In my previous post on the silliness of Chuck Todd, I offered at the end that perhaps it is time to formalize the equivalent of Moore’s Law (chip speed doubles every 18 months) for liberalism: liberal craziness/dementia doubles every 18 months (or perhaps every 18 hours as one commenter plausibly suggests). Perhaps it is time for this to become a regular Power Line feature.
Case in point is the story today of the Cambridge librarian who has refused a donation of Dr. Seuss books from Melania Trump because Dr. Seuss is—wait for it—a racist!
A librarian at Cambridgeport School refused to accept the gift, criticizing Trump administration education policies and images in the books. Seuss’s illustrations are “steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,” librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro wrote in a letter to Trump on Tuesday.
Oh-kay. I guess Soeiro is unfamiliar with—or doesn’t know how to perceive—some of Seuss’s older works such as:
As usual, David Burge (aka, “Iowahawk”) has the best takedown of this madness:
I guess we better tear this down then:
And special bonus caption contest for Soeiro:
But wait—there’s more!
When did The New Yorker become the National Lampoon? It happened so slowly that I hardly noticed. Right now The New Yorker is informing us that “Thomas the Tank Engine” is “repressive and authoritarian.” No doubt Barron Trump has a rooms and rooms of Thomas toys in Trump tower. Seriously, it seldom gets better than this:
It is clear from his work that Awdry [Thomas’s creator] disliked change, venerated order, and craved the administration of punishment. . . But on the Island of Sodor steam locomotives are permanently on top. The caste system is very rigid. There is one diesel engine, a black train known just as “Diesel,” who struggles to prove that he’s as useful as the steam trains. . .
On Sodor, the steam trains engage in constant competition for big jobs, more work, and the Fat Controller’s approval. Anthropomorphized trains in literature tend to be hard workers, but one Tumblr thread holds that Thomas and friends have other motivations. The show “canonically takes place in a train post-apocalypse where the Island of Sodor is the only safe zone in a totalitarian dystopia in which steam trains are routinely killed and their body parts are sold or cannibalized for repair,” a Tumblr user named frog-and-toad-are-friends argues. . .
This is what happens when “critical theory” gets taken seriously.
I still like this perspective on the Thomas world:
Reminder from Arthur Schlesinger: “Ignorance is never any bar to certitude in the progressive dreamworld.”
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