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Here are green eggs and ham in real life. They're made of danger.


courtesy of who is undoubtedly super nice

If your ham and eggs are green, they are rancid. Of course they are! That's what green means! They're poison now. You're going to be sick. Tautological nightmare Sam I Am is trying to convince our protagonist - unnamed, like the children in Cat in the Hat and others in Seuss's Kafkaesque universe - to eat rancid food. Understandably, our hero is reluctant. But Sam I Am won't quit. He uses increasingly brutal tactics to break our hero down. Here he is hitting him with a car.



Soon Sam I Am will drive the car off a cliff into the ocean - a goat will be involved too, because why not - and here, near drowning, our hero is finally defeated.



If this all sounds a little familiar, it's because it's exactly the ending of 1984.



Seuss, one of our darkest and most anguished writers, has a fascination with psychological torture. His nihilistic masterpiece Fox in Socks presents a darker end to a similar journey: Fox brainwashes his prey with relentless reality-bending tongue twisters until Knox breaks and destroys him with his own weapons. It's A Clockwork Orange with rhyming: "I was cured alright."

The tactic here is an infinite doubling down until you lose all sense of reality. If you repeat something enough times, even if it's gibberish, it starts to sound like there must be a reasonable argument for it, or people wouldn't keep bringing it up. You use simple words, short sentences. Dr. Seuss's publisher bet him that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words. Green Eggs & Ham uses exactly 50 words. They form a lunatic vortex.

Say! In the dark? Here, in the dark?
Would you, could you, in the dark?

Well, no, says our hero. That...that sounds crazy, right? I would not, could not eat green eggs and ham in the dark! Not in the rain! Not on a train! But - but maybe if we could just slow down for a moment, I could - I could have a taste. Would that be a good compromise? Is that the new normal? If you say "Fake news" enough times, some people will believe that too. It's hard to remember what normal used to be. Were there rules? Did anyone follow them? You have to step back, again and again, and re-center yourself. You do know what a sane world looks like. That food is green. It's made of poison. Don't let them break you.