Our President’s Word Wars
Olivia Alperstein
These days I find myself thinking often about a cartoon by the late Theodore Geissel.
In it, a woman with a sweater that reads “America First” reads aloud from a storybook to two children: “And the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones,” she relays. “But those were Foreign Children and it didn’t really matter.”
Geissel — better known as Dr. Seuss — was criticizing Americans’ purposeful isolationism during World War II. But it’s never felt more prescient, as a sitting American president embarks on a dangerous and deadly new “America First” policy.