What can we see there on Mulberry Street?

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley

They’ve taken after Pa Ingalls and Dr. Seuss.  Muppets, Dumbo, Mr. Potato Head … You have been warned.

Somewhere the ghost of Madame Mao has a has a wistful, knowing smile.

It’s all over the news and the right wing troglodytes are making hay. The blue-nosed no-funskis and the yellow-backed better-than-yous are out in force, grabbing the headlines and they won’t let up until the culture is pure as the  -- well, not the driven snow … that’s way too white.

Ok, that might have been insensitive, but then I might not be a properly sensitive guy. Or maybe I still believe better to be better, refuse to let the perfect become the enemy of the good, insist we’ve come a long way, baby, and accept the past as the past, not a flawed version of the present, subject to revision.

I also believe in forgiveness, redemption and the reality of growth and change.

Which makes me want to shout at all the prissy point-fingered pretend progressives, “Quit it out already!. One 84-year-old illustration does not an everlasting bigot make.”

What Marco saw on Mulberry Street in 1937 isn’t what he’d see there today.

They ran the zoo differently in 1950 – the year Dr. Seuss’s book – now on the roster of the proscribed – was awarded the Caldecott Medal in recognition of  “the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children.”

And if Laura Ingalls Wilder’s retelling of encounters with Indians as a child on the 1870s frontier is out of sync with contemporary sensibilities, what of it? Over the last 150 years those sensibilities – and pretty much everything else – has changed dang-near entirely.  But that doesn’t erase the reality of life and attitudes way back when.

That’s what’s afoot here. A supercilious sanitizing of our cultural past … and let’s be really clear about it, that’s just plain wrong.

We were different people three generations ago and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

Let’s remember, back then we smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey, then got in cars without seatbelts, drove to an unairconditioned house with no TV where mom had been home all day while the kids ran wherever they chose with no more supervision than the neighborhood cats and dogs, but kids knew there was a spanking waiting for them if they got caught doing what they oughtn’t. Down south Jim Crow was the law and nowhere in the country did folks give second thought to donning blackface or a feathered headdress come Halloween, guffaw at the antics of Amos ‘n’ Andy or refer to the folks living on the other side of town in ways that nowadays would end a career. Kids made decisions with a sing-song “eeny-meeny-miney-moe…” and most folks called Brazil nuts by a racially descriptive anatomical epithet – no one thought anything of it.

We fought a war against Japs, reveled in stereotypes and gave less than little thought to who might be upset, unsettled or offended. What was written, broadcast, published and remembered reminds us of all that.

No doubt, by contemporary standards, we weren’t very nice people.

But our standards weren’t their standards – and let’s not forget that a whole lot of “them” are still with us today -- and struggle to keep up with and make sense of a country that becomes more foreign with each passing day.

In the 1960s the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution aimed to wipe out the remnants of China’s past – and tore the country apart. Re-education, struggle sessions, criticism and self-criticism were the currency of the day to root out “class privilege” and erase ideological error from national culture and individual daily life. Madam Mao and the Red Guard were politically “woke” and demanded, at risk of career and reputation, that all conform.

Ok, we’re not there … yet. But while we can improve ourselves, improve our present, the past is out of reach. History is messy, often ugly, but if we look at it square on we can learn from it. Despite flaws, the books, movies, and customs we’ve inherited enrich our lives and understanding and should be embraced and enjoyed. Madam Mao set a bad example.

There’s still plenty to be seen on Mulberry Street. We just need to know how to look.