Miss Mary Mack

Last night, we reminisced about dumb songs we used to sing as kids. "When you're sitting in a Chevy/And you're feeling something heavy/Diarrhea!" "Joy to the world/The teacher's dead/I barbecued her head." Bathroom humor can be expected; hella, I still sing about poop. Likewise, songs about killing our nation's educators are certainly not a positive thing, but given how violence pervades our media and at that age homework, even though it consisted of little more than connecting the dots to create the Mayflower, seemed like torture, it's not all that surprising . What appalled me was the racism. Jess recalled a song about a naked dark-skinned man chasing kids. We also remembered "Me Chinese/Me play joke/Me pour pee pee in your Coke" and "Chinese [pull eyelids upwards]/Japanese [pull eyelids downwards]/Dirty knees [an oral sex reference, perhaps?]/Look at these [gesture towards nonexistent, prepubescent breasts.]"

It's amazing how quickly these ditties rolled off my tongue and how I don't remember the obvious racism ever being an issue when I was young. I remember from a young age knowing that "racism is bad," but somehow I didn't connect these songs as having such content. My second family is Chinese and I don't recall that ever being an issue to me. I accepted many a soda from them without worrying about urine contamination, that's for sure. If anything, they had to worry about me, what with my propensity to forego a toilet for a tree outdoors or my sibling who would put off tinkling as long as possible until she inevitably laughed and wet herself while sitting on the couch. Come to think of it, there should really be songs about "dumb Irish kids" who do stuff like that.