"Pepe [Le Pew] was set to appear in a black-and-white Casablanca-like Rick’s Cafe sequence. Pepe, playing a bartender, starts hitting on a woman at the bar..."

"He begins kissing her arm, which she pulls back, then slamming Pepe into the chair next to hers. She then pours her drink on Pepe, and slaps him hard, sending him spinning in a stool, which is then stopped by LeBron James’ hand. James and Bugs Bunny are looking for Lola, and Pepe knows her whereabouts. Pepe then tells the guys that Penelope cat has filed a restraining order against him. James makes a remark in the script that Pepe can’t grab other Tunes without their consent...." 

From "Pepe Le Pew Won’t Be Appearing In Warner Bros’ ‘Space Jam’ Sequel" (Deadline Hollywood). 

The actress, Greice Santo, is unhappy to have her big scene cut: "Even though Pepe is a cartoon character, if anyone was going to slap a sexual harasser like him, Greice wished it would be her. Now... she doesn’t have that power to influence the world through younger generations who’ll be watching Space Jam 2, to let younger girls and younger boys know that Pepe’s behavior is unacceptable."

If I remember the old cartoons correctly, the other cartoon characters always let Pepe know his behavior was unacceptable... though I think that was mainly because they were cats and he was a skunk.

I don't know if that read as racism — Was the problem that he was a different species? —  or were we to think their objection was simply that he smelled bad — which really was, I think, an insult intentionally directed at the French.  

As for this new movie, maybe instruction about sexual harassment didn't fit the mood of whatever the story was or maybe LeBron James doesn't have the acting chops to pull off a sincere warning against sexual misdeeds.

From the Wikipedia article on Pepe Le Pew, under the subheading "Reputation":

Pepé's reputation suffered in later years. Comedian Dave Chappelle, in his 2000 stand-up film Killin' Them Softly, called him a rapist. In a 2021 column in The New York Times, Charles M. Blow wrote that Pepé "normalized rape culture". Amber E. George, in her essay "Pride or Prejudice? Exploring Issues of Queerness, Speciesism, and Disability in Warner Bros. Looney Tunes", characterized Pepé's actions towards Penelope Pussycat as "sexual harassment, stalking, and abuse" and noted that Pepé's qualities mock the French people and their culture. On March 7, 2021, it was announced Pepé Le Pew have been removed from Space Jam: A New Legacy.

If you're interested in reading that Amber E. George essay, it's in "The Intersectionality of Critical Animal, Disability, and Environmental Studies: Toward Eco-ability, Justice, and Liberation." That will cost you $73 even just to download it in Kindle!

As for Charles Blow, the Le Pew bit is just a line in his column about the Dr. Seuss problem: "Six Seuss Books Bore a Bias/Racism must be exorcised from culture, including, or maybe especially, from children’s culture."

Racism must be exorcised from culture, including, or maybe especially, from children’s culture. Teaching a child to hate or be ashamed of themselves is a sin against their innocence and a weight against their possibilities.

Exorcised?! I think the word he was looking for the word "excised." Or are we possessed by an evil spirit that can be driven out by performing some ritual? If you're talking about editing things out of the culture — which is what is really going on — the word is"excised."

Why isn't there a vibrant anti-pornography movement within the present-day cancel culture?

I wondered. I remember the big anti-pornography movement of the 1980s — and how it was squelched — and I thought it is due for a comeback. We're censoring Dr. Seuss books for minor racial improprieties, but the monumental misogyny problems of pornography are ignored. 

So I looked to see if there were signs of a resurgence of the anti-pornography movement, and I found this (from a few days ago, at Vox): "This week in TikTok: The problem with the 'Cancel Porn' movement/On TikTok, it’s impossible to have a nuanced discussion about sex work."

Apparently, there's enough of a new movement that Vox needs to instruct us about what's wrong with it. If there's a resurgence there's also a squelching of the resurgence, off and running. 

Notice that Vox's problem with it is structured as feminism — helping sex workers? — but that's how the squelching of the 1980s movement worked too. It was packaged as feminism. What's different now: There's TikTok, and the activists are teenagers reaching teenagers.

Here's #cancelporn if you want to educate yourself about how this movement is taking off.

ADDED: Here's a Reddit discussion from January: "I'm very worried about the #cancelporn movement on TikTok." The worry expressed is that it will be used "to shame sex workers and generally safe ways of sex work."

Someone there says: "I wouldn't worry too much, the porn industry is one of the largest in the world and there's no chance in hell that a bunch of TikTok cringe artists are going to have any sort of actual impact." 

That roughly corresponds to something I was thinking. You can't pressure porn businesses if they are nothing but porn. It's not like demanding some publishing company take out a book here and there or movie company cancel some of its productions. If the questionable material is only a part of a business, there is leverage to pressure the business. 

So the "Cancel Porn" movement will need a different strategy. What I would expect to see is young people, especially women, staunchly disapproving of people who consume porn and declining to be in a relationship with a porn user. Boycott the users.

AND: From the Vox article (which is written by a woman, Rebecca Jennings):

[The Cancel Porn movement is] just one facet of a conservatism, for lack of a better term, that’s proliferating on TikTok from rather unlikely sources: young, presumably progressive women (for the most part) who seem to believe that “choice feminism,” or the idea that every choice a woman makes is inherently feminist because a woman made it, is propagating patriarchy and the male gaze....

Escorts, sugar babies, cam girls, strippers, OnlyFans creators, and folks who sell feet pics or panties online have used [TikTok] to show both the highs and lows of their jobs.... Yet even more than those videos, I’m seeing the backlash to them: “Liberal feminism telling young girls that hookup culture is liberating, conditioning them to think that if you dont have extreme kinks at a young age then they’re boring and vanilla, and encouraging them to get into sex work the minute they turn 18,” reads the caption on one video by a TikToker whose bio says she’s 16...

On TikTok, where only a certain kind of video will always rise to the top... [i]t begins to seem like there are only two teams: the left-wing feminists who seek liberation through beauty and sex work and the SWERFs who lean so far into what they believe is left-wing feminism that it becomes conservative (horseshoe theory, etc., etc.)....

SWERFs! That's a new one to me, but it's obviously like TERFs. The "RF" stands for "radical feminist," and these acronyms are used to demonize feminists who go radical in a way that's deemed wrong. The "E" stands for "exclusionary," though, ironically, the acronym is all about excluding a type of person — a radical feminist who doesn't want to consider transgender women to be women (TERF) or a radical feminist who's critical of sex work (SWERF).

What is FAIR?

Because I follow the Twitter feed of the erstwhile NYT columnist Bari Weiss, I noticed that there's a new group that calls itself FAIR — The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. Here's their video:

 

That's on such a high level of abstraction that it hard to understand what's really going on there. The assumption is that you'll recognize at least some of the names/faces and trust their authority. They seem to be banding together as a correction to the excesses of social-justice activists. But what exactly? Are we to trust them as experts, with details to come later?

I found their website, here, and the front page has that video embedded next to the words "What is FAIR?" So I'm stuck in a loop. "What is FAIR?" is the question I had after watching the video. So I watched it again. As far as I can tell, based on the words spoken, it is a forthright demand for the old-fashioned color-blindness approach to racial justice: There is "one race, the human race."

Given the famous names who've joined together — Steven Pinker, John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Bari Weiss, etc. — I would expect news coverage of this organization, which seems to have been announced yesterday. But when I did a Google News search, only one thing came up, a NY Post item titled "Booksellers were unprepared for Dr. Seuss ban as sales skyrocket." 

That's not an article about FAIR, just a reference to it at the end of an article about the Seuss crisis:

A Web site has sprung up called BannedSeuss run by the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism that says: “Erasing books is insanity. Stand up for our common humanity.”

Here's the BannedSeuss website.  Ah! It has the full text and pictures of "And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street" (a book, that, I think, is cancelled because of the line "A Chinese man who eats with sticks" and the picture of a man whose eyes are represented by short angled lines when everyone else in the book has eyes represented by dots). 

Back to the NY Post:

The Foundation behind it claims to be a non-partisan organization “dedicated to advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding and humanity.” It did not return an email from Media Ink seeking comment. None of the banned books could be found at the Barnes & Noble in Manhattan’s Union Square on Thursday even though an associate said he believed the store had “And To Think I Found It on Mulberry Street” in stock as recently as Wednesday. Other Dr. Seuss books were still available for purchase, however.

How quickly the mind erases the past. At the NY Post, the title has already deteriorated from "And To Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street" to "And To Think I Found It on Mulberry Street." Just imagine how racist this book would become if we lost access to it! 

I celebrate the BannedSeuss website. I'm not a copyright expert, but I encourage the defense of the practice of publishing the entirety of a book that has been banned. It's fair use, no? It's only by seeing the whole thing that we can know how little was even questionable about this 70-year-old book.

Now, back to the FAIR website. I click through to the "About" page. There's some specificity here. I'll select the most usefully specific material: 

We advocate for individuals who are threatened or persecuted for speech, or who are held to a different set of rules for language or conduct based on their skin color, ancestry, or other immutable characteristics....

We believe bad ideas are best confronted with good ideas – and never with dehumanization, deplatforming or blacklisting.

We believe that objective truth exists, that it is discoverable, and that scientific research must be untainted by any political agenda.

We are pro-human, and promote compassionate anti-racism rooted in dignity and our common humanity.

There's a pledge: "I seek to treat everyone equally without regard to skin color or other immutable characteristics. I believe in applying the same rules to everyone, and reject disparagement of individuals based on the circumstances of their birth... I am open-minded. I seek to understand opinions or behavior that I do not necessarily agree with. I am tolerant and consider points of view that are in conflict with my prior convictions.... I recognize that every person has a unique identity, that our shared humanity is precious, and that it is up to all of us to defend and protect the civic culture that unites us."

There seems to be an effort to infuse the work with the kind of religion that Martin Luther King Jr. brought to the civil rights movement. They seek "redemption and reconciliation" and "to defeat evil." And: "Suffering can educate and transform. We will not retaliate when attacked, physically or otherwise. We will meet hate and anger with compassion and kindness. Choose Love, Not Hate. We seek to resist violence of the spirit as well as the body. We believe in the power of love."

"Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down..."

"... into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure...' I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." 

That is the suicide note of Helen Palmer, the first wife of Theodore Geisel AKA Dr. Seuss. Here's her Wikipedia page. She was born in Brooklyn, he was born in Massachusetts, she went to Wellesley, he went to Dartmouth, and they both went to Oxford, where they met. 

She later stated, "Ted's notebooks were always filled with these fabulous animals. So I set to work diverting him; here was a man who could draw such pictures; he should be earning a living doing that."...

For about a decade following World War II, Ted worked to feed a booming children's book market... [relying] heavily on the encouragement and editorial input of Helen. In fact, throughout much of his career, he relied on her support. After realising that her husband was having an affair, Helen committed suicide in 1967 with an overdose of barbiturates after a series of illnesses spanning 13 years. ...

About Helen's death, Ted's niece Peggy commented: "Whatever Helen did, she did it out of absolute love for Ted." Secretary Julie Olfe called Helen's death "her last and greatest gift to him." Eight months later, in June 1968, Ted married Audrey Dimond, with whom he had been having an affair before Helen's death.

That links to a 2000 article in the NYT: 

Audrey Dimond was married with two children when she fell in love with Ted Geisel. Mr. Geisel, 18 years her senior, was also married. In the wake of their affair, Mr. Geisel's wife, Helen, committed suicide, causing, as Mrs. Geisel puts it, ''a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla.''

Mrs. Dimond divorced her husband to marry Mr. Geisel, 64, and when she did, her daughters, 9 and 14, were sent away to school.

''They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em.' Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.''

Did you know and remember this story? I didn't. Had I read it in the NYT back in 2000? I must have, but it was shocking news to me when I encountered it as I was poking around on Geisel's Wikipedia page this morning after blogging about the current to-do over the man. 

ADDED: Palmer was herself a children's book author. This is her most famous book:

Knowing what happened to her, it's hard not to imagine her answer to the question: Commit suicide! 

And it's hard not to think of the super-greedy boy as Geisel. Some people thought the book was actually written by Geisel, and Snopes took the trouble to debunk a rumor which it states as: "Dr. Seuss once wrote a children's book since banned due to its references to suicide and violence."

The Snopes piece is long and interesting, going beyond getting the authorship straight and delving into why the book could be understood to have a violence problem: 

Some of the prose in Do You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday? does sound a little odd if read without the context provided by its accompanying photographs, a feature the creator of the “Banned Book” page capitalized upon. For instance, at one point the child narrator declares:

Did you ever beat more than one kid at a time?

Well, I’m going to beat five kids at a time.

And then I’m going to beat their fathers, too.

The photos show a boy playing tennis with kids and volleyball with men.

Likewise, the following lines are a little difficult to fathom when considered in isolation:

I’ll dump water on Sam.

I’ll make him take a walk.

I’ll make Sam walk about a hundred miles.

The photos show kids hiking and playing. 

Even the innocuous can sound ominous when taken out of context:

I’ll run around and yell and yell.

Next Saturday I’ll yell my head off.

I’ll blow horns. I’ll blow and blow.

Next Saturday I’ll blow my head off.

No one is going to stop me next Saturday.

In the photo, the kid is playing a tuba, but you can see you don't want to hear your child say "Next Saturday I’ll blow my head off"!

You Know What I’m Going to Do Next Saturday? was never “banned,” and nothing about it was really the least bit unwholesome....

Yeah, well, actually it is. The whole point is that there are double meanings and the photo is always the good meaning, but you can still figure out the dangerous meaning. That's why it's funny. And once you know the author killed herself, aren't you ready to keep it out of the hands of your little darlings?

Press coverage of Dr. Seuss, worn at a slant.

I was reading this Vox piece, "Meltdown over Dr. Seuss/Biden didn’t mention Dr. Seuss in his Read Across America Day statement. All hell broke loose from there," and of course, I could see from the title the piece was massively slanted... 

Oh! Maybe I shouldn't use the word "slant" in the vicinity of the Dr. Seuss dispute. It's the worst word he ever used. Oh, no, it's not cute:

That's from "If I Ran the Zoo," a 1950 book that Dr. Seuss enterprises has just withdrawn from publication.  

Vox writes its article at a slant on a website where everything must be a rant. I'm not staying there long. I won't and I can't. But I noticed this one thing that seemed slightly wacky — a press conference question aimed at poor Jen Psaki:

Q A question about Dr. Seuss, since this may be the only day that you can bring up Dr. Seuss in the briefing room. It is National Read Across America Day. It’s also Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Both former Presidents Obama and Trump mentioned Dr. Seuss in their Read Across America Day proclamations, but President Biden did not. Why not?

MS. PSAKI: Well, first, the proclamation was written by the Department of Education, and you could certainly speak to them about more specifics about the drafting of it. But Read Across America Day, which has — you’re right, has not existed forever; it has only been around for a short period of time — elevates and celebrates a love of reading among our nation’s youngest leaders. And the day is also a chance to celebrate diverse authors whose work and lived experience reflect the diversity of our country. And that’s certainly what they attempted to do or hope to do this year. And as we celebrate the love of reading and uplift diverse and representative authors, it is especially important that we ensure all children can see themselves represented and celebrated in the books that they read.

Q So does the omission have anything to do with the controversy about the lack of diverse characters in the author’s books?

MS. PSAKI: Well, again, I think it is important that children of all backgrounds see themselves in the children’s books that they read. But I would point you to the Department of Education for any more details on the writing of the proclamation. 

It was a hot topic and she made it quite dull. If you want to be a press secretary, that's something to mull.

"Though I may be late, I am willing to admit that I was ignorant to the truth of Dr. Seuss’ writings until recently. I have unknowingly read many of his books to my own children."

"But now that I am better informed, I am committed to advocating for change. Because when we know better, we should do better."  

Writes Maureen Downey (in the Atlanta Journal Constitution). 

So drearily earnest...

She means well. Is she anxious about what else she may be unknowingly doing... such as depriving children of the fun of reading Dr. Seuss or generating morbid fears about strange manifestations of racism or being too subservient about taking instruction from dull people who are oversure of their puritanical notions of racial correctness?

Downey links to what she calls a "fantastic list" of other books to give to children, but it's not just a list. It's an opinionated blog post, "Dr. Seuss was racist. Why are we still reading his books?"

... I pulled out the extensive collection of Dr. Seuss books that I have in my home and re-read them with a critical lens only to find that the themes of anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and Orientalism are garishly prevalent. I have used Dr. Seuss books in my classroom for the last ten years. I feel disgusted knowing that I not only celebrated these texts, but the life of Theodore Geisel. Dr. Seuss books will no longer have a place in my home. The messages that children absorb through literature will impact their racial beliefs. Without proper support in navigating the harmful messages from books like Dr. Seuss’s, children are likely to transfer what they read to their play and social life....

Go to that link to see the suggestions of books to read in place of particular Dr. Seuss books. The book covers are depicted, so you can get a sense of the kind of drawing that anti-Seussers think could work as a substitute for his highly idiosyncratic work. But these substitutes just have blandly realistic, sentimental illustrations that depict people of color. If you want to replace Dr. Seuss, the first thing you'll need some exciting, inventive drawing! And you've got to have a little edge to the story. It can't be just love is important and nice people are nice.

Did you miss your calling?

Dr. Seuss was a successful commercial artist when, at age 34, he wrote his first book, "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street." It was rejected by publishers dozens of times. He was in his late 40s when he began successfully writing and selling children’s books. He did this advertisement in the 1930s.

This past week I had conversations with two artists about the feasibility of being a full-time artist.

One is a woman with a young family, a mortgage, an MFA and a good (albeit temporary) job. Judging by the work I’ve seen, she has prodigious talent. If given the opportunity for a permanent position, should she take it? Or should she chuck that idea and try to work as a waitress nights and weekends so that she can still make art.

As a working mother, she is already doing two jobs. Adding a third job will be difficult, if not impossible. Until her kids are old enough for school, she’d be smart to do whatever pays best, and save money against the day she drops the day job and takes up painting again. In the meantime, she can carve out a small corner of her house and a few hours a week to nurture her talent, even if it’s by sketching in her spare time.

Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses, was the poster girl for late-life career changes, having turned to painting in her seventies. Here, Country Fair, 1950.

In essence, that’s what I did. I worked in the marketplace until I was in my late 30s, when a combination of life events made it possible—mandatory, even—for me to resume painting. (There was a time when our society acknowledged that raising children was valuable work. Now, childrearing is supposed to run silently in the background, taking no time or effort at all.)

One of my painting students has an MBA and work experience in an area of business analysis I won’t pretend to understand. She picked up brushes in response to a life crisis and in the process discovered that she has a real affinity for it.

On Saturday, we discussed what the next step might be for a person who wants to start selling paintings. As so often happens with these things, Life answered her question; she was approached about doing a solo show at a local venue.

Vincent Van Gogh didn't actually start painting until he was in his late 20s, when he only had a decade left to live. Most of his masterpieces were created in the last two years of his life. Wheat Field with Crows, 1890, is generally accepted to be his last painting.

That’s a tremendous affirmation, but as we old-timers know, a show is just a doorway through which you enter the next phase of your work. She still has a long, hard slog ahead of her, but she has the character to endure it.

Neither of these women will find it an easy road. But in both cases, I think they will find something very valuable comes from it.

Come to Maine and learn to paint before it’s too late. I have two openings left for my 2014 workshop in Belfast, ME. Information is available here.