My baloney has a first nameIn retrospect, I'm thinking that when you've lost Mizz McCluskey's third graders, you've lost the heartland. I'm sure there were similar ditties being sung by Bush's second term, although with lyrics actually written by the NEA and passed out by the teachers, rather than being made up on the teeter-totters**.
It's J-I-M-M-Y
My baloney has a second name
C-A-R-T-E-R
I hate to hear it every day
And if you ask me why I'll say
'Cause Jimmy Carter has a way
Of messing up the USA!*
I find myself idly wondering what the pulse is on the average playground today.
*Those lyrics, kids, rhymed with a commercial for Oscar Mayer bologna. You know how they have those "commercial" things that everybody watches during Super Bowl parties? Well, before the days of DVR, they were on TV all the time! True!
** re: Teeter-totters. Ask your parents, kids. Believe it or not, grownups used to actually put booby traps on the playground that were used to break unpopular kids' tailbones after first tricking them into thinking you wanted to be friends, thereby maiming them physically and psychically. The playground at William Golding Elementary was a hard and savage place.
Teeter-totters were educational, but merry-go-rounds even more so. Everyone was glad to help get them spinning, but once it reached max RPMs and you needed help hanging on, that's when you found out who your REAL friends were!
ReplyDeleteAnd Mom and Dad let us head out Saturday morning with nothing but a "be back by supper time." I mean, anything could have happened, like heading up into the woods with a friend's .22 for some plinking. Or riding bikes (off of jumps we built) without helmets.
ReplyDeleteToday, the CPS would take the kids away.
Actually, I blame myself. I voted for Carter. Twice. I was young and stupid, and bought into that whole "make America's foreign policy as nice as the American people."
Learned from that experience, I did. I dare say that there are a number of 20 somethings that will look back on their Obama votes that way.
But you know what a hopelessly optimistic dreamer I am.
The marxists have fully taken control of our educational system, from pre-school through college.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, it was exposed as one of their many specific aims way back when.
Is it any surprise that kids were singing the "Barack Hussein Obama, mmm, mmm, mmm" song?
My school playgrounds had asphalt, concrete and crushed limestone, not bark mulch, rubber mats, and smooth river rock.
ReplyDeleteIt's a wonder I survived!
Teeter totters? Merry-go-rounds? Those both require at least two people to cooperate (at first) for one or both to get hurt.
ReplyDeleteFor sheer damage through individucality nothing tops a simple set of monkey bars - 6", 8" and 10' tall - over asphalt, of course. The nuns at my parochial school were tough, tough, tough and wanted their students to know that life was full of pain and suffering.
6', 8', 10'.
ReplyDeleteWe did not have Zoolander-scale monkey bars at my school.
I'm still trying to deal with you being in grade school when Jimmy was Prez'dent.
ReplyDeleteNow look at you! All grown up!
But yeah, such lyrics about Teh Won on the playground today would sign you (and possibly Mom & Dad) up for some counseling about your anti-authoritarian attitude young lady.
Swings, teeter-totters, chin-up bars, monkey bars....phttttttt. We had all of those and a Tether-ball pole as well. Nothing showed rugged toughness more than taking a speeding volleyball on a rope right into your face and not crying about it.
ReplyDeleteAlthough there were days in gym class when we got to play Dodgeball as well...good times, good times!
I seem to remember saying something to my 8th grade teacher (yeah, I'm older than you) about moving to Russia if Carter won the election. He laughed and said "no, you're not". The Chicago Public Skool faculty were quite enamored of the 70s version of Teh Won™ after all...
ReplyDeleteLast time I looked, there was some hooroar about kids being taught Young Obamaneer songs in grade school.
ReplyDeleteYa gotta brainwash 'em young.
I remember a "Push Bush in the Bush" ditty when I was a kid. It was George Bush Sr. I grew up in sweden(the ditty however was in english). Decent spread there. Must've been around '87. Pre-internet.
ReplyDeleteAnd the swings were real moneymakers.
ReplyDeleteKid gets a swing seat in the mouth and...dentists made a fortune.
Kid didn't do it twice, though :-)
Since my kids are, well, my kids, and not prone to soaking up whatever their teachers say, I can't report on the playground opinion of Obama. I don't think they ever got in trouble for their proxy-campaigning for McCain back in '08, but my oldest did get in trouble for saying that lesbians are women who love other women, so there's clearly no Libertarian element in our schools.
ReplyDeleteI remember a grade school teacher holding a vote between Carter and Ford. I was the only kid that voted for Nixon. (It wasn't me, I was a reflection of my Dad. He hated both Carter and Ford, said the only reason people didn't like Nixon was that he got caught. He became a Reagan Democrat).
ReplyDeleteHmmmm. I think we went to the same school...
ReplyDeleteMy school playground was like a miniature SERE course. Yeah, we had all the standard bone-bruising playground equipment of yore -an age before the wobbly hippie-spawn set about their task of distributing hornless unicorn ponies and lining the world with padding- but there were some added features provided by the local gods of the copybook headings which were overlooked by the responsible adults.
ReplyDeleteTo whit, there were enough different fruit trees in the wilds adjoining campus that a starving kid could offer up his soggy tuna/PBJ sandwich to the ants and mongoose and live off the land almost year round.
Our basketball court (the very one Tim Duncan later got his start) was lined on one side by casha (acacia) bushes with thorns like barbed wire, only more numerous and ice-picky, and besides tromping through the bush exploring the hills whilst dodging Jack Spaniard wasps, or attempting to capture and ride the tick-infested rastaman horses that roamed therein, a favorite lunch-time game was something we called "kill the man with the ball".
KMWB was played just as it sounds like it would be. It's as if football had drunk sex with rugby and its ne're-do-well offspring threw out all the rules except for the proscription on nutsack kicking, weapons usage, and the delineation of the field of battle.
It was Lord of the Flies without the teams and compressed into the space of our lunch period. Consequently, even our nerds were tough. Anyway, the last kids left standing at the lunch-ending bell, won, sort of...The "winners" sometimes got carted off to the office for aspirin and a stern talking to by the resident priest with possible detention. Mind you, detention back in the day was essentially the precursor to a parental ass-switching.
Great fun...The game, not the priest, or the whuppin'.
Nice detail in your second footnote.
ReplyDeleteTam,
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure I grew up miles and miles from you. Oddly enough, we sang the EXACT same song in 3rd grade. How'd that happen w/o the Innernet?
My bologna has a first name,
ReplyDeleteit's J-I-M-M-Y
My bologna has a second name,
it's H-O-F-F-A...
William Golding Elementary
ReplyDeleteSnork!
I and another kid got cap guns for Christmas in first grade. The teacher arranged a show down wherein we faced each other at the front of the room, drew and fired at the teacher's signal. I lost, which taught me a valuable lesson about shooting from ambush.
ReplyDeleteNo physical damage, but a good memory.
Is that William H. Golding in Cobleskill NY?
ReplyDeleteWhat a name for a school...
Anon 12:12, I was gonna say the same thing. I grew up in the swamps of southeast Texas, and I remember singing that, too. Group consciousness maybe? Or space aliens.
ReplyDeletejf
How strange. I went to William Golding Intermediate in Hawaii. "Five racial epithets a day or you get a free bloody nose!"
ReplyDeleteSeward rides a white horse,
ReplyDeleteLincoln rides a mule,
Seward is a gentleman,
Lincoln is a fool.
Lincoln drinks his soda,
Seward drinks his rum,
Seward is a gentleman,
Lincoln is a bum.
Lincoln has a bottle,
Seward has a glass,
Seward is a gentleman,
Lincoln is an .....
Song taught to schoolchildren before the 1864 election. Supposedly it travelled from Baltimore to Boston in a week.
Yeah. All of that. We had a sex-segregated playground, with all of the pathologies you might infer from that.
ReplyDeleteThe game we played, that the administration tried to ban, was called Ditch. It was essentially Australian Rules Tag crossed with Capture the Flag without the flag. Sometimes we played teams, sometimes it was Every Man for Himself.
The playground was about a half a football field in size and paved with asphalt, so it took considerable nimbleness not to get injured. Getting injured meant getting caught. Even the unpopular kids knew to keep their mouths shut when the teachers asked if we'd been playing Ditch.
Have things really changed in the intervening 50 years? Or are the (unionized liberal) educators merely more easily gulled by their nominal charges?
M
Heh...I remember a (brief) stint at a Christian school, had to've been around 3rd grade, where recess was spent on an asphalt (actually, in Guam, it was probably crushed coral and cement) parking lot with tetherball and basketball hoops, and lots of little kids running around playing tag and hide-n-go-seek. There wasn't a day that went by where recess ended without a scraped knee or elbow. Those taught you to dodge better, or (better yet) when it was appropriate to throw up the tears in order to avoid being tagged. One of our favorite past-times was getting the maintenance guy to let rip on the merry-go-round...the guy was fit, and could spin the thing so hard that us kids would, quite literally, be parallel with the ground as we held on for dear life. A friend of mine lost his grip, and tumbled/bounced/rolled for about 30 feet or so before coming to a stop...getting up...brushing himself off...and racing back for the next round. The blood on his knee was a minor inconvenience...the blood on his palm would have interfered with his grip. Ahhhh...good times!
ReplyDeleteWe use to play mumbley-peg at recess.
ReplyDeleteOur version was to flip our pen-knife (nope, no Zero Tolerance in those days) into a circle drawn in the dirt using fancy flips or off our elbow, chin ...
Our teacher's only comment was "If you cut yourself don't be late to class!"
"Anonymous mikee said...
ReplyDelete6', 8', 10'.
We did not have Zoolander-scale monkey bars at my school."
I was thinking more like "Spinal Tap".
While I don't think Carter was a very good president, I do think he was the most honorable man elected to the office of President within my lifetime.
ReplyDeleteHe gained more respect from me when he stood up to his church becasue he thought they were wrong. He is a man who I would trust to not deliberately stab me in the back.
Oh the memories that are flooding back. We had two really big hills and the PTA actually boight us tractor tire sized inner tubes to pile onto and go racing towards our fate at the bottom of one hill or the other. Last one to bail out won, but occasionally the prize was a call to Mom to come and take you to the ER.
ReplyDeleteSt. John the Baptist, we were tough, we used to throw rocks at each other....
ReplyDeleteSometimes a catholic school education can fail you....
My time was a little bit later. The only song I remember that mentioned a president was really more about something else. To the tune of "Frere Jacques":
ReplyDeleteMarijuana,
Marijuana,
LSD,
LSD,
Betty Crocker makes it,
Ronald Reagan takes it,
Why can't we?
Why can't we?
I don't remember what year that was, but I was young enough that I didn't know what LSD was.
I was born in the very early Fifties, in the South, and never heard nor read "teeter-totter" until I had been an almost grown-up. Are you referring to see-saws, Ma'am?
ReplyDeleteP.s. Broke yer tailbone for not fitting in socially, did they? Ma'am, I believe that you might really have a touch of the autitude about you, and if that's true , it's like salt in the stew.
ReplyDeleteThat is, a slight touch of it is good for you, but a lot of it can bring serious problems.