This Is Not a Good Game

Fuse #8's link to the "Dylan Hears a Who" website prompted me to listen to Dr. Seuss's text of The Cat in the Hat again, just in time for Random House's extensive marketing campaign for the book’s fiftieth anniversary.

What a subversive book that is! Politeness (e.g., shaking hands with strangers) gets kids in trouble. At the end the narrator asks readers whether they would keep a visit from the title character secret from their mothers.

Remember how ten years ago the giant Cat in the Hat balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade knocked a lamppost onto spectator Kathleen Caronna, injuring her badly? (Ms. Caronna seems to have recovered as well as can be expected, only to have a small plane crash into her empty bedroom last year. She may be one of those people, like Rulon Gardner, that things happen to.)

Now who could have seen that parade-balloon accident coming? Well, the fish, for one. And any six-year-old who'd read the book. The Cat in the Hat is not nice. He is not simply Supergrover with a taller hat. He's a figure of misrule and chaos. As well as, of course, a beloved symbol of literacy in America.