How 'Green Eggs and Ham' became a 'banned' book (thanks, Internet!)

Dr. Seuss'  Green Eggs and Hamfrequently crops up on lists of banned books, even though there's no clear evidence it's ever been outlawed in the USA.

How did that happen? We may have an answer.

Jesse Walker, the books editor for Reason magazine and a free-speech advocate, writes that if you want to blame somebody, start with him -- though the real culprits are people on the Internet who don't understand satire:
It's my fault. Sorry. My bad.




Way back in 2002, I wrote a satiric Banned Books Week column that mocked the nation's prigs by suggesting they try to pull something new off the nation's school shelves. The article then devolved into me decoding the supposed sexual subtexts in Treasure Island and, yes, Green Eggs and Ham.
Walker then walks us through the strange digital path that took Dr. Seuss from author of beloved children's books to free-speech martyr. This may be hard to believe, but it seems there are a lot of people online who either don't get pointed humor, deliberately ignore it to serve their own ends or are too lazy to do research. Or all three:
Someone once said that if a spooky legend catches on, it says something true about the anxieties of the people who believe and repeat the tale, even if it says absolutely nothing true about the subject of the story itself. My yarn may be more funny than scary—that's what I was aiming for, anyway—but the idea that people would prohibit a harmless children's book is still pretty frightening. And it's not hard to imagine what underlying worries might be at work here.
The Internet: Threat or menace?
br />