If you don't have the two or three hundred dollars to take your children to the 3D movies this weekend, then you must read them the old instructions, over and over again, until they can recite them back to you with both eyes shut, until they have made them part of their person.
But draw the curtains first, because they are on to us.
"The Lorax, cuddly cartoon agitprop the Unabomber would've loved," reveals the Washington Times, headlining a review of the film, opening today. Critic Adam Mazmanian identifies the film as the "quintessence of limousine liberalism," though allows that the inclusion of a heterosexual subplot may taint its ideological purity for "those parents loopy enough to want their kids to be indoctrinated with the wing-nut message of The Lorax."
"I don't want the moron writers of The Lorax trying to indoctrinate children and turn them into millions of little eco-warriors," the Media Research Center's Dan Gainor told the Los Angeles Times yesterday. "Who appointed them in that role?"
Who, indeed. That would be the Who of all Whos, Dr. Seuss, who confessed 25 years ago to what conservatives are uncovering today.
In the February 1987 issue of Parenting magazine, Seuss, aka Theodore Geisel, admitted that The Lorax was "one of the few things I ever set out to do that was straight propaganda." This is at best a half truth.
From the very start Seuss dealt in wing-nut messages, beginning with a three year stint (1941-43) at the lefty New York rag PM, where he drew editorial cartoons urging race mixing and other pink agenda items. And many of his books of instruction for children can be seen by the keen conservative eye as nothing less than agiprop for tots:
Yertle the Turtle, with its whining turtle named Max, the epitome of the entitled Occupy movement, whose rude protest at the bottom of a legally compiled 200 turtle stack brings down a once great nation;
The Sneetches, where a culture of envy brings about redistribution of stars upon thars, resulting in a society in which star achievement has no value;
How the Grinch Stole Christmas, an attack on capitalism itself, on the very makers of boxes and bangles and bags who provide jobs and keep our economy afloat;
Green Eggs and Ham, an enticement to vice for the youngest readers, a thinly veiled exhortation to sexual experimentation, to man-on-fox-in-box and other perversions.
I could go on (and please do in the comments).
Once upon a time, the lessons propagated by Seuss, then called conservation, anti-totalitarianism, equality, spirituality and trying new foods, were universal virtues we all wanted to teach our children. But now the right has exposed them as socialist scams, and so it has been left to us to drum them into our children, to plant the final seed of truffola tree into their fertile little brains, where strip mining and clear-cut logging is not yet allowed.