We didn’t start this culture war

Kermit the Frog. Mr Potato Head. Dr Seuss. The culture war becomes more infantile by the day. Quite literally. The big talking points of the past few weeks have focused almost exclusively on children’s TV shows, toys and authors. First Disney Plus slapped a warning label on The Muppets Show, due to the ‘negative depictions and / or mistreatment of people or cultures’ it apparently features, acknowledging the ‘harmful impacts’ these puppets have inflicted on generations of youngsters.

Then there was the de-gendering of Mr Potato Head. Hasbro announced that the beloved toy brand would drop the honorific, so as to make it more gender inclusive (while still keeping the Mr and Mrs Potato Head characters).

Then they came for Dr Seuss, as it were. Joe Biden conspicuously removed any mention of the beloved author from his proclamation on Read Across America Day this week, which was up until now also known as Dr Seuss Day. A Virginia school district also instructed its teachers to ‘not connect Read Across America Day with Dr Seuss’. Most strikingly, the Seuss estate said it would cease publishing six of the more ‘problematic’ titles.

This followed a years-long campaign on the part of some academics to repose Seuss as a racist, due to the old stereotypical depictions in some of his books (ignoring the fact that while his work reflects some of the prejudices of his time, he also satirised racism, fascism and nationalism).

Right-wingers in the US have had several field days over all of this, as you might expect. Dr Seuss got rolling coverage on Fox, and some pundits got a bit carried away. ‘Buy Mr and Mrs Potato Head because it’s the end of an era. It is the end of freedom in America’, thundered Glenn Beck on his radio show.

And all this has allowed liberals to rehearse their new favourite line – that cancel culture is just right-wing grievance-mongering used to ‘distract’ from the bigger issues. Comment pieces and cable-news monologues have portrayed these conservatives as lunatics obsessing over the genitalia of plastic potatoes and exaggerating what are actually minor stories.

Here, woke liberals are essentially projecting their own lunacy on to their critics. After all, the only reason anyone is talking about Messrs Seuss, Potato Head and Frog is that some people actually decided these anodyne children’s products were potentially dangerous and had to be changed or culled.

The pattern keeps repeating itself. Wokists do something mad and when you point this out to them they accuse you of being mad. The people who think that the mascots on Uncle Ben’s rice or Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix are essentially propping up white supremacy are perfectly sensible. Anyone who says ‘hang on a minute’ is crazy.