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17 March 21
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RSN: Harvey Wasserman | How Once-ler Trump Canceled the Lorax
Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
Wasserman writes:
he Lorax speaks for the trees.
Trump canceled him.
Trump’s Zombie Cultists are in a snit about Dr. Seuss. They whine about questioning his older books over issues of racism, sexism, and antisemitism. They moan about a “cancel culture.”
WE CALL BS!!!!
Theodore Seuss Geisel’s sixty-plus books have sold more than 700,000,000 copies worldwide. They are uniquely brilliant …charming, funny, irreverent, sassy, thought-provoking. They preach tolerance, fellowship, responsibility, good will, creative thinking … all the stuff Trump and his disciples so clearly hate.
Anti-authoritarian (Yertle the Turtle) and anti-materialistic (The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), Seuss provoked (like Mad Magazine), some of the first out-of-the-box excursions for millions of readers, young and younger.
Like early Disney, the Marx Brothers’ Day at the Races, and other ancient icons, some of Dr. Seuss’s early works have cringe-worthy passages with racist and sexist imagery.
Alive today, he’d surely want them edited out, as has happened with numerous other works from earlier eras.
Seuss was gracious, gentle, liberal-minded, and occupied a very different world from the right-wingers now pretending to like him.
Think, above all: The Lorax.
Published on the summer solstice, 1971, this gorgeous masterpiece rose at the dawn of the global environmental movement.
It is radical and timeless, with a clear message aimed straight at the planet-hating sickness of the likes of Donald Trump.
It’s the tale of a young boy living in a world without trees. To win a female heart, he goes in search of one. He stumbles upon the legend of the Lorax, a furry activist stump played by Danny DeVito in the unfortunate 2012 feature animation.
Our young hero comes to a hellish post-industrial landscape, treeless and toxic, and finds the Once-ler, who made it happen. After gouging a fee, this Trump-style capitalist describes what the place once looked like when “the grass was still green … the pond was still wet … the clouds were still clean … and the song of the Swomee-Swans rang out in space.”
That world was covered in Truffula trees, whose touch was “much softer than silk,” with “the sweet smell of fresh butterfly milk.”
The Once-ler chopped them all down to make Thneeds with no real function beyond making him money.
With his Earth-destroying technology, the Once-ler drives out the Swomee-Swans, Humming-Fish, and Brown Bar-ba-loots … all of whom are represented by the Lorax, who tries to persuade the Once-ler to act with some decency. But the Once-ler drives him off, clear-cutting the forest with his “super-axe hacker” while “glumming the pond” and filling the sky with “smogulous smoke.” Business is business, he says, “and business must grow.”
In the end (spoiler alert) this sad, faceless grinch throws our hero a seed and reminds him of the Lorax’s last word: Unless.
Seuss’s transcendent screed helped inspire a generation of Earth Day activists and Green New Dealers bent on saving the Earth. The crocodile tears being shed for its author by Trump Cultists is the pinnacle of hypocrisy. With the possible exception of Ronald Reagan, no US president has waged a more heartless, cynical, profit-driven assault on our Planet Earth than Donald Trump.
That his followers would now glum up the pond with their smogulous hypocrisy is par for the course. Let’s see just one of them fight a pipeline, install a solar panel, or shut a nuke before we take their “cancel culture” critique at all seriously.
Remember, said the Lorax, “no one can sing who has smog in his throat.”
Harvey Wasserman’s America at the Brink of Rebirth: The Organic Spiral of Us History can be had via www.solartopia.org. The Strip & Flip Selection of 2016: Five Jim Crows & Electronic Election Theft, co-written with Bob Fitrakis, is at www.freepress.org.
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