The Decision to Pull Books & Why it’s Almost Always Wrong.
Good morning fans and friends! It’s been quite a while since I was able to post anything due to some hectic weeks in my day job and me entering crunch time with the new novel, Clocktower (It’s almost done!). I had planned to do another Japan blog today, but after a big kerfuffle in the book community this week, I decided to share my thoughts and feelings on that instead.
For those who don’t know, the Dr. Seuss Foundation elected to withdraw six books from publication, citing racially insensitive imagery. You can read about it more here if you haven’t heard about it already, and I encourage you to do so as there is a lot of misinformation flying around out there about where this came from and why it was done.
To address the elephant in the room, no, this was not the result of the Cancel Culture mob we all know and hate. This appears to be the decision of the Foundation and them alone, although the nature of the actions taken creates an almost natural urge to point to Cancel Culture and blame them. That being said, it’s impossible to know the minds of the people in charge here, so we’ll leave this point be and move onto the actual decision and its consequences.
I think this is a good topic to talk about, because it’s hard to have any clear black and white, right and wrong view of this issue. If you’re reading this, and you think you stand very firmly on one side or the other, I hope that I can make you a bit uncomfortable in your convictions. Ultimately, as with most issues, there are valid and important arguments on both sides which should be heard and respected.
Before I talk too much about the Dr. Seuss books, I want to bring up another novel by a famous author that was taken out of print in 2007 at the request of the author himself. Many of you might know this story, but I am of course talking about the novel Rage by Stephen King. Rage was published in 1977, and centers around a high school senior who brings a gun to school and kills two of his teachers while taking a classroom hostage. This is, of course, a work of fiction. King is a cornerstone of the horror genre, and this story was meant as a horror story. It was not King’s intent to encourage troubled youths to arm themselves and murder their fellow students and staff, but in the following thirty years, that’s exactly what happened. On at least five different incidents between 1988 and 1997, school shooters either cited directly or were connected to Rage, and after an incident at Heath High School in Kentucky, 1997, King moved to let the novel go out of print.
Was this the right decision? For King, it was. He expressed in 2007 that it was a good thing that Rage was now out of print, and it was clear he felt remorse for writing a novel that may have contributed to the tragedies that occurred all over the country in the latter half of the 20th century.
“But Chad, you devilishly handsome wordsmith,” I hear you say. “One of the biggest industries that was blamed for mass shootings since the 1990’s was the video game industry. I play video games, and I never felt the urge to take a gun to school and murder people.” And that’s a good point. Games like Call of Duty or Counterstrike were never removed from sale despite the fact that some murderers played them. But there was a huge movement to have these titles banned across the nation. For a long time, and even today, video games get a huge amount of negative media, citing studies on how repeated killing in video games makes it easier for an individual to kill in real life.
Is this true? It could be. I’m not going to go around digging up studies and reports on this, because it’s not why I’m writing this blog, although it is a topic I’d like to touch on eventually. The point is, however, that due to the extreme actions of only a fraction of a percent of the readership of Rage, King decided it was better that the world be shielded from the story he had written. In the end, even if only five out of five million people decided to act upon their inner turmoil due in however small part to his work, that number was too high. Ultimately, however, King is the creator, and the creator is the one who gets to decide if, when, and how his creation is released. Although I may not have made the same decision as King were I in his shoes, I don’t begrudge him for it, and neither should anyone else.
This brings me neatly to the Dr. Seuss controversy that we are looking at today. I, like many others, read and loved Dr. Seuss books as a child. In Okey-Dokey Sensei, Martin even hums “Green Eggs and Ham” as he goes about frying eggs while listening to the television. I think I still have some of his books stored away in my parents garage to this day.
It wasn’t until much, much later that I discovered that Theodor Seuss Geisel was, well, kind of a racist dick. He supported the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2, and even managed to draw this disgusting piece. And yet, his story doesn’t end here. In 1953, Seuss visited Japan and witnessed the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe first hand. This clearly had a profound impact on the man, and it seems not only was he able to make friends there, but he also dedicated his next book, Horton Hears a Who! to one of them (source).
So what do we say about this man? This man who fervently opposed fascism and fought for freedom, while simultaneously arguing for the dehumanization of Japanese Americans? Should we herald him as an American hero? Should we demonize him as a racist hypocrite? Should we remove his earlier books that were “racially insensitive” but keep his later ones available? How about Horton Hears a Who! which became one of the rallying cries of the pro-life movement in the US? Should that be banned because it was used by a group who I, like many others, find despicable?
I think not. I do not support the decision by the Dr. Seuss Foundation to remove these texts from circulation. They represent a significant part of a complicated man, who, like all of us, held conflicting views at different points in his life. Should we ban everything H.P. Lovecraft ever penned, because he was vehemently pro Jim Crow? Should readers of the next generation be denied the unsettling pleasures of the Cthulhu mythos because the man who wrote them held beliefs that were not that uncommon for his time?
And what of the future? In 50 or 60 years, will the books I’ve written be some hot-button topic, because one Japanese character I wrote among many has crooked teeth? When you start filtering what can and cannot be viewed by the public. When you start making that decision for people instead of allowing them to freely view things and make their own decisions, you start down a path that is difficult to return from.
I’ll end here with a quote that I always try to keep close at hand when I find myself repulsed by certain viewpoints. Try hard not to offend, but try even harder not to be offended.
-CA
