All Fall Down

There is a persistent story that the children's nursery rhyme "Ring Around The Rosie" isn't a sweet innocent bit of doggerel. The story is that the poem is actually about the black plague. The 'pocket full of posies' is supposed to signify the carrying of pleasant smelling flowers in hopes of warding off the disease, etc. The last line, 'we all fall down' means that at the end, the plague takes you anyway.

Pretty depressing, isn't it?

Snopes doesn't buy into that particular theory of the meaning of the rhyme, and has a lengthy debunking that has been up on their website for a long time. The story, however, persists. I just saw it repeated on a new show on the Discovery channel. The persistence of of some urban legends is astonishing.

Right now there is an absolute frenzy going on in the blogospere and in the MSM over the latest Scandal Of The Week™ that will bring the administration down. It is, of course just the latest in a long, long, long string of these things and will likely end up as the others have - nowhere. But let's say the angry left gets it's way and they bring down the President. What then? Why President Cheney is sworn in. Then the angry left will go after Cheney in hopes of bringing him down too (but it's getting close to the next election by then, probably not enough time). But they will continue attacking, regardless. All real progress will come to a standstill, congress will not be able to get any worthwhile legislation passed.

And in the end will accomplish what? The one absolute guaranteed outcome is quite simple: They will have ensured that the next President WILL be subjected to the exact same treatment. In other words they will have ensured that no President of the United States will ever be able to govern effectively. They will have turned the electoral process on it's ear and made any election subject to endless revision. They will have established the tyranny of the mob.

And we will all fall down.

Other Links to this Post

1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » I Spoke Too Soon — Tuesday, 11 April , 2006 @ 11:32 am

2. Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » An Age Of Insanity — Thursday, 14 September , 2006 @ 8:49 pm