Atrios put up the lyrics of two childhood songs yesterday but he got them all wrong.
Here are the correct lyrics for the Battle Hymn of the Republic and Old Smokey:
My eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured every teacher, we have broken every rule
We are marching to the office now to hang the principal
Our school is marching on
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I bopped her on the bean
With a rotten tangerine
And now she’s not so mean
(note that the original lyrics predates the use of assault weapons in school)
And here is Old Smokey:
On top of old Spaghetti, all covered with cheese
I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed
It rolled of the table, and onto the floor
And then my poor meatball rolled right out the door
It rolled into the garden and under a bush
And then my poor meatball,
Was nothing but mush.
The mush was as tasty
As tasty could be,
And then the next summer,
It grew into a tree.
The tree was all covered,
All covered with moss,
And on it grew meatballs,
And tomato sauce.
So if you eat spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
Hold on to your meatball,
Whenever you sneeze.
Kids in the 60s and early 70s were less violent. We knew all the words to the protest songs and no one we knew owned guns except bad suburban dads wwho beat their kids on Sundays as prophylactic punishment and hunters.
True story.
Filed under: General | Tagged: Atrios, glory hallelujah, old smokey |
The Confluence 
The number of guns has kept rising but, apparently, gun ownership has actually decreased. What has increased is the number of gun owners who own lots and lots of guns. Gallup, for example, reports that 29% of Americans own gins but 48% of gun owners (about 14% of the population) own multiple weapons and 20% of gun owners own 65% of the weapons (that’s 6% of the population).
Another, larger, sample, by the University of Chicago, reports that gun ownership is 21%.
Gun ownership, according to Gallup, is concentrated in the South, among whites, among males, and among Republicans (no surprise) and increases as education goes down. The person most likely to own a gun is a low education white male who is middle aged, southern, and Republican. Stereotype, much? Incidentally, gun owners have less education, we do not know IQ so we certainly can’t use the word “stupid.”
Recent mass shootings, at least the ones that have drawn attention have taken place outside the South (Colorado, Arizona, Connecticut).
The gun culture is recent. In the 1800 and until recently, a lot of violence was with fists or rocks or (the high tech alternative), knives.
Boys might play army when I was a kid, but the reality as the kids aged was the draft and Vietnam. By 1972, the war was winding down but it was present for a year or two after. Going to an all volunteer army, in retrospect, was a bad idea because it kept the children of the 1%, plus the rich-but-not-uber-rich, and the “upper middle class” exempt from war unless they chose to enter the service.
For point of reference, by 1972 Obama was 11 and just moving back to the States and entering a life of sudden privilege, He never faced the draft or even the shadow of the draft looming on his personal horizon.
My brother was a chicken liberal, someone who was anti-war (and thus liberal) because of the draft. As he aged and married a woman who was conservative he has aged into a Fox News kind of conservative who, despite a law degree from a good school, is largely ignorant of the facts. You know, what is not presented on Fox news or Rush Limbaugh.
We have a lot of chicken liberals out there that were freed up by the all volunteer army.
Well, I know this is rambling and a bit off topic but I wanted to enter it into the discussion.
so all the crazy right wing ignorant republican rednecks who own all those guns they “don’t need” and “shouldn’t be allowed to have” are not the ones doing the mass murders? Now how do we blame gun nuts?
Well, if IIRC, the Connecticut shooter’s mama–who was one of his victims–was a gun nut who taught him how to shoot guns.
I think that poor woman wins a Darwin Award.
But was she Southern herself or Southern by ancestry? Was she ill-educated? We already know she wasn’t male.
I am as gunless to this very day as the day I was born. But here is something I remember seeing from several decades ago.
My father used to be a professor at a major mid-Southern University. One of his friends, a professor in another department, was as much a beard-growing sandal-wearer as it was possible to be back there back then. I remember seeing them at “hootenannies” (talk about a cultural artifact) held at the city’s one-and-only Unitarian Church. So, some years later we had to leave the city for family-economic-disaster reasons but we kept our house there and rented it to this very professor and his family. One summer we went back to do some live-in maintainance. Well! I remember seeing three long guns carefully stacked and racked in one of the rooms. A “small” rifle, a “big” rifle, and a shotgun. Turns out they all-three belonged to the early-teenage son his own self. Faculty brat–three long guns. Professor father. Educated I reckon. Gun culture. This was in 1973 or so. Just an observation.
During the Vietnam war era the scions of the uber rich and well connected didn’t serve and if they did sign up it was usually a guard unit ala Bush the Lesser. The bad thing about an all volunteer army is the politicians have no skin in the game and thus have no qualms about sending your kids off to war.
Being anti-war doesn’t make one a Liberal as several conservatives were against “Foreign Entanglements” per the Constitution. But then that’s another bit of republo-corporate media brainwashing.
Oh and by the way, there was plenty of violence, at least between our Catholic high school and the public school kids. Thing is broken noses and loose teeth aren’t life threatening. I still have a scar above my right eye.
Another thing about Obama, if he was in Chicago during the riots at the Democratic National Convention I have no doubt he would have been cheering Mayor Daley on as the cops beat the snot out of everybody.
The politicians had no qualms about sending your son off to war during Vietnam either. I have heard/read that discipline/ fragging/etc. problems got bad enough in the Army that the Army itself said: No More Draft. No more of this. No. No more.
I hope we can retire the phrase “skin in the game” fairly soon now. If it wasn’t already dripping with pus and fece before Obama used it, he has certainly covered it with pus and fece by now.
Ah, chicken hawks, they roost everywhere.
Including at crawdad holes. 😈