotry, actually, that does take something.
We have the before and after.
You just showed a before, and we have in his oeuvre Horton Hears a Who and so much else that demonstrates the growth that is possible for individuals.
And that he encodes it in a way that isn't, you know, it's not an apology exactly.
It's far better than an apology.
It's a corrective for future bigotry that, you know, he's giving to children, right?
Which is, you know, it is an amazing fact.
Maybe the world's most impactful educator.
Could well be.
And it's almost impossible to measure because the lessons are encapsulated in such a way that when they unfold you don't even realize where they came from.
Yeah, that's right.
One of the one of the cancelled books, McGillicud's Pool, to me, I just here, let me let me see if I can show it here.
Yeah, I also have except I can't get to the beginning of the book.
Yeah, here's the image that got Megillah gets Pool cancelled, so this is a story.
I think most of us did not know this story until it was cancelled.
Can we, before we talk about that image, just set it up?
Sure.
So, Zach, if you can show my screen here.
This is the cover of the book, and it starts With a little boy fishing in a pool that the farmer says, the pool is too small and you might as well know it when people have junk, here's the place that they throw it.
And the boy says, hmm, answered Marco, it may be your right.
I've been here three hours without one single bite.
There might be no fish, but again, well, there might.
Because you never can tell what goes on down below.
The pool might be bigger than you or I know.
There might be it.
This might be a pool like I've read of in books connected to one of those underground brooks.
Okay, so it goes on and on and on and on and then we get to Zach.
You can show back.
Yep.
We get to this image where, I can't quite read it, it says, some Eskimo fish from beyond Hudson Bay might decide to swim down... Yeah, can you... Yeah, might decide to swim down, might be headed this way.
It's a pretty long trip, but they might, and they may.
So... I actually did have this as a child as well.
You did?
I don't, now that I see it, I remember it.
Unfortunately, it's not in our collection, but...
But in any case, obviously the term Eskimo is incorrect and offensive in many contexts.
I would point out that this is not... That itself is going to be news to a lot of people.
Right.
And you know, are, you know, are the Beatles next?
When Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's going to flock to him or run to him.
I don't know that reference.
Let's just put it this way.
So you're saying that there's a Beatles song which uses the word Eskimo, and if an image of fur-necked fish being called Eskimo fish in a Seuss book is sufficient to have the publisher of that book say, actually, we're going to pull this because it's not reflective of our values, then what's next?
Perhaps the Beatles, because they also use the word Eskimo.
Right.
And, you know, we will find that because of human nature, this is a problem that is riddled throughout lots of things.
So, for example, I hope I'm remembering this correctly, the term Anastasi is actually… Anastasi.
Anastasi is an epithet.
It is not the term that the people in question use for themselves.
It is basically the Navajo word for foe.
I believe that's right.
And then there's… Pueblo people.
The Pueblo people, right?
And then there's the most complex case of all, I think, which is the term Indian, which is obviously, you know, Columbus's error, thinking that he was, you know, In India, or had arrived where he was intending to go, misjudges, therefore, the people he's encountered.
Those people have now taken on this moniker.
And some people, in fact, I've been challenged inside of Clubhouse for using the term Indian as if it was an epithet, which it isn't.
Indians use it for themselves.
I have specifically been instructed by people of Native descent.
We had a colleague at Evergreen who insisted on it, who actually got, you know, pretty pissed off.
at all this futzing around with all this other language.
He said, call me an Indian, and let's get on with it.
Again, it's not the most interesting thing about me, was his position.
And it's true, and it is present in everything that I do and everything that I am.
But spending a lot of time around exactly what language to use is a waste of all of our time.
Right.
And, you know, my feeling is people have a right to self-define and, you know, to the extent that we have a major, you know, news outlet for Native Americans called Indian Country.
This is something that has been chosen by people.
They've taken it on.
You know, and what are we to do, frankly, with white and black?
I've never met a black, black person or a white, white person.
I've met some pink-white people, and I've met some brown-black people, but the point is these are not literal descriptions of anything.
These are somebody's moniker, right?
And so the whole thing is fraught, and we can either get over it and say, all right, look, history is definitely not a pretty place.
It's got its moments, both good and bad, and let us not read too much into the particular utterances that we are using or the particular choice of, you know, tropes that show up in a child's book.
There's something very interesting to be done here, I think, around what language is, is a move away from strictly onomatopoetic utterances.
In which, excuse me, onomatopoeia being those words that sound like what they're describing.
So, you know, the names that we give to animal sounds.
It's interesting, though, that they often sound so different between different languages, even though the animals presumably sound the same.
But other words like crash or bonk.
Splash.
Splash, right.
And that one of the things that linguists describe as an indication that you're engaged in language that is more complex is that it goes far beyond simple onomatopoeia.
Things that sound like the things they're describing is a very narrow version that is what onomatopoeia is, but you're talking now about visual descriptors being exactly the thing that the word is being used to mean.
It's like a visual onomatopoeia that we are stuck in.
And what language is, is metaphor.
So much of the meaning in language is actually metaphorical, and we get ambiguity.
Nuance can be ambiguous, and language is almost always ambiguous, and you can disagree about exactly what you meant by a certain word unless it is nailed down at sort of the visual or sensory on a monopoetic level.
But to be nailed down to that level is again an example of reductionist thinking.
It's just so narrow, and so it's all trees and no forest, that we're never going to get anywhere interesting or good.
And, you know, it gets in the way of the purpose of language.
The purpose of language is to convey things.
And so it just so happens that if you go to Lone Pine, California, you won't find the Lone Pine.
It fell down a long time ago, right?
Now it happens that nobody is offended that we call it Lone Pine, and there's been no movement to... You know why?
Because Lorax.
No one speaks for the trees, Brett.
I don't think that's why.
I think it's because Lone Pine has now taken on a meaning that has nothing to do with a lone pine, right?
This is an excellent example, I think.
All of those place names that are indicative of a particular thing from a particular place in a particular time, You know, they don't all need to be kept.
They don't all need to be kept.
But a widespread, of a moment, we're going to rename all the things.
We're going to stop publication of these things and we're going to rename all these other things.
Man, the school renamings are amazing!
There's no consideration of the cost-benefit in any case.
And so Lone Pine is relatively simple because the cost of just simply accepting that it doesn't describe an actual tree Pretty low.
On the other hand, Dead Indian Memorial Drive in Southern Oregon, right?
Now, that always, from the first moment I heard that descriptor, struck me as callous, right?
Dead Indian, right?
Who was this?
What are the circumstances of their death, right?
And, you know, but the problem is, if you rename it, nobody knows how to ask directions, because that's simply what everybody understands it to be called.
A worse case, I remember from when I was working with Bob Trivers in Jamaica as his field assistant, we drove through a town called Black River.
And I asked him very naively, I looked at, I said, That river looks brown to me.
It was a silty river.
And he said, it's not named for the water.
It's named for the people.
Right?
Oh, goodness.
Right?
This was a descriptor of the population that lived around that.
Aren't most people who live in Jamaica African?
Yeah, but it was a British naming.
So, I guess I haven't been to Jamaica.
You had that one extended experience in the field with Bob many, many years ago.
That just surprises me because it seems like those people who don't have dark skin who live in Jamaica are a tiny minority.
Well, I don't know what the meaning is precisely, but nonetheless, It's sure to be uncomfortable given that a place was named for the color of the skin.
And then you and I ran into an odd example of this in... where were we?
The slave market in... Oh, Charleston.
Yeah, in Charleston.
South Carolina.
Right, so the slave market gives the impression that this is the place where slaves were sold, when in fact what slave market means, so there's a correct meaning to it, which is historically accurate, which is that this is the place where slaves went to sell their goods, that they actually had an economy that they could sell things at the place.
I don't remember this.
Yeah, so anyway, the point I guess is, look, If you want to just scrutinize the name of every damn thing, wow, are you going to find a mess?
And is some of it going to be offensive?
You better believe some of it's going to be offensive.
Is that an argument to change every offensive thing?
Well, at least you would want to figure out how much chaos you're going to create by taking things, the names of which people know.
And invalidating those names and giving them some arbitrage.
I mean, the school you and I went to high school at was a marvelous place in many ways.
I know what you're going to say.
You know exactly what I'm going to say.
So you should name the school.
There will be some people out there who know it.
It's Crossroads.
The Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences in Santa Monica.
Crossroads.
It's not a drug rehab center, it's a high school.
Which some people thought, yes.
Well sure, it sounds like Crossroads, you know.
And it's on an alley.
Yeah, but a charming alley, as alleys go.
I found it charming, but then again, you were there.
That might have colored my vision.
But in any case... Do you remember when you and a handful of other people literally picked up my car and moved it?
Yes.
Okay.
I do.
I recall the front of it being a great deal heavier than we expected on account of the engine being there.
Yes.
It was a nine-year-old little Toyota, but still, you managed to... It was made of metal, I assure you.
Anyway.
But in any case, the school...
… was so progressive that instead of numbering the rooms in the buildings, it named them according to famous persons from… Beautiful.
Cicero, Dostoevsky.
Sure.
Those are the two that I remember.
Thucydides.
Thucydides.
I had great books on Thucydides, and at least once I had English in Dostoevsky.
And we read Thucydides, and we read Dostoevsky.
There was never a Hobbes room.
Yes.
Am I recalling… They didn't want to bring about the nasty, brutish, and short end to our young lives, I think.
Right, and they did not want to endow us with a veil of ignorance.
They wanted us to leave wiser than we were.
But in any case, they screwed up the system because you never knew where your classroom was going to be.
Kind of.
I mean, you were only there for two years, I was there for six.
Because I repeated grades?
No, because it was seven through 12.
But for me, I thought it was because it really was.
I didn't expect us to be going here today.
But, you know, it was literally they just bought up a building here and there around an alley.
So they had like an old body shop, there was like an airplane hangar, there was an apartment building.
And they'd converted, sort of, these buildings.
They hadn't raised them and built new buildings.
I think by now they have.
It's a very fancy school by now, but it certainly wasn't when we went there.
But I had French in an apartment building, and I had my film classes in this body shop and such.
And you knew after you'd been there a year where Thucydides was and where Dostoevsky was.
And I was a music major for my first two years there, and so that was in the airplane hangar.
But the problem was, they literally changed where the names of where the rooms were every year.
So they didn't move the rooms around, they just… they recycled the names as if there weren't enough important people from history, and they just like switched where the cities was, and where Dostoevsky was.
So this is emblematic of a failure of their model.
They named the rooms after people.
Rather than plants.
If they named them after plants, then they would have been stable in place.
But, you know, Plato moves from one part of the campus to the next.
That's to be expected.
I mean, Socrates in particular.
You would expect him to be on a walkabout.
You're absolutely right.
And he raises a lot of questions as to where he's gone.
Exactly.
Okay.
I don't know how we got there.
Some way.
Language, I'm thinking.
We're over an hour.
Oh, we haven't even talked about the cancellation.
Well, that's cool.
We're going to keep going.
Just a couple more of the lessons of Seuss.
Reflections on what it is to be a child.
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.
It was maybe my least favorite book of his.
It's just not very interesting.
But there's this one picture in it, which I think I can find here, that is the reason that the Seuss Foundation or whatever has decided not to publish it anymore.
One picture in a long book.
Nope.
Yeah, there we go.
A Chinese boy who eats with sticks in the lower left.
So you have the original version.
I think I do.
So he's yellow.
His skin is yellow.
And the other people's skin isn't yellow.
And he's got a conical hat and a ponytail, a pigtail, and chopsticks.
And the clogs.
Oh, and the, yeah.
Yep.
Sure.
So this was changed, I think, in the 70s.
Well, this book can't be, I don't know.
I don't know when this book is from, but it's a book club edition rather than a party edition, which is what we have for Horton Hears a Who.
So he was turned into a Chinaman who eats with sticks.
That actually looks more worse to me by a lot.
Well, I agree.
A Chinese boy who eats with sticks.
I think it's actually been changed since then.
I don't think that's the updated version.
That looks like going backwards to me.
Because Chinaman is, you know, is not a term that most people would use in modern times.
Whereas a Chinese boy who eats with sticks.
I agree.
I agree.
But it's possible because of the complexity around the term boy and that that is used as an epithet.
It's possible that it was taken that if you describe him as a man What if he was actually a boy?
Well, I agree.
That's certainly a possibility.
What if the guy was actually a child?
And as a result of these drawings being not 100% accurate, it's a little difficult to tell how old the person in that picture is.
Oh my god.
And you know, like eating with sticks is... That's racist?
Really?
So we're bringing this up because apparently this is the image and text in the book, which is the reason for the ceasing of publication of this particular book.
A book which actually has a lesson in it, right?
I mean, I think almost all of his books, at least the ones that I'm familiar with, do.
Maybe that's just the selective process that my parents used on me, and therefore we used on our children.
But what do you see as the lesson to think that I saw on Mulberry Street?
Well, first of all, I believe that I've never looked into this book until this cancellation episode.
I read it, and the book is about a child who feels that the story – he knows he's going to be asked about what he saw, and he feels that the story is a little sparse.
And so he comes up with a much more fanciful story in which the horse that's pulling the cart turns into a zebra and all sorts of amazing things happen.
And then he's asked by his father, as he knows he will be, what he saw, and he reports the actual story, which isn't that fascinating.
So it's his fantasy.
And which can also be read as it's a series of lies.
Like, the boy is a fabulist, as all children are.
As all children are, all children imagine what could be and what might be and what might be true of them, what might be true of others, all of this.
Like, that's what children do.
Right.
And so the book is in some ways licensed to do that.
It's an invitation to do that.
It is a recognition that the fact that you came up with something doesn't make it legit to report.
Could the book have proceeded in a way that he reported the fanciful story?
Of course, because everybody knows there was no zebra on Mulberry Street.
Right?
So, you know, the point is it is a scenario that raises all of the important questions about, you know, what is an honorable fiction?
What is a lie?
These things.
And in some ways, the cat in the hat is almost the inverse.
It's like these children we are told actually experience this crazy thing.
Bless you.
Yeah.
The children actually have this menace come into their home, and he brings with him – actually, maybe this is the moment to show what will be our picture.
Oh, sure.
The menace, the cat in the hat, brings Things 1 and 2 into the children's home, and this is actually our children at the ages of 3 and 5.
Things 1 and 2, who have been dressed up by their grandmother.
Yes, my mother.
Very much, and made these costumes.
This was Halloween.
We didn't force these children.
You said they've been dressed up by their grandmother.
I do not recall this being Halloween.
I believe we sent them to school that way for a month.
That explains a lot about them, doesn't it?
Yes, it sure does.
Why they have not been averse to the lockdowns.
They don't know what we're going to send them to school in next.
So my recollection is that Halloween was always great because of the amazing costumes that your mom made.
She's quite the skilled craftsman.
Yes, she's extraordinary.
And then it went off the rails when one of our children decided he was A bit above it.
And she dressed him up as Sherlock Holmes at his request.
Yes.
He accepted... Wait, before, so he said, at first he said, pretty young, right?
He was like 11 maybe.
He said, I don't want to do Halloween anymore.
I don't, I'm not interested in candy.
I don't want to go asking people for things I don't want anyway.
I'm not doing this.
So he dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, complete with the pipe and the deerstalker hat or whatever it's called.
And instead of soliciting candy, he went up to doors and he asked each of the households if they had seen any suspicious characters.
And the thing is, the funny thing is, I recall in later years, when we came by, that we were asked- With the other child who was still, the younger child who was still interested in doing this.
Right, we were asked where that adorable odd child was, who had asked about Suspicious Character.
Where is he now?
He is now the producer of Dark Horse Podcast, among other things.
Yes, proving that just, you know, because you've done terrible things doesn't mean you can't find an honorable position in society that's productive.
Yeah.
So, I was trying to make a connection, but like I think the cat in the hat is in some ways the inverse of like both of the kids do both of these things like they think real things have happened, or they imagine up real things and they're going to tell their It's a fantastical story, and then they actually revert to the truth, and to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street.
And then the cat in the hat, kids can actually believe that crazy things happened, right?
And actually, they may just be deceiving themselves, or there's a lot of reasons for kids to believe that crazy things happened that didn't.
But at the point mom comes home, they're like, mom, they.
She says, um, you know, what's going on here?
Um, they are convinced the children that they need to hide from her the truth.
And in fact, you know, if, if, if all of the chaos that happens in the cat in the hat, it actually happened, it's the children who got out of control.
And, you know, maybe with the help of a babysitter who was too busy on her phone or whatever.
Uh, and now they're trying to hide, hide all of the evidence from their mom.
Uh, you know, there is no cat in the hat.
It's really, it's really a risky business for children.
Yes.
And then I guess before we talk, and I know we're going way over here, but before we talk about some of the specifics of the cancellation, I would like to ask you, do you have a Zanz for Kanz?
Oh!
You should.
I did.
I know that I should.
You should.
Yes.
Do you have Zanz for Kanz?
You should.
Yes, this is a question that we pose to each other rather frequently around here.
I'm not quite sure why, but… Man, one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.
I don't know what the lesson there is beyond basically, you know, getting familiar with language and playfulness.
And really, language and playfulness.
Yeah.
I mean, I think actually that one, and I would have to go back to it to be sure, but the fox in socks.
Oh, yes.
Absolutely.
- Right, "The Fox in Socks" is not a lesson book about the content, it's a lesson book in how to deal with tricky linguistic constructions. - Absolutely, and I haven't found it on our shelves and it's possible I somehow got rid of it in our move, but for a long time I had a book about some of but for a long time I had a book about some of Seuss's early playings with language, which probably included some of those early racist cartoons called "The Tough Coughs As He Plows
Because I'm not sure if he was an American, he may have been a naturalized American, because I think English may not have been his first language.
And I'm sorry if I'm getting this wrong, but as I remember it, that book, Because if you think about the title, the tough coughs as he plows the dough, it's four words that all end with O-U-G-H.
And so it was him learning English going like, what is going on with this crazy language where I have four words that look like they should rhyme?
Tough, cough, plow, dough, which none of them rhyme.
And how is it that you end up with a language like that?
So, I'm not positive that he wasn't born elsewhere, and we should have thought about that before doing an episode on Soosness.
Yeah, I don't know.
But anyway, he was fascinated with language, and The Fox in Socks expands on that also.
And again, that was a book that we read to our children a lot, and I don't have it, so I don't know why.
Yeah.
I hope it's somewhere.
Yeah.
Okay, so why are we talking about Seuss today?
Well, there are six Seuss books that won't be published anymore.
Here is a headline from CNN.
Zack, six Dr. Seuss books won't be published published anymore because they portray people in hurtful and wrong ways.
Okay, Z, thank you.
In this CNN report they say, the study also argues, they're referring to a study that I'll get to here, the study also argues that since the majority of human characters in Dr. Seuss's books are white, his works, inadvertently or not, center whiteness and thus perpetuate white supremacy.
Right.
Perpetuate white supremacy.
Yeah.
So, Learning for Justice, which is this outfit here, was called Teaching Tolerance, and it was formed by the SBLCC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, about 30 years ago.
Teaching Tolerance has been proudly renamed Learning for Justice now because they recognize now that Teaching Tolerance is a Bad goal.
Oh, terrible.
It's a bad goal.
And what we really need to do is learning for justice.
So again, Zach, I need my screen back here to find what I'm doing here.
Just a minute.
This crazy – wait, you want to see the screen?
Yeah, I want to go back to that.
How about you look at it without me showing it because I need to find some stuff.
No, no.
You okay?
Go for it.
Can you put it up?
I just want to point out the comparison between Soos himself and the joyous presentation of the world and this schoolmarm sour it's time to talk about.
Dr. Seuss, right?
It's a take your medicine.
It doesn't matter how much fun or how much you're learning from Dr. Seuss.
It's time that we talked about what's deep in his past, right?
That is so absurd and so obviously the wrong side of this argument, right?
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I just want to call attention that this is somebody who has lost the thread and given up on the idea that there could be good things in the world that we should just allow to be for what they are.
Yes, absolutely.
I totally agree.
So one thing from this, don't show my screen just yet, Zach, is the Learning for Justice Center says, if you're thinking you need to burn your favorite copy of The Sneetches or The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, I'd really rather that you didn't.
We're all about environmental safety here.
If you're thinking you need to have some important conversations with your students, you're absolutely right.
Their justification for not burning books is that it's bad for the environment.
Well, actually, this is also relevant to witches.
Because think about the fuel.
Especially if they've been eating crap food all their lives.
The stuff that's gonna get aerosolized when you, or turn into particulate matter that others might inhale, if you burn them, you should do so at least with a good ventilation system, I would think.
Well, certainly ventilation, but I think the real point of the woke revolution is that the burning of witches is only acceptable if it's done in a carbon neutral way.
Yeah, that's true.
So, offsets or something like that.
Oh, yes.
You see?
Yes.
Yes, now I see a business model here.
Yeah.
We could sell them some kind of non-fungible offsets, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, it's a business model for us?
Yeah, totally.
Oh, okay.
I'm not sure I want to get into that business model, but okay.
So here's two more paragraphs from this insane Learning for Justice piece.
But what about the sneetches, they ask?
You can show it if you want, Zach.
In light of this new information, you may wonder about Dr. Seuss books featuring non-human characters.
At Teaching Tolerance, we've even featured anti-racist activities built around the Dr. Seuss book, The Sneetches.
But when we re-evaluated, we found that the story is actually not as anti-racist as we once thought, and it has some pretty intricate layers you and your students might consider, too.
The solution to the story's conflict is that the plain-bellied sneetches and star-bellied sneetches simply get confused as to who is oppressed.
As a result, they accept one another.
This message of acceptance does not acknowledge structural power imbalances.
It doesn't address the idea that historical narratives impact present-day power structures.
And instead of encouraging young readers to recognize and take action against injustice, the story promotes a race-neutral approach.
So the Learning for Justice organization, which is now called Teaching Tolerance, has once again demonstrated that they can't tell the difference They're now called teaching tolerance and they were once called learning for justice has once again revealed as so many of these people do that they can't tell the difference between an individual and a population.
They just they simply they're not willing to or they can't tell the difference.
They have no idea.
So in listening to this insanity.
Yes.
I cannot help but wonder about something in myself.
I feel like I feel like I'm almost famously tolerant, and I feel like I'm getting to the end of my tolerance.
At the point we're going to play this game over this stuff, right?
Yes.
I just don't know how to file it, because goddammit, this is too freaking important, right?
This is a wonderful case of a person with normal human failings who overcame them, decided to pass on what he had discovered, right?
Has done uncountable good for the world, specifically with reference to children.
What he provided to the world is totally democratizable.
And we are going to cancel it over, you know, infractions that are... that actually... How do I say this?
We have to be able to look at historical artifacts that are compromised by things like racism and be able to say, yes, that was 1942.
That was 1928.
Look how far we've come.
We have some idea what our actual history was, how bad things were, how bad things weren't.
Fast we've moved and where we've ended up, and we might be able then to look forward and say, well, what are we still getting wrong, right?
But if you're going to erase the history, if you're going to make this frankly insane claim that mere exposure to things that are compromised by their position in history, things that show some sign of common bigotry, Right?
If you're going to argue that simple exposure to those things is so harmful that we cannot risk allowing children to see it, they're going to have no idea what actually happened.
Right?
Frankly, it is very useful as an adult that I periodically run into things that surprise me.
It is useful that I read Darwin and I'm a little bit shocked sometimes.
That he gets some stuff wrong.
That I have to grapple with Fisher and his antisemitism.
The fact of having these characters.
Louis Agassi.
Right.
Almost all of the greats if they were born before yesterday.
Right.
And, you know, I don't know how long... I don't know how long we can go.
We're already canceling Washington and Lincoln.
Has anybody noticed that there are gigantic monuments to these men in Washington and Jefferson?
How long before we discuss whether those have to be removed, right?
That's clearly going to come.
And the fact is... I'm sure they'll put up something beautiful and propagandistic in its place, though.
I mean, no doubt.
You know what?
Not yes, but.
That's ridiculous.
Well, it is ridiculous.
Yes, but this.
There is a monument not far from those old ones, right?
There is a monument to the Vietnam War dead.
That is a monument that acknowledges the ambiguity of history.
Do we get to honor these people who fought for us in spite of the fact that we largely now recognize that the war was not just, that it was predicated on falseness, that it didn't need to be fought?
These people lost their lives doing what they perceived as their patriotic duty, and we, the government, fucked up.
We should not have been there.
We, the government, are responsible for the deaths of these people.
Now, it doesn't say that anywhere, but clearly the tone of the monument recognizes that there's a gray area and that we have to grapple with these things.
And it seems to me that this is implicit in all of these questions, and that the impulse to erase the history is specifically an instinct of those who wish to fictionalize what happened in order to make it sound much worse than it actually was, as bad as it may have been, make it worse than it was in order to justify other things that they are not entitled to do.
Yeah, that's right.
Let me just come full circle on what's happening with the Seuss books right now, because it is the Seuss Foundation, or whatever they're called, who have decided to permanently table six of these books, and they've become basically unavailable.
I went looking within a few hours of their decision and at least one of the books was on offer for $3,000 on Amazon and then it said not available.
Well, then Amazon made the choice, and eBay made the choice not to circulate these things.
And in an echo of our discussion on Andy Ngo's book not being available locally here in Portland, but Mein Kampf still being available, Mein Kampf is still available on eBay.
And so it's not like there's a policy that says that things that are coming, as dumb as that policy would be, things that are bad from history won't be sold here.
Right?
That policy apparently does not exist.
Dr. Seuss is a no-go and Mein Kampf is still cool.
No, to hearken back to the phrase that I created back in the beginning of the summer, it's a society-wide, don't hurt me wall.
And I fear that that's what the Seuss Foundation, or again, whatever exactly they're called, is doing.
That this is a slightly proactive, but mostly retroactive, please don't hurt me, look at how ahead of things we're getting.
We're going to get rid of these six books, a couple of which I understand and I haven't been able to find actually do have some Some racist imagery in them, but at least the two that we've talked about here don't just not like why are they getting rid of?
And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street and McElligot's Pool.
Yeah.
I'm not sure exactly what prompted them, but every article that's being written right now is hearkening back to this 2019 piece of scholarship, which is scholarship in the same way that Lindsay Pluckrose and Boghossian's important study on dog rape culture was scholarship.
It's exactly that level of scholarship, I think, and I will probably catch some crap for suggesting that, but this is that level of garbage.
Um, let's see, where is it?
Oh, so, um, yeah, Zach, you can just show my, show my article.
Everyone is referring to this piece, um, by Ishizuka and Stevens from 2019 called, The Cat is Out of the Bag, Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books, published in Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.
And, you know, it's a very long piece.
You know, they clearly put some time in.
I'll give them that.
But one, just one tiny thing that they say in here is, quote, Our study sought to evaluate the claims that his children's books are anti-racist and was shaped by the research question, how and to what extent are non-white characters depicted in Dr. Seuss's children's books?
So, they do something that a lot of bad science and a lot of bad this-isn't-even-science scholarship do there, where they say, we had this question, and this question is potentially interesting.
I mean, the claims that his children's books are anti-racist, that's already burdened there, that's already laden with...
Um, with a conclusion, but you start with a question and then you actually do something, you know, you pivot and you twist and you, you know, you actually do something that becomes a very tiny narrow instantiation of what, what one way that that thing might be revealed in the world, which in this case is how non-white characters are depicted in Dr. Seuss's children's books.
So this is like, This reminds me of scientism, frankly.
Hayek, who's an economist from the early 20th century, coined this term scientism, which we talk about in our book actually, in which he basically said, look, there's all these people who aren't doing science or who think they are doing science but really aren't, who look at what science is and borrow some of the methods of it and apply them.
And then other people who are confused can look on and say, Oh, that sounds sciencey, that sounds scientific.
And it's this in some ways, I think I'd have to go back and really familiarize myself with exactly what Hayek was saying.
He talked about it a lot.
But I think he was particularly concerned about the sort of the elevation of There's a lot of actual science and the misapplication of actual science to places where it doesn't belong, because there are questions that you can ask where the scientific method isn't the right approach for sure.
But what we definitely have in modern times is even this kind of quote-unquote scholarship seems to be playing around with some of the supposed methods of science.
And what it's done is it's borrowed the worst of modern scientific stuff, which is so reductionist, which it said, ah, I've got this question.
What can I count?
What can I count?
Oh, what I can count is how many of the people are white.
That's the thing I can count.
And it fails to recognize that the thing that you can count is often Not the thing that is an accurate indicator of whether or not what you are counting can tell you anything about that question.
Yeah.
It doesn't get you there.
This is wrong in two ways.
One, it isn't.
Which is?
What I just said?
No, the methodology is wrong.
Of this 2019 paper.
Of this study.
Because one, let's say that you were doing, you know, let's say that we were to evaluate the Peaky Blinders and whether or not it was anti-black.
One of the best shows on television, ever.
Great show, right?
How many of the characters are black?
Certainly, there's one prominent character, but it is overwhelmingly a white audience.
I mean, white cast, okay?
You could conclude that that's the result of bias, or you could conclude that this is a story about Birmingham in the aftermath of World War I.
1920s and 30s, yes.
Birmingham, England in the 1920s and 30s.
And that it actually does a pretty good job of, you know, depicting this scene plausibly.
You know what it has an over-representation of?
Gypsies.
Wow.
I know.
Right?
It's anti everyone but gypsies is what Peaky Blinders is.
That's true.
But okay, so the methodology, the fact that you can count something and that you find that it is not what you expect, it doesn't say what you think.
So just as with the, you know, the Damore era stuff.
- James Damore, Google Memo. - Right, the idea that women may be underrepresented in the engineering side of Google could mean that there's a structural bias against women gaining access, or it could mean something else, like women have preferences that don't tend to lead them there as frequently, and so they're like women have preferences that don't tend to lead them there So, you know, the point is, the counting doesn't answer the question.
You're making a logical leap.
You're engaged in a deductive fallacy.
But the other thing that's wrong here is that it isn't even meeting the basic requirements of science of advancing a hypothesis and then testing it.
Because they're testing a question that they already know the answer to.
So what they've done is they've said… Well, they've already landed on the answer they'll come to.
Well, not only are they conclusion driven, but they also, even a casual perusing of Seuss, which they've clearly done in order to care enough about the topic, tells them what answer they're going to come out with.
So the point is, it's not actually a test.
You have to count something that you don't know how many you're gonna find, right, in order for it to be a valid test.
You cannot, you know, make an observation, hey, there's a bias in this book, and then test it by measuring that same bias.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think maybe this is wrapped up in your first concern, your first way that it's wrong, but this counting of trees and pretending you understand the forest is one of the errors here.
It's an error in a lot of modern science that doesn't inherently have some ridiculous woke bias in it.
It's an error of the modern era to confuse what you can count with what you want to know.
Yep.
Now, I do think we have to be careful.
It's not as if the racism is...
Absent, but it's earlier, right?
Well, I think it's absent from most of his books.
That's what I'm saying, is that the cancellation is about trivial infractions that need to remain just so that people have a sense of where we were and where we are.
The stuff that's really bad, and there is some stuff that's really bad.
Zach, do you want to show the cartoon?
There's a cartoon.
This is a very early cartoon.
So yeah, here we have the depiction of Africans, right?
It's pretty offensive.
You know what it reminds me of?
Early Disney.
Right.
You'll find the same kinds of tropes in Disney.
When is this?
This is 20s?
Do we know when this is?
I don't remember.
And you see just one little thing that reminds me of later Seuss with that critter that's coming in on the upper right The mosquito thing.
Yep.
So anyway, this is really bad.
But we're talking about a person who overcame bigotry, and the fact that he was so prolific in his books, explored so many different things, is… That's really quite a cartoon, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
Sorry, but I've never seen this before.
And for those people listening, you've got sort of what may be an African king with a lot of crazy racist indicators, big lips and such.
Well, with tropes.
You've got the British explorer being boiled.
We're not there yet.
You've got an African king who has a lot of these racist indicators, and cooking a pot with another African at it, A big mosquito comes towards the king.
He looks surprised.
The white explorer who turns out to be in the pot sticks his head up, not yet cooked, and sprays the mosquito dead with some insecticide to the joy of the two Africans who Who, you know, it's racist.
They don't look as fully human as the white guy does.
But it's also, I mean, it's also the, you know, the white guy is not the savior here.
No.
But that does seem to be what the cartoon suggests.
But he's also doing exactly the thing.
You know, he's doing the reductionist crazy thing of like, well, just kill it.
I'm sure it'll be fine.
Well, I mean, he's being a dummy.
He's protecting the person who's having him boiled.
I think it's much more interesting than that.
My point is, he's produced this tool that people at the time thought was going to be the amazing saving grace, and this was just pre-DDT.
This is exactly the reductionist, crazy, thing that gave us so many of the problems of the 21st century where people are now fat and stressed and unhealthy because we've been told that nutritionists and pharmaceutical execs and exercise physiologists have all figured out the 1-2-3-A-B-C thing that you need to do in order to be healthy Okay.
It is a cartoon.
It is compromised.
pills, eat these things, make sure you get enough carbs and this and that and the other, and you'll be fine.
And so we land in part in the crazy era that we're in.
Okay.
It is a cartoon.
It is compromised.
It may or may not mean various things, but we are stuck with this.
It is from an early part of this person's career.
It does not appear to characterize his later thinkings about anything.
And we could make the argument, right?
I found that cartoon with a standard Google search.
We could make the argument that that cartoon… Did you search like racist Seuss or something?
I'm trying to.
I think I searched African and Seuss.
But in any case.
We could make the argument that that cartoon is offensive, and it is, and that that offense could potentially do harm, which I guess it might.
And we could make the argument that it should then be removed from Google, right?
No, we shouldn't.
It is very important that when somebody says, Dr. Seuss had a racist past, that I can go and I can find that image and I can assess for myself.
And when I do that, what do I come up with?
Yep, he did.
Okay, that then allows me to put the later stuff in context.
That is a very important thing to be able to do.
Disappearing the evidence is completely unfair, and this is increasingly a trope of this woke nonsense.
You will frequently now find journalistic articles In which somebody is reported to have said something racist, but you can't find the quote to assess for yourself whether it is or it isn't.
And the problem is we know so many of these accusations are bogus that the idea that you can just simply report, well, it was obviously racist, and then not say what the person said is, it is an obvious game to evade the mechanism of evaluation.
That's brilliant.
So says notorious racist Brett Weinstein.
And I'm thinking back to this chilling thing, you know, in the hallway in that first May 23rd, 2017 event where I'm grappling with these students.
I'm trying to get a handle on what they think and what I should say so that they will understand that they've got it wrong.
And this one guy, white guy, Not one of your students, one of the mob.
Right, one of the mob.
Somebody I'd never met.
Says, you said some racist shit, now apologize.
And the point was, you're just going to skip the part where what I actually said could be evaluated.
The point is, well, we know you said some racist shit.
You know it, I know it.
It's like, nope.
Nobody who's paying attention knows that.
So anyway, Zach, do you want to put up the cartoon, some of the anti-fascist cartoons This is Seuss.
This is Seuss from World War II.
Pre-war, pre-our entry into the war.
Actual anti-fascist.
Actual anti-fascist.
So this is Seuss.
Describe it for people who are listening.
You've got a picture of two guys on a stage, an American guy with an America First written on his jacket with a smile standing Tall, if awkwardly on the stage.
And his beard is linked to a guy, a sort of malformed, fat, grinning, apparently German Nazi with a swastika on his belly.
And the person in a patriotic American hat is pointing at the beard that links them together.
He's like a carnival barker, Uncle Sam.
Yeah, Carnival Barker, Uncle Sam is announcing to the audience and on this platform, folks, those most perplexing people, the lads with the Siamese beard, unrelated by blood, they are joined in a manner that mystifies in the mightiest minds of the land.
So anyway, this is one of many anti-fascist cartoons.
So again, the date is relevant here.
Wait, no, Zach, don't, don't, no, not yet, please.
Do we know when that's from?
It feels super relevant to the story.
Yeah, it is super relevant to the story, but I believe it is just before our entry into the war and a couple years prior.
Okay, so if that is true – and I really don't like doing this without knowing exactly when that's from – if that is true, that tells a terrific story in which it would appear that Geisel de Zeus is basically saying to the American government, what the hell are you doing?
You appear to be on the side of the Germans here.
Right.
And he does that many, many times.
He takes Lindbergh to task, who was a Nazi sympathizer.
He goes after the America First movement, which is an isolationist movement.
So Zach, do you want to show the Okay, here we have an America First guy sitting in his bathtub with Nazi fish and a Nazi crocodile, maybe positioned to scrub this guy's back, and it says, I think there's a Nazi octopus and a Nazi lobster, too.
Yeah, there are lots of Nazi critters, and the bathtub is labeled American Hemisphere, and it says, the old family bathtub is plenty safe for me.
The idea being that we can't hang out in the Western Hemisphere and expect to be safe from the Nazis, but the America First movement doesn't get it.
Do the next one, Zach?
Okay, now here we have two figures apparently carved into something Mount Rushmore-like.
One is clearly a smug caricature of Hitler, and the other is a bizarre and distorted Japanese person that I'm led to understand does not in any obvious way resemble any leader like Hirohito or anything like that.
So in this case what we have is those figures are carved into the mountain and it says don't let them carve those faces on our mountains.
Buy United States savings bonds and stamps.
And so this is a pro-war effort cartoon.
Now, in it, we can see two things.
We can see that Seuss is anti-fascist, that he is pro-intervention, that he is patriotic, that he has distorted the Japanese villain much more strongly than the German villain, evidencing bigotry.
So, you know, what are we to make of a cartoon like this?
A cartoon like this contains the full complexity, right?
This is a person with bigotry early in their life, a bigotry that they later overcome, you know, reference the earlier part of this conversation about Horton, here's a who.
Yeah.
In many ways, the perfect demonstration of what really happened.
In Theodor Geisel's case, we have the receipts.
We've got the evidence of what he went through, what he became, what it meant.
And you're arguing that the current attempts to disappear the receipts allows any story to be told.
allows any story to be told.
And it also, and mind you, I don't think that they are done with the cancellation effort on Dr. Seuss.
I think we will see more.
But the fact is, central to the whole program of this woke revolution Our two contradictory ideas that sit right next to each other, right?
That white supremacy is our top priority and we must act against it very strongly and white supremacy cannot be cured.
There's nothing we can do.
If you're white, you've got the disease, right?
This story actually tells us quite a bit.
It says that you can go from a state of bigotry and you can arrive at a state of an egalitarian, liberal-minded view of the world, and that that is a real transition where we can, you know, we can evaluate the man, warts and all, and get some sense of what is possible.
But there's a reason that they do not want us doing that.
And that reason is that if it is possible to overcome your bigotry, then you would have to ask the question of which of us might have already overcome our bigotry, right?
You couldn't just demonize us based on our skin color.
You would have to say, well, I wonder if this person has the disease or not.
And they don't want to do that.
So they need the simplifying assumption that nobody is cured.
And in order to get it, they're disappearing the evidence and they are going to fictionalize history.
And, you know, it's enough.
Simply, we simply cannot allow this to happen and Dr. Seuss.
This is such an obvious example, right?
Eskimo fish is what it is.
Yes, the term Eskimo is antiquated and not a good term but Um, we should be able to go look at it and say, isn't that interesting that in whatever year Mulberry Street was written, 50 something, um, that that term was in circulation.
Yeah, I think it will come as a surprise to almost everyone that Eskimo is also a term that we're not supposed to be using anymore.
I haven't, but that's maybe neither here nor there.
Um, I, you know, I, I, I object as we talked about early in the middle of this to the idea that, um, You know, language changes by fiat.
It doesn't.
It changes as people change what they believe and change how they use language, and it changes as the generations move, right?
Like, this is part of what young people do, is that they take the language of their elders and they change it, and the elders go, what are you doing?
And the young people say, we're, you know, we're changing.
That's what we do.
So, you had suggested, That we invite people to start using a hashtag.
Hashtag Loose the Seuss, which I'm only concerned about because I'm not sure that I think people will end up hashtagging Loose the Seuss.
How about Let Loose the Seuss?
Maybe that helps.
It's still got loose in it.
So isn't that the name of your poem, Let Loose the Seuss?
I guess it is.
Yeah.
In any case, yes, the thought was that we have people tweet in Seussian rhyme and that we pick a hashtag.
Do we have one that isn't compromised?
Well, I was saying that we would use hashtag Loose the Seuss, L-O-O-S-E, the Seuss, S-E-U-S-S, and just encourage people to write Seussian rhyme of any sort.
It has the potential to be both fanciful and deep, and there's plenty of Seuss that is not deep, but plenty that is, and it is all, I think.
All of the books that remain to us now Yep.
So, shall we have them do that on a particular day when we will have the – we could have them do it on Sunday, tomorrow.
And it does rhyme and have meter, but it plays around in those spaces as well.
It doesn't simply adopt a simple, even, you know, rhyming metric and stick with that.
Yep.
So shall we have them do that on a particular day when we will have the, we could have them do it on Sunday, tomorrow, Sunday.
Hashtag loose the Seuss and you can tweet in Seussian rhyme.
Okay.
I'm not sure.
I mean, most people won't have seen this by then, so I'm not sure that having a particular day helps.
All right.
At will.
I just think it could be interesting to see if such a thing could catch on and we could get sort of more fanciful, more fabulous, and potentially more deep short poetry showing up such that anyone could search on that hashtag, hashtag Loose Lassoos, and find some good stuff.
All right, excellent.
So, with that, we are going to take, for those of you watching, we're going to take a 15-minute break and come back with our live Q&A as we always do, answering your questions that you ask here in Super Chat for those of you live on YouTube.
Email our moderator darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com if you're not sure how to do that or with any other logistical questions.
Please consider joining one or both of our Patreons.
Mine, Heather Hying, has the Dark Horse membership where we do a two-hour private Q&A once a month the last Sunday of the month.
Brett, on his, has among other things Two-hour conversations for people at the higher tiers.
The second one for this month is tomorrow, Sunday at 9 a.m.
Pacific.
9 a.m.
Pacific.
You can go to store.darkhorsepodcast.org for some Dark Horse merchandise.
We will have new stuff out soon.
And the Clips channel is producing clips at a fabulous rate.
At a fabulous clip.
A fabulous clip, and for those who are looking to share shorter bits, or just interested in shorter bits, we recommend you going there.
And if there's anything that you really would like clipped, again, email darkhorse.moderator at gmail.com, and our moderator will pass that on to our Clips guy.
All right!
Anything else?
So, as usual, we encourage you to Love the people in your lives, and eat well, and get outside.
