The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof shocked the world last week when he admitted, in print, that he knows a conservative. A conservative academic, no less, which is kind of like seeing a purple squirrel. There aren’t many around, and if you do see one, you’re first impulse is to make sure you took the right medication that morning.
In his column, Kristof pointed out that there is an unfair liberal bias in our country’s academic institutions, particularly in the humanities, where less than ten percent of professors identify as Republicans. This is alarming, of course. It means our country is crawling with Republican Ph.D.’s in Russian Literature who can’t get tenure, and that there are thousands—maybe even millions—of conservative art scholars out there whose voices have been silenced by the drumbeat of liberal clap-trap being peddled to the twelve remaining students in America who are not pursuing a STEM degree.
As it happens, my Uncle John was a die-hard conservative scholar who wrote thousands of pages of insightful literary criticism no one ever saw. Now, admittedly, the main reason no one ever read Uncle John’s work is that he wrote in chicken blood using reams of two-ply toilet paper. Also, the Parkinson’s affected his penmanship, so his scholarship could often be mistaken for a nosebleed. Publishers in New York tended to reject his work without even trying to read it, due to their obvious and unfair bias toward double-spaced manuscripts laser-printed on sheets of crisp, white, rectangular office paper.
Hence, his voice was silenced.
Luckily, Uncle John recently died of heart failure and left all his writings to me. All 3,490 rolls of it. I intend to keep several hundred rolls for my own personal use—but, since the world is clearly being deprived of conservative literary scholarship, I feel duty-bound to share at least some of his silenced work with the general public. Diversity of opinion is the cornerstone of this great nation, and my Uncle John’s opinions diverged more than most, so it only seems right.
Roughly 1,200 of my uncle’s sc-rolls were dedicated to various works of Dr. Seuss, so it seems logical to start there. Here, then, is my departed Uncle John’s archly conservative exegesis of the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham:
Holy shit! Somebody has got to shut this Dr. Seuss motherfucker down! I just read Green Eggs and Ham, and I can’t believe the man isn’t in prison. I’ve never seen such blatant Marxist propaganda in my life. How does this stuff get published? I’ll tell you how. It’s all those liberal commies in New York who are out to brainwash the public through books full of anti-American nonsense. The real danger is that children might be exposed to this book. The print is large, so that old people can read it, and it’s got plenty of pictures to break up the monotony of all those words, but any kid with a second-grade education could accidentally get their hands on it and be scarred for life.
If you don’t know the story, it’s about this shaggy hippie dude who, judging from his body hair, hasn’t shaved in his entire life. He approaches this smaller dude (or it might be a girl; it’s hard to tell), and tells him his name is Sam-I-Am. In other words, he’s Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam asks the little dude if he wants to try something truly terrifying and horrible, a dish he calls “green eggs and ham.” The little dude, being sensible, says no thanks. But Uncle Sam insists, promising the little dude that he will like this disgusting dish. The little dude says no again, but ol’ Uncle Sam won’t quit.
It’s pretty clear what’s going on here. The green food Uncle Sam is offering this dude is money. He’s basically saying, “You’re going to love welfare, little dude. I’ll give you money, and all you have to do is take it. Trust me, you’ll like living on welfare, because who doesn’t like free money?” The little dude knows better. He knows he shouldn’t take the money. He knows in his heart that he doesn’t want the money. But Uncle Sam just keeps piling it on, offering him a house and a boat and a vacation on a train (Amtrak, naturally). Finally, the little guy breaks down and samples what Uncle Sam is offering. And of course he likes it—because guess what, people like it when the government gives them free money!
So you can see, this whole book is basically just a big stinking load of Marxist propaganda. But now that I think about it, the big shaggy dude could just as easily be a drug dealer. “Here, try my disgusting drugs, little man. You’ll like them, trust me.” Or he could be a gay sex fiend. “Hey little guy, have you tried butt sex yet? Here, have a taste.” Or he could be a pushy atheist. “Hey there, have you tried not believing God? Trust me, it’s more fun living without fear of eternal damnation.”
Whatever the hidden message in this book is, it’s bad. It basically says that if you just ignore your gut instincts, disobey your conscience, and abandon all your principles, you’ll live a happier life on the dole. Sure, your house might have a mouse in it, but that’s a small price to pay for a free house, isn’t it? So just do what I tell you, and trust me, you’re going to be happier.
That’s the nanny state for you. Always knows what you should do better than you do. Unless of course what you want to do is have gay sex, marry a dude, get an abortion, do drugs, not be a Christian, hire a prostitute, reduce military spending, shut down a prison, take semi-automatic weapons off the street, remove the word “God” from the pledge of allegiance, or be black, Mexican, Muslim, or a Democrat—in which case the nanny state has it perfectly right.
People tell me all the time: John, you should write all this down on regular paper, because nobody knows this stuff, and they really ought to. What these lamebrains don’t understand is that if I did that, I wouldn’t be me, and my ideas would just look like everyone else’s: words on a page, boring and useless. Well, they can all go [illegible]. This is America. That is, unless too many kids end up reading books by this Dr. Seuss character, in which case it might not be for long.
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