(I’m canceling canceling)
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Have you ever really paid attention to nursery rhymes? Or current events? Only to discover that far too often there’s not a whole lot of difference?
I’ve certainly mistaken the two before. I’ve read nursery rhymes that included incorrigible behavior and thought, “Didn’t somebody in Washington just do that?” And then I’ve read stories in the news about some self-serving celebrity’s self-serving conduct and thought, “Why doesn’t this rhyme?”
If you have been paying attention, you’ll also have noticed that some faceless thing called Cancel Culture is trying to just banish nursery rhymes altogether from America. Yawn.
Who, exactly, is this cancel posse? Where are their headquarters? I can’t find anyone who can point to a “Cancel Culture” committee. Who’s in charge? Who gave them power to demand anything? When and where is their weekly “Oh, this has gotta go!” culture-purge meeting? And can you imagine how strict their HR department must be?
Where’s their website? EVERYTHING has a website. Heck, Martha White Flour has a website. Seriously. (marthawhite.com)
Even vegan vampires have a website. Seriously. (veganvampireinc.com)
I rest my case.
So who cares? If we just hang up the phone on these whiners, what’s their “…or else”?
Whatever. But before they try to cancel anything else, let’s take a deeper look at some nursery rhymes.
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All around the Mulberry Bush,
The monkey chased the weasel.
The monkey stopped to pull up his sock,
Pop! Goes the weasel.
According to people who claim to know, this nursery rhyme originated in 18th-Century England, about a century after Keith Richards was born. The monkey may have referred to rent or other recurring household bills, except in the case of Keith Richards. In those hard, pre-IRS tax credit days, people would often run out of money and have to pawn (pop) their coat (weasel) to a pawnbroker named Mulberry Bush (great-grandfather of George W. Bush).
Many times, the head of household ran out of rent money because he spent it all at the pub, which coincidentally brings us back round to Keith Richards.
Why the monkey had only one sock, we may never know.
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Rub-a-dub-dub
Three men in a tub
Sure, one might raise an eyebrow, until one discovers that the middle man was a transitioning woman, and the trio’s third was a talent scout for the San Francisco City Council.
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
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Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Obviously, this is racist at its sophist finest. This is the kind of “evidence” that sends Cancel Culture morale officers to the cheese-and-salami party tray section at the grocery.
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Mary, Mary, quite contrary.
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.
It seems Mary had a nice sideline, growing hemp in her dorm room. This helps explain why Mary was discovered later gobbling down curds and whey — Mary was stoned out of her goldilocks.
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Ring around the rosie
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down.
A playful reference to Europe’s Black Death in the 1300s, during which infected people would develop rash-like rings on their skin, and had to carry around a handful of flowers to try and cloak the fetching scent of pending doom. (Europe had no underarm deodorant then. Or now.)
Ultimately, the plague killed practically everybody, who then had to be cremated because, well, because we all fall down.
Sleep tight, kiddies!
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Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
Not a penny was there in it,
Only ribbon round it.
Kitty Fisher was a quite popular courtesan in 18th-Century England. Lucy Locket was a barmaid. They both wanted the same man, a situation that still provided the plot of most movies.
The inevitable showdown between Kitty and Lucy led William Shakespeare to coin the phrase “cat fight.” This was quite a literary feat, considering he had died 200 years earlier.
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Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
There’s nothing particularly disturbing about this popular round, until you consider that it was narrowly rejected as the fundraising slogan for the Biden for President campaign.
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Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly, lavender’s green
When I am king, dilly, dilly, you shall be queen.
So, how about you come back to my place and let me show my etchings. Dilly, dilly.
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It’s raining; it’s pouring.
The old man is snoring.
He bumped his head on the top of the bed,
And couldn’t get up in the morning.
Top of the bed? Grandpa was sleeping under the bed again, huh, Mom?
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Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning.
Based on other verses in the ditty (This is the way we brush our teeth and This is the way we put on our clothes, for example), one historian suggests this nursery rhyme was about a woman’s prison. Fortunately for all of us, the person who penned the poem died before getting into any This is the way we relieve pent-up sexual tension weirdness.
And what’s with this medieval European fascination with mulberry bushes?
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Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
Presently, a pack of pickled pocket-pickers publicly palmed Peter Piper’s peppers. Providentially, Peter was packin’.
Film at eleven.
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