Reforming rhymes

Editor’s note: George is sick this week, so we give you this column from 2002.

The busy bodies are still at it, taking the violence, crime, sexism and immorality out of our traditional children’s literature. One promoter of political correctness in “a gentler” ... and phonier world, has reworked Mother Goose. Name is Bruce Lansky.

See if you can recognize the original for one of his “less harsh” reworks: “Peter, Peter, sugar eater. Always wanted food much sweeter. Adding sugar was a blunder–Now he is a toothless wonder.”

Isn’t that just the cutest little poem you ever read? Bruce didn’t like the idea of Peter imprisoning his wife in a pumpkin shell, even though Peter did keep her “very well.”

Maybe this is wimmin’s lib carried to the height of ridiculousness or to the depths of ignorance ... can’t make up my mind. Lansky does not forget violence and child abuse: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. Which wasn’t too bad when the winter winds blew.” “But the strong summer sun was too hot to handle. So she packed up her things and moved to a sandal.”

That’s how Bruce boy got around that violent “spanked them all soundly” business and, of course, avoided any reference to a sexually active female who may or may not have been selling her favors on the street. For some reason, I just recalled another modified version I read in a family planning guide:

“There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children because she didn’t know what to do.” According to one newspaper article from a Southern state, a school librarian tried out some of the new Brucie rhymes on elementary kids and they “had more fun with the new ones,” but she believes they related better to the old versions and understood the point of the rhymes better. When they read the new ones together, “The kids giggled through it.” Besides giggling quite a bit, my reaction is that Bruce Lansky was trying to make a few fast bucks by riding on an established literary tradition ... and possibly taking under-the-table money from the Nutri-Sweet and sandal industries.

Besides that, his work is a form of rationalized plagiarism. That newspaper article says there were calls for revising nursery rhymes back in the early 1800s, and in 1952 an English scholar “made a list of 199 undesirable acts of behavior culled from a collection of 200 traditional nursery rhymes. Included in the ‘52 list were eight allusions to murder, 12 cases of torments and cruelty, 23 cases of physical violence, and 14 cases of stealing or general dishonesty, and one allusion to marriage as a form of death.”

That’s hard to believe. Guess I’ll just do some research right now. It would be scientifically best to simply open the old children’s book to random pages.

Here goes: Page 31—“Mud is gooey-squish patooey! Mush it with your fingers; Gush it with your toes. Slimey, glimey, wet and grimy - Ooooooooh, I like mud.” Well, not much violence there, but it does promote being unsanitary and certainly would upset the Water Quality Board.

Page 26 — “Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night, Sailed off in a wooden shoe— Sailed on a river of crystal light, into a sea of dew. “‘Where are you going and what do you wish?’ “The old man asked the three. “We have come to fish for the herring fish “that live in this beautiful sea; “Nets of silver and gold have we!’ “Said Wynken, Blynken and Nod.”

Never realized how harmful those old poems are. These kids are not wearing life jackets, probably didn’t tell their folks where they were going, and are out beyond curfew. This is a bad one and should be rewritten. Let’s try one more. Page 56 — “Algy met a bear. The bear met Algy. The bear was bulgy. The bulgy was Algy.”

If there was ever a kiddie’s poem designed to teach people to fear and hate endangered grizzly bears, that’s it. I’ll send this one along to Brucie for a rewrite, and a carbon copy to the Audubon Society. One thing puzzles me. Why is it the more these know-it-all liberals mess with our laws, education system and literature, the farther society’s morals seem to fall?

I like the guy who said, “Don’t mess with nothin’ that ain’t botherin’ ya none.”

G. George Ostrom is an award winning columnist from Kalispell.