If I could run the Seuss estate, I'd do it well! I'd be real great!

The controversy du jour is about the Dr. Seuss estate's decision to pull six books from print because of certain racist caricatures found in some of the illustrations. Despite what certain conservative critics claim, this is not a “First Amendment violation” because it's not the government doing it; the Seuss estate has every legal right to decide what, if anything, it will do with works whose copyright they own.

That said: if I ran the Seuss estate then, instead of pulling those six books from circulation, I'd publish them all together in a single volume, alongside commentary from historians and other experts putting the books into historical context. If that weren't enough, I'd also share the profits of that omnibus edition with reputable anti-racism charities.

How can future generations learn the lessons of our history if we whitewash away all the bad parts of it? People of the future need to know: American racism wasn't just something hidden away in the darker corners of the national psyche -- it was considered wholesome enough for children's books and Disney cartoons (such as "Song of the South," another classic I think should remain in print, alongside modern context-giving commentary).

I have similar qualms about the suggestion to digitally remove Donald Trump from that Home Alone movie he was in -- no, don't do it. Future generations need to know: Trump didn't just come out of nowhere -- one day the U.S. Republican Party was perfectly competent and sane, when suddenly a spray-tanned orange asteroid crashed down from out of nowhere and left a smoking crater where once stood a principled political party -- Trump became president after the media spent literal decades building him up as some business-genius folk hero (and the Republicans spent decades pandering to bigots, but that's for another day). We need to preserve these parts of our history, so future generations will know what to avoid.