Chances are you’ve already heard about this book, but during the past weeks of work-and-nothing-else the announcement of a revision of the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon into a savvy political satire of the Bush regime called Goodnight Bush: A Parody got me laughing and thinking.
You can take a peek inside on the book’s web site, and see “a quiet Dick Cheney whispering hush.” Also, one of my personal favorites was simply reading my former UC Berkeley senior thesis (on Toni Morrison) Professor Janet Adelman’s blurb:
“This is wistful, funny [brilliantly clever in fact], and also absolutely terrifying…who could ask for anything more…I can see a PhD dissertation writing the history of the Bush administration via the illustrations in a few years.”
There is a long history of such revisions of children’s literature to satirize current political conditions and figures. The first that comes to mind is my great-great-grandfather’s co-opting of Mother Goose to comment on Roosevelt’s New Deal (Rewind to read background info). “Mother Goose in Washington” by Will H. Chandlee is out of print, but still relevant at least to those at Rutgers, who have excerpted portions, with illustrations and analysis, on their ECLIPSE site.
Literary Lotus 