My children have pretty strict limits on “screen time,” but even so, they tend to pick a movie and watch it a few times before moving on.  This past week, it was the recent cartoon remake of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax.  Naturally, I expected the propaganda to be thick, but as I picked up bits and pieces of the plot while walking through the room, I noticed something even more profoundly disturbing about the movie.

Of course, there’s the simplistic — childish — presentation of businesses.  The Once-ler builds a massive corporation, with an elaborate house and factory and a giant ticker on the wall showing how much money he’s made, yet he is somehow taken by surprise when his employees chop down the last truffula tree.  With all of that money and “biggering,” the Once-ler never bothers to look at the longevity of his business and find ways to conserve or replicate his critical natural resource… which the beginning of the movie shows him traveling the world to find?  Yeah, sure.

Then there’s the character, not included in the book, of the movie’s second evil entrepreneur, Mr. O’Hare, who’s made his fortune selling air to compensate for the industrial damage of the Once-ler’s thneed enterprise.  Naturally, the air salesman has decided that there must never be a resurgence of truffula trees, because they make air for free.

Put aside questions of realism; put aside that we know that other trees exist in the world, because the Once-ler passed by them in his search for just the right material; put aside the question of where O’Hare gets his air.  With all that money to be made in the air business, no competitors ever arise to challenge O’Hare’s monopoly?

And how is it that Thneedville came to be a walled city, so isolated that nobody’s even looked over the wall to see the wasteland of truffula stumps and smog outside?

The only conclusion that makes sense is that the government of Thneedville has been complicit in blocking any threats to O’Hare’s monopoly, whether homegrown competitors (through regulation) or outside vendors (through protectionism).  The government has gone even farther, though, both indoctrinating the people (presumably in government-run schools) and actively forcing them to remain within the walls.

Yet, the government isn’t really mentioned in the film.  We know it exists, because the Once-ler sings about having not done anything against the law, but it doesn’t make an appearance.  Presumably, the progressive screenwriter couldn’t come up with a plot line that acknowledged the government while absolving it of responsibility.

When the theme is persecution of minorities, as in the movie version of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Whoville’s mayor is front and center to lead the call to conformity.  When the theme is the evil of traditionalists who want eliminate imaginations, as in the cartoon version of Horton Hears a Who, Whoville’s mayor is Horton the elephant’s only liaison to rally the Whos to unified action against calamity.  But Thneedville doesn’t really have a mayor.  (The IMDB synopsis calls O’Hare the mayor, which I may have missed, but if that’s the case, the character’s presentation is entirely in his role as a wealthy businessman.  His henchmen are business associates, not police.)

The really disturbing thing about The Lorax, though, is not just that it vilifies corporate activity and assumes the ruthlessness of business people.  Rather, it very specifically demonizes entrepreneurs, especially those who are upwardly mobile.

The Once-ler starts out as a poor redneck, and through his imaginative invention and determined self-reliance begins a new fad that makes him rich.  Bad guy.  O’Hare starts out as a laborer pasting up billboards and finds a way to provide something the population needs and that makes life in Thneedville better.  Villain, even just for having the idea.

The message, in short, isn’t just the silly assertion that business is heartless and will destroy the world.  It’s that business enterprises that specifically empower the poor and working classes — those upstarts who come up with products that people freely want to buy — are the very heart of evil.

If only the truffula forest had been a vacation spot for super rich liberals to get back to nature, perhaps the Lorax would never have had to emerge to “speak for the trees.”  That would have made for quite a different story, probably one involving a supernatural conservative who materializes to speak for the poor and working class.