Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

If you are an academic, it does not matter a tinker’s curse to you what happens to Whoville, only why, and the answer is because Dr. Seuss was a man after his own kind. How do you prove this? You point to any remnant of text whatsoever, as did the bassplayer of Kiss on the Bard, who was demonstrably of the same temperament “because he wrote those thees and thous, he obviously had a lisp” (we are reminded, editorially, of the Los Angeles Times music critic who was called upon to review the Berg-Schoenberg correspondence and pronounced it free of perversion, except for that salutation, “Lieber Herr Schoenberg!”).

Of course, the Depression figures into the equation, but the Whos praise Christmas even when it is stolen from them by the Grinch, because they are Americans. “Give me Liberty or give me Death” is at the essence of American thought, and rises to the surface of art in more than one episode of Combat!, in Sydney Pollack’s Castle Keep, and at the end of The Monitors.

What care we though “we see not our signs”?

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger