"Seuss-isms For Success" is a small, overpriced hardcover book quoting, out of context, familiar couplets from Doctor Seuss books, with captions suggesting that each such chortle of wisdom be taken as advice pertaining to some element of business life: "On Micromanagement", "On Delegating", etc. Solid business wisdom, it turns out, is concealed within the most infantile rhymes about green eggs and cats and trips to Solla Sollew.
It's an amusing book, if you live your life on a scaffolding of mergers and meetings and you find some forgiving irony in the knowledge that your donation of each new daylight to the corporate drainpipe might somehow be traced back to the propaganda you were given as a child to teach you how to count. Certainly, there is an uncomfortable smile to be earned from the recognition of an industrial imperative in the stanza "You have to be smart and keep watching their feet, because sometimes they stand on their tiptoes and cheat." Much of the logic of the corporate world is indeed childlike in its simplicity.
The horror shows up on page 5, however, when the caption "On growth:" is paired with a quote from "The Lorax":
I laughed at the Lorax, "You poor stupid guy!
You never can tell what some people will buy."
Business is business!
And business must grow
Regardless of crummies in tummies, you know.
Again, this is meant as a joke: even our long-familiar childhood rhymes contain the larval shape of the most pivotal and unromantic adult insights. Nothing changes, after all, in the downhill slide to big from small. How delightful.
But the flaw here is not a matter of comic exaggeration. "The Lorax" contains advice, yes, but this ain't it. The book is a potent satire of all corporate arrogance that ignores the environmental and, yes, even the economic costs of its own growth. If the joke is in the similarity between Dr. Seuss' philosophy and that of corporate America, the bitterness is in the fact that there is no similarity. And nobody notices.
Now, I'm not gonna go cheering for Dr. Seuss one way or the other. In addition to writing marvelous children's books and disarmingly imaginative storybooks for adults, Dr. Seuss spent the early 1940s sketching loathesome political cartoons portraying every Asian in North America as a slant-eyed spy, even while he produced heroic depictions of the hypocrisy of anti-black racism. The guy wasn't perfect. But when Dr. Seuss chose his battle, he made it clear which side he was on.
So, Dr. Seuss has been quoted out of context, his accomplishments corrupted, his militant words adopted for destructive use by the opposite side of an idealistic fight. Does this matter? Does anybody expect anything less from the corporate world?
Well, unfortunately, it does matter. This book may not provide the detonator for any one corporate explosion; perhaps no executive has even cracked the tiny book open. But the book is a mirror. And in the reflection, the real problem is clearly visible.
Imagine you're an American Indian in the midwest in the 1880s. The white folks have spent the last three centuries sawing down forests, wiping out your food sources, hunting down your people, spreading disease. Everywhere you move, they move there too. And now they're everywhere, like giant white cockroaches with bad breath and stupid clothes. They sign treaties, then they break them. They seem to hate the land even as they steal it from you.
Now, imagine it's 120 years later, and we white folks are very sorry about all this. Not sorry enough to actually give back anything we've taken, but otherwise pretty sorry. Well, mostly sorry. Sorry, like, we wish we didn't have to do it, but we did. We do, after all, like the Midwest, and since we already have it we might as well just keep it. Really, we're not actually sorry, we're just sorta amicably upset about the whole thing, like Bush with the whole spy plane incident. We hate it when someone else's misfortune gets in the way of our good time.
The fact is, 120 years later, we're exactly as sorry as we can be without pretending we wouldn't do it again. If we want something, after all, we don't just take it; we pretend it's ours until nobody remembers where we got it. If Dr. Seuss says something about how we should curtail our growth to sustainable limits, we pretend he said that we have to keep growing no matter what. If we want oil and there's a game preserve in the way, we just forget it's a game preserve.
It's as if wanting is all that matters. It's as if our decisions are made my children. It's as if we can see, but only through one eye. Which might explain why our book of wisdom ends with a quote from "I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!"
SO...that's why I tell you
To keep your eyes wide.
To keep them wide open...
At least on one side.
Copyright 2001 Betsy Shebang