"madam press secretary, does mister biden assert that horton does not in fact hear a who and is perpetuating a falsehood on par with the leadup to the iraq war? i work for the washington post, btw." https://t.co/y8EP8WUomE
— Peloton InfoSec Analyst (Incident Response) (@CalmSporting) March 2, 2021
I don’t actually remember the content of And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street — one of the not-acutally-banned six — but I do remember getting in trouble for publicly criticizing it, back in 1960, when I was in kindergarten. Most of the story-hour books at P.S. 291 were of the genre best described as Worthy Educational Material, designed more to lull the young audience into naptime than to inspire. But one day Mrs. Bookbinder, bless her earnest heart, decided to bring in a copy of the already-vintage Dr. Seuss book that had once inspired her children. And, of course, as a budding literary snob, I was impelled to denigrate it as nowhere near the standards of the author’s later work (not even 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, much less the slyly subversive One Fish Two Fish). Which I probably could’ve gotten away with, if not for the predicatable teacher’s pet…
“I think it was a wonderful story, Mrs. Bookbinder!”
“Yeah, cuz you’re a suck-up.”
So I had to bring home (yet another) Note to My Parents. My poor mother, a nascent English teacher herself, was torn between the honesty of my critique and her immense respect for the social forms. My old man, after explaining (probably not for the first time) that there were many things which were true and yet not to be said in public, introduced me to Mr. Geissel’s original source of fame: the advertising campaign for FLIT, which was popular enough to enter the general awareness as a tag line — I remember it being used in both Pogo and MAD magazine. (And some of those ads, if you click over: hella racist, by 21st-century standards!)
I was also held incidentally responsible, by the educational authorities, for a minor kerfuffle with the parents of a couple of my Italian-American classmates. Apparently the fuss over my brutal emotional assault on Teacher’s Pet impressed those kids enough that, although they’d never mentioned anything about earlier stories, they described the Seuss-inspired scene to their parents. Now, Geissel was talking about his home town in Massachusetts, but in NYC, Mulberry Street was (still is, such as it remains) Little Italy. You find us funny? Are we some kind of joke to you?…
Such is the power of literature, even at its most (pre)elementary level.
Later Night Open Thread: <em>Quick, Henry, the FLIT!</em>Post + Comments (47)