Dr. Seuss’s poor Lorax, that bewhiskered woodland creature who speaks for the trees, has been made into a capitalistic spectacle twice: once in a delightful 1972 CBS TV special indebted heavily to Seuss’s 1971 picture book of the same name, and once in a computer-animated Hollywood nightmare that is not quite as bad as 2000’s Jim Carrey The Grinch but boy, is that not saying much. In neither is the Lorax a paranoid, granola-munching doper with a fondness for that sweet sticky-icky that rivals his passion for more family-friendly flora. I find this nigh incredulous. The Lorax clearly puffs hella trees.
This raises an interesting philosophical question—one that will, now that it has been articulated, no doubt plague the great thinkers of our time until the end of their days: If the Lorax puffs trees in the forest, can he see the forest for the trees? Allow me to brush off the cat hair and throw my overlarge, red- and white-striped top hat into the ring here in a vain effort to solve an equation of material implication which will no doubt prove, if not utterly unsolvable, to at least be a puzzle for the ages.
Watching as the dreaded industrial tycoon the Once-ler decimates a lovely grove of far-too-colorful trees that looks like a cross between palmettos, cotton balls, and the dank buds of a kush-like strain, the Lorax protests at the carnage, declaring with gusto: “I speak for the trees!” Yeah, don’t we all after we’ve carefully followed those hallowed instructions laid down by Memphis rap legend 8Ball so many years ago: “Roll that shit, light that shit, hit that shit, hold that shit, / blow that shit out slow, then pass it to me, bro.” What he apparently does not do, however, is speak for the forest itself—which makes sense! Because, as anyone hitting that good good knows, when you’re puffing on trees, trees are all you see. At least metaphorically.
That’s all, folks. Now that we’re done here, can you pass that shit to me, bro? You’ve been bogarting for a minute.
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