Bartholomew and the Oobleck
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Bartholomew and the Oobleck, for the uninitiated, is about a king who gets bored with the weather and commands his creepy magicians to make something new come down from the sky. As I read the first part of this story to my kids tonight, my son Sam (6) interrupted me to ask “Is that really a good idea?”
Oobleck was published in 1949, a time when it seemed that the kings of the world did indeed seem to be bored with the weather of the world and, aided by creepy magicians like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, deemed it necessary, for reasons having to do with hubris and pride, to have something new fall from the sky.
The narrative tension of Oobleck is palpable as Bartholomew, the lowly page boy, tries first warn the king against his foolish whim, then waits with nameless dread for the coming apocalypse, then desperately races to warn the kingdom of the king’s disastrous mistake.
It’s hard to read this story without feeling a lot like Bartholomew. We all knew our current king’s folly was a bad idea, everyone tried to tell him so, but kings will be kings and so the creepy magicians (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Halliburton, the Carlyle group, PNAC, etc etc etc) created an apocalypse for the boy tyrant.
(With plenty of little army men for him to throw around the floor of his throne room while he made exploding noises, but don’t let me mix my metaphors.)
The effects of oobleck, it turns out, can be reversed with a simple act of humility on the part of the king. Our boy king, of course, we have learned is incapable of an act of humility, and even if he were, this particular oobleck is, alas, here to stay. Our boy king’s plan, his stated plan, is to keep the war in Iraq going long enough to become someone else’s problem, and, theoretically, never end at all.
(A canny commentator remarked recently that Bush is not, and never was, interested in being president. What he was interested in was winning the election. We’ve seen, indeed, over and over, that Bush’s main objective has always been to win, no matter what he has to do, what laws he has to break or who he has to kill to do so. We’ve also seen that he does, in fact, have no interest in leading, making decisions or doing anything remotely presidential, like treating other leaders, or anyone really, even his own mindless supporters, with anything like dignity or respect.)
Bartholomew unheeded
I had a recording of this book, which I listened to repeatedly when I was a kid. I loved it because it was so filled with menace and warning. (The text was read by a man with a deep, resonant voice. Could it have been Boris Karloff?) I still think about it often: the cows stuck in the fields, the oobleck pouring out of the bathtub spigot.
The king is a spoiled, selfish, self-satisfied person — as you’d expect of a king. They’re generally made that way.
Our king is all that, plus an American: suspicious of thinking (“Just do it!”), prone to seeing everything in black-and-white and, as you point out, determined to win.
Bartholomew’s warnings have not and will not work on our king. And damned if the Secret Service will let him into the royal bathroom.
Our oobleck will not magically recede. There is no happy ending for our kingdom.
–Ed.
Re: Bartholomew unheeded
I think the one I had was narrated by Winston Hibler. Your results may vary. Did yours come with Yertle the Turtle on the other side?
Re: Bartholomew unheeded
My copy of Yertle the Turtle backed with Batholomew and the Oobleck, on RCA Camden (“Living Stereo” the banner promises) says “The best-selling children’s book set to dramatic action personally by “Dr. Seuss” with music and featuring Marvin Miller.” Whatever that means.
Re: Bartholomew unheeded
This is one of the many times in any given day when I wish everything I own wasn’t in an aircraft-hangar sized storage unit in Santa Maria, California. Once upon a distant time, I could have just gone to the shelf and looked.
Re: Bartholomew unheeded
Alas, my childhood records are all gone. But Todd’s sounds like the same edition.
Unrelated but…
Can I recommend “The Twenty-One Balloons” as a great children’s story. You might have read it yourself as a kid. It is wonderful and is desperate for a screenplay…
If your son gets a little older, I would say that Phillip Pullman (a neighbour and visitor to our school)’s His Dark Materials is a far better read than Harry Potter. The first of the trilogy is out soon with Nicole Kidman and has a very interesting take on parallel universes….
Re: Unrelated but…
My wife worships Phillip Pullman and I certainly won’t let them read Narnia without also reading Dark Materials.
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Although Philip Pullman’s published opinions on Narnia are… ill-informed, to say the least.
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So I guess you know that this parallel universe does not involve staying at the same age forever…
This is one of the few Seuss books I don’t own. At some point that will be corrected. I’m always thrilled at the layers of meaning you can find in such a wide range of narratives. It really challenges me to think about my own writing, to strive to do better and more meaningful work. It also makes me worry that I won’t be able to live up to that standard.
Bush is a sociopath, incapable of emotions like compassion and humility, but absolutely certain of his own invincibility and his supreme importance. Lots of us talk to God, but Bush is the only one who hears God talk back. Judging from the results, I think Bush should have more closely examined the caller ID. I mean this in a very dispassionate, scientific way: he’s a monster. He’s the hollow man we were warned about, the first President who’s his own effigy. And you’re right about the winning thing. The “mission accomplished” victory parade he threw himself was probably the single defining moment of his presidency–a staged, hollow, pointless, comically expensive production that was completely divorced from reality. He wore a codpiece, for God’s sake. How confused and infuriated he must have been when the war stubbornly went on–could they not read the 200-foot sign? But this is what happens when the WWII generation leaves their kids unsupervised. Bush is the Risky Business President–his father’s out of town, he’s got the place to himself and he thinks he’s invincible so he gets wasted, dances around in his padded underpants, crashes the Porsche, cracks the crystal egg, turns the whole place into a brothel and lets goons steal the entire contents of the house. And we’re all (some of us literally) standing in the rubble asking “what the fuck?”
This new book called “Dead Certain” would seem to support your notion of the Risky Business president. But Tom Cruise was a successful high school hoping his junior achievements would get him into Princeton. Bush didn’t have to achieve anything to get into Yale. The review of this book in the Times suggests that Bush likes to do Dr. Evil impressions and race his secret service guys on his bike rides. Surely, the unfortunate agent who outrides Bush finds himself on a slow boat to Kandahar. More egregious is that his top aides write reports that reflect his views regardless of the facts. Even his own NSA/Sec of State says that she is not advising but internalizing his world. And as Olbermann pointed out in his tirade, the guy is hoping to convince his successor to stay in Iraq indefinitely. Playing for October. Playing indeed.
Yeah, but is it written in anapestic tetrameter?
I dont know this one, but it seems, like all good childrens storys, this is a parable on the folly of adults 🙂
I must admit that I am interested to see the Dark Materials be tunred into films. The second book with the “Italian” city filled with children and ghosts was very memorable, but it is the outright damning of organised religeon and Christianity that comes in the 3rd book; that I dying to see. If the far right had problems with Harry Potter, theyre going to have a fit when they see book 3. lol.
According to an interview with Nicole Kidman in Entertainment Weekly, it sounds like they’re soft-pedaling the explicitly anti-clerical and anti-organized religion aspects of the story, at least in the first movie. There is still a shadowy council of elders called the Magisterium running everything, it’s just no longer explicitly the Church behind it.
Oh, I see what you did there.
It bothers me when people try and find allegories about current events in a book that my grandfather read to frighten my mother (b. 1952.) (I got both the English and the Hebrew versions, and I was still scared in 1985.) Anyway, in doing so, you’re turning Bush into some sort of figure worth seeing in literature, when really he’s just a rampaging turd. Moreover, he’s our rampaging turd, sowhatareyagonnadoaboutit? Obama ’08?
I also find this sentence rather obnoxiously simplistic: …a time when it seemed that the kings of the world did indeed seem to be bored with the weather of the world and, aided by creepy magicians like Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, deemed it necessary, for reasons having to do with hubris and pride, to have something new fall from the sky.
I’m not sure boredom was exactly and only what motivated the implied advances in science, for fuck’s sake. Though I won’t doubt that the “hubris” aspect (whatever that means) was a motivator for Seuss’ parable, even though the “hubris of adults” theme is always ripe for a children’s book.
Re: Oh, I see what you did there.
Oh believe me, I wasn’t trying to find it — it jumped right up on the bed and rolled over on its back, begging me to rub its belly.
It’s a good thing I didn’t go ahead with my original plan of comparing Bush to the Thane of Cawdor — that story’s even older.
Oh shit — in 1969 Leonard Cohen compared Nixon to Abraham in “Story of Isaac!” That shit is ancient!
Rampaging Turd was, in fact, the original title of a famous Martin Scosese movie. They sweetened it up to the more “acceptable” title of Raging Bull, but still nobody went to see it. Sad, really.
I can almost guarantee you that “implied advances in science” was not the primary motivating factor in the decision to develop the atomic bomb. For fuck’s sake.
hubris (noun): very great pride and belief in your own importance: He was punished for his hubris.
Re: Oh, I see what you did there.
I can almost guarantee you that “implied advances in science” was not the primary motivating factor in the decision to develop the atomic bomb. For fuck’s sake.
The overall point is: Your sentence was overly simplistic. I didn’t like it.
What you doing up so early?
Re: Oh, I see what you did there.
Me? I’m not up early — I just haven’t gone to bed yet.
Pretty sure I’ve seen this before in print, if only I could remember where.