Where Maurice Sendak was

Under the rubric of “Annals of the Tolerant Left,” Glenn Reynolds links to a post by the Daily Caller’s pseudonymous Jim Treacher. Treacher quotes from an interview given by the late Maurice Sendak — author of Where the Wild Things Are and many other such books — to Gary Groth of The Comics Journal last October:

SENDAK: Bush was president, I thought, “Be brave. Tie a bomb to your shirt. Insist on going to the White House. And I wanna have a big hug with the vice president, definitely. And his wife, and the president, and his wife, and anybody else that can fit into the love hug.”

GROTH: A group hug.

SENDAK: And then we’ll blow ourselves up, and I’d be a hero. [Groth laughs.] To hell with the kiddie books. He killed Bush. He killed the vice president. Oh my God.

GROTH: I would have been willing to forgo this interview. [Sendak laughs.]

SENDAK: You would have forgotten about it. It would have been a very brave and wonderful thing. But I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.

Now I think I dislike President Obama about as much as Sendak and “the tolerant left” disliked President Bush. I think President Obama is subverting limited government, befriending our enemies, undermining our friends, promoting the spread of Islamism abroad, destroying the health care system at home, retarding economic growth and loading us up with debt that will have to be inflated away along with the value of our savings. And so on.

Yet the thought of his assassination fills me with dread and horror. It sickens me. I can’t imagine humoring somebody who mused about it. In the interview, by contact, Sendak’s fantasy wins the appreciative laughter and encouragement of Gary Groth.

Groth, incidentally, is not some ludicrous leftist nobody. He is the founder of Fantagraphics Books. If you are a fan of R. Crumb (as I am) you are probably the owner of many of the books published by his firm (as I am).

You really have to wonder what it is with these people, and — as Glenn Reynolds intimates — how representative they are of “the Tolerant Left.”

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