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

[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.