Gleaming the Sneetch

One of my favorite children’s stories growing up was Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. Year after year, in doctor offices and myriad other random waiting rooms, I would patiently search out any resident Dr. Seuss collection in hopes to peruse the pages of Sneetchdom.




Who knows why children like what they like, be it Green Eggs and Ham or any of the many adventures Seuss created, but for me, I looked for Sneetches “with stars upon thars.” I found Sylvester McMonkey McBean intriguing and his machine, masterful. Could he really create a Star-Bellied Sneetch from a Pain-Bellied Sneetch, I remember thinking as if Seuss’s cartoon world was as real as my neighborhood at home.




A sneetch is a sneetch, whether starred or barred, I concluded with the last flip of the page in a sort of awkward way thus fulfilling the author’s objective of illustrating the picture of racial equality for youthful readers. While the story book Sneetches “forgot about stars and whether they had one, or not, upon thars,” today’s Sneetches are all about stars and, “with their snoots in the air, they sniff and they snort, we'll have nothing to do with the Plain-Belly sort!"




It is hard not to make the comparison of Seuss’s Sneetches with today’s political landscape. Whether tuned into the evening news or perusing the political blogs, one finds no objectivity anymore, only political mouthpieces blindly repeating the day’s talking points and slights of hand.



While conservative in nature myself, this criticism is leveled at both political parties and their all too eager minions bent at sculpting political gains from unsuspecting bystanders with hollow words and catty comments. With “famous idiots” issuing their decrees, political neophytes repeating their ill-constructed philosophies, and politicos pocketing your money at a frenzied clip, politics is no longer a device of this republic; it is a game of perversion with the winners reaping Sylvester McMonkey McBean-like fame and fortune.


via The Insider

“Then, when every last cent of their money was spent,The Fix-It-Up Chappie packed up. And he went. And he laughed as he drove in his car up the beach, “They never will learn. No. You can’t teach a Sneetch!””

I see an unfortunate environment in this country where our politicians stand on platforms and make statements of fact that are conclusively false yet, as voters, we spin their rhetoric faster than a hungry spider in a field of mosquitoes. We spin a web of partisanship because our preferred candidate is a reflection of our beliefs and must be defended against the indefensible, protected against all criticisms, and paraded as the next savior to the world.




In the end, however, our candidate, win or lose, becomes yet another politician playing a game we, as citizens, have agreed to lose every election cycle. When will we see that the issues we fight for year in and year out are secondary to the goals of our politicians?




In November, when the fix-it-up chappies pack up and go, will we be left with a president-elect primed to right the ship of America or a charlatan who just won the greatest game on the face of the earth? Perhaps my sneetchdom is too raw and my ire too thick, but sneetches these days get the short end of the stick. Just a thought!