Rant #2,604: One Chain Don't Make No Prison

I am convinced that the world we live in needs people like me, who speak their mind and know right from wrong.
 
The world needs people like me who understand history, learns from history, and progresses because they understand history.
 
The world needs people like me, who reject the “cancel culture” that currently prevails in our country.
 
The world needs people like me, who understand who Dr. Seuss was, is and will always be.
 
Now the PC Police—who have kind of morphed into “cancel culture” over the past few years—have decided that certain books by Dr. Seuss will not be published anymore, because they contain what can be construed as racist references.
 
One of the books was first published in 1937, 84 years ago, or when our culture wasn’t so sensitive to everything on God’s green earth.
 
It contained a reference about a character of Asian origin, a character who was Chinese, and it used a kind of common Asian reference at the time to describe the character.
 
In fact, Seuss himself updated the character decades later to make the character less “offensive,” but that isn’t good enough … now we must just get rid of it because 87 years later, it does not fit the social norms of today.
 
Using that thinking, let’s get rid of books like “Huckleberry Finn,” let’s get rid of every book written by Jacqueline Susann, let’s get rid of every book ever written, including the Bible.
 
This thinking is just so ridiculous.
 
We are supposedly so progressive in 2021 that any reference offends us, but our children revel in the culture of today, with its almost mundane references to the “N-word” in music and other scatological references in music, TV and the movies.
 
That we can stand, but Dr, Seuss we can’t.
 
If you can explain this to me … well to you, I would say “Mr. Potato Head.”
 
On Facebook yesterday, somebody had the audacity—and I hope that this person was kidding—to say on my post about the kids’ toy that  “to call someone Mr. Potato Head is offensive.”
 
No one was calling anyone Mr. Potato Head. That is the name of the toy.
 
And I have no potato guilt for calling the toy its name.
 
The next thing we are going to see is that green people—whoever they may be—are going to get upset at Seuss for his Grinch character, or for “Green Eggs and Ham.”
 
The sad thing is that evidently, we are not learning from our past mistakes, because this is not the first time that “cancel culture” has reared its ugly head in our society.
 
It wasn’t called that back in the early 1970s, but it was present, and I knew something was afoot when I watched “The Little Rascals” and “The Three Stooges” on local TV, and I wasn’t seeing the full 15- or 20-minute features anymore.
 
“The Little Rascals” and “The here Stooges” were on its last breaths as a kids’ TV staples in 1970 and 1971. The rules were changing, and kids’ TV hosts could not promote certain products without being liable for any false claims made by those products, so local kids’ TV hosts were being weeded out.
 
In New York, we were the mecca of such hosts, and Officer Joe Bolton held court on Channel 11, WPIX, at that point showing the “Our Gang” and “Three Stooges” shorts.
 
Channel 11 always showed truncated versions of the shorts due to time constraints. There were also “Little Rascals” shorts, in particular, that were never shown because they were so overtly racially tinged that you simply could not show them on local TV, even in the 1960s and early 1970s when other stations were still showing “Amos and Andy” TV shows on a regular basis.
 
But now, in the swan song days of the kids’ show hosts on local TV, Officer Joe Bolton was showing not only truncated versions of the Rascals’ and Stooges’ shorts, but episodes that were so cut apart and edited—and censored—that they made no sense at all.
 
Scenes with an even mild racial tone were being removed, any violence was being cut, and any inferences of anything that would offend anyone were cut out.
 
I had become a teenager in 1970, and maybe the little kids watching didn’t know that what they were watching was clipped beyond recognition, but I did.
 
Thank goodness those shows had ran their course back then, because to show destroyed shorts—classics that were filmed many decades earlier—was truly a crime.
 
Happily, the Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts never really left, morphing first to late night movie theater runs—where so many people were inebriated and stoned that it really didn’t matter what was up on the screen—and later to video, then DVD, and now streaming.
 
Heck, the Three Stooges are on MeTV every Saturday for two hours!
 
And you can see the full, un-cut versions of these shorts, and even those that were banned way back when.
 
And the same thing will happen to the Dr. Seuss books. Millions upon millions upon millions of these books are in circulation, and if certain books won’t be printed anymore, you will still be able to get them, and your children and their children and their children will be able to read them with glee.
 
So “cancel culture” really doesn’t totally work. The things they want to get rid of are still out there, and still loved by people who have enjoyed these things for generations and will continue to enjoy them for many generations in the future.

 
“Cancel culture” is simply a “modern” off-shoot of the situation in Nazi Germany, where books were burned, any art was confiscated, and people were robbed of their lives because of who they were.
 
I don’t think we want that here, but it seems that some people do.
 
Let’s reject—and cancel—“cancel culture” before it morphs into what it did in Germany 70 years ago.
 
And my current heroes are Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head—let them lead the charge!