Are you awoke yet?

Oh dear, Dr. Suess has been cancelled! What shall we read to our children?

Well, not exactly. The Suess trust has removed a very few of the very large canon of children’s literature because they have caricatures of Chinese and Africans considered offensive.

Fact is, though some of the criticism is kind of odd, “Chinese kids eat with sticks” (they do), the illustrations of Africans with bones through their topknots are pretty cringe-worthy.

I’m old enough I used to see caricatures like this in Saturday morning cartoons. And I remember Popeye punching sneering buck-toothed Japanese sailors over the horizon in the re-cycled WWII-era cartoons.

My impression is that contemporary Japanese find these caricatures amusing rather than offensive, and if they do get woke we can always dig up the historical woodcut images 19th century Japanese artists made portraying Commodore Perry and his men as gross barbarians with huge noses.

But now Looney Tunes has consigned Pepe le Pew to the trash heap of history for behavior considered “rapey,” or as some say – French.
(I’m only half-joking. I grew up with French kids and I remember they simply assumed a woman who resisted their advances was just making a pro forma protest for modesty’s sake.)

But the Pepe is more complicated than it seems. The female cat who was the object of his affections was repelled by his smell, and when he is doused with perfume the roles reverse and she starts chasing him.

She is obviously Odor-ist!

We might have seen this coming after the announcement that a musical number, “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” performed by Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams (Neptune’s Daughter, 1949) is not a light-hearted song of flirtation and seduction, but rape with the aid of drugs. (“Hey what’s in this drink?”)

But moving on. Al Jolson classics, not going to see him on classic movie channels anymore. Not in blackface at any rate.

And now that I think of it, there’s an old Bing Crosby movie “Dixie” (1943) which we’ve got to archive. It’s about the songwriter who composed the song Dixie. It has a scene where two actors have to invent blackface performance after blacking each other’s eyes in a fight. And though it’s set in the antebellum South it doesn’t have a word to say about the injustice of slavery.

OK, so we’ve had a lot of fun at the expense of the Social Justice Warriors and their crusade to remove all that is racist, sexist, whatever-ist from our culture. But now folks are getting irritated and are starting to get downright mad.

So what’s going on?

We have a history, and not all of it is pretty or in the best of taste. Otherwise good people held what we now consider objectionable attitudes and opinions.

Which leads to the question, are we going to hide that history? Put it in vaults you need special permission to enter? Erase it from the experience of our children and only let them learn about it in college?

Oh, that’s right. Safe spaces…

Well here’s what I think is happening. Colleges are turning out large numbers of people who assume they have the right to leadership roles in society. Trouble is, there’s not enough of those roles to go around, creating what Russian-American author Peter Turchin calls “an overproduction of elites.”

As a result we have an overabundance of arrogant holier-than-thou busybodies looking for something, anything to justify telling you what attitudes to have, opinions to hold, and what to do with your time.

I think it could be just that simple.