Okay it's time who's ready for my
unhinged rant on The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
*the book, from the perspective of a >9mo pregnant anticapitalist disaster who's read it to a 2yo about 23,000 times in the past 6 months
I bought The Lorax for my kiddo based on vague memories and the charming line about caring a whole awful lot. The back of the book describes it as a book "about standing up for what you believe in."
The first time I read it to jog my memory, I was pleased to remember the Lorax angrily showing the Onceler the consequences of his actions, the irony of the Onceler watching his possessions crumble (and his family leave) after the trees are gone, the emphasis on restoration at the end. The truffula seed reminded me of the pawpaw seeds I was stewarding.
In subsequent reads, I grew more frustrated at the Onceler. He tells the story in an apparent act of accountability, but he still charges for it? He still describes the Lorax as bossy and makes comments about his attitude. He puts a lot of emphasis on his own prowess at engineering.
I came to think that the Onceler is actually a better stand-in for corporate profiteers than Seuss may even have intended, since he destroyed an ecosystem for personal profit, takes the retelling of the story as an opportunity to express that he's worried about it with all of his heart, and then shoves off responsibility for restoration onto a literal child when he could have spent the intervening decades growing trees and undoing his mess. This is just a Coca-Cola recycling campaign.
And then, by engaging uncritically with the Onceler's pleas, does the book itself endorse this sort of corporate responsibility-dodging?
But of course, the comparison breaks down because a proper capitalist would either have established a truffula farm free from all those pesky creatures to keep the operation going, or packed up and left with his family when there was no more profit to be wrung from that particular piece of land.
So then, why does the Onceler stay and watch his buildings crumble, cold under the roof, and make[s] his own clothes out of miff-muffered moof? Why not go on to the next big opportunity? Maybe he really does feel bad, but it's hard to square that with his ineffectual moping and charging for the story. I'm more inclined to think that he's so invested in the story of his own genius and the tragedy of his situation that he's stayed there wallowing in self-pity instead of either moving or fixing things. He's an individualist, but not the poster boy of capitalist success. He's a victim of his own ideology.
tl;dr: the books says:
The Onceler is a loser (in both capitalist and environmentalist ideologies)
it's important for us to step up and save the environment as private citizens after the companies make puppy dog eyes about it
