Say! I like green eggs and ham!

[calimac]

Ted Cruz has been getting a lot of amused chuckles for reading Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham on CNN as a bedtime story for his children in the course of conducting his filibuster on Obamacare. (It's not the strangest thing that has been read during a Senate filibuster. Al D'Amato read the phone book. Huey Long read his favorite recipe for potlikker and encouraged his audience to clip it out of the Congressional Record the next day.)

It's what Cruz said afterwards that gets me.

"'Green Eggs and Ham' has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamcare debate," Cruz said after he finished, to a few audible chuckles from the Senate gallery.

Americans "did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare either," he added. "They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse."

This proves that Princeton and Harvard do not equip the student with reading comprehension, if that student is a big enough jerk. The moral of Green Eggs and Ham is 'How do you know you don't like it if you haven't even tried it?'

You do not like them.
So you say.
Try them! Try them!
And you may.
Try them and you may, I say.

Isn't that the Republicans' actual fear, that once the public tries Obamacare, they'll like it, and then refuse to give it up?

One other point. Though not totally deaf to the nuance of the story, Cruz's reading is rather dull, bland, and hurried, not helped by the fact that, at the moment, he had virtually no live audience and that not very responsive.

You want to hear a good reading of excerpts from Green Eggs and Ham?* Friends, from a memorial broadcast after Dr. Seuss's death, here is the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

*Pages 40-41, 46-59, 62. What?

Comments

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

From a political cartoon I saw:

"I do not like Obamacare.
I do not like it, this I swear!
I do not like it, Uncle Sam...
...But I ain't got no other plan."

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't see why Cruz shouldn't take Seuss's metaphor and turn it to his own purpose if he likes. "Applicability" is the perfect word: It's the one Tolkien uses for what rests in the freedom of the reader, as opposed to "allegory," which rests in the control of the writer.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I'm not objecting to his turning the metaphor to his own purposes. In fact I'm chortling at it, because he hasn't noticed that it proves the opposite of what he thinks it does.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Well, if you like the metaphor of "you're a child and your parents know better than you do, so when they make you do things you don't want to it's for your own good." I find it disturbingly authoritarian as a model for the relationship between government and adult citizens. Of course it's also a bit ironic that a staunch conservative is rejecting a metaphor so supportive of parental and state authority—but then it's equally ironic to me that a staunch liberal finds that metaphor appealing.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, I don't like that metaphor at all, but since it has nothing to do with the message of Green Eggs and Ham the point is irrelevant. You and Ted Cruz: is this book really so hard to understand?

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Clearly the book is a Christian allegory, on the lines of "The Hound of Heaven." The eggs and ham are the body of Christ, and it ends in a jolly communion feast.

Seriously, though, Cruz couldn't have chosen worse.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Interesting and fwiw, in the early days of the NHS being set up after WW2, you got much the same reactions from the privileged here until they realised that they also had a right to free health care under the scheme.

[(Anonymous)]

I thought everyone knew that Green Eggs and Ham was a retelling of a passage in The Lord of the Rings:

http://users.bestweb.net/~jfgm/HerbsWeb/CriticsDrailog.pdf

-MTD/neb