Y'all remember how it goes? ...
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall ...
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall ...
And what happened next?
Whatever it was, the BBC decided it was just too disturbing for young minds:
... in a revised version of the nursery rhyme that aired recently on the British Broadcasting Corporation's children's channel CBeebies, the tale - which first appeared in print in 1810 - no longer ends with "all the king's horses and all the king's men/Couldn't put Humpty together again". Now, a crack squadron of His Majesty's finest hard-boiled military personnel has found the recipe to "make Humpty happy again" ...
No wonder we're raising a generation of wussies. The BBC has decided the mess that resulted from Humpty's fall -- brains? egg yolks? -- was just too disturbing for young minds to comprehend, so they felt the need to rewrite the poem to protect these children from something nightmarish.
In the nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty was a really benign character. A jolly, gaily-dressed egg-shaped character perched on his wall. At least that's what I remembered. Then, I read about Humpty in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, and realized he had a dark side. A mean-spirited troll who verbally crossed swords with Alice. I can't forget those immortal words of his:
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
See, The Humpster (Dumpster?) wrote the book on modern politics, and on modern news reporting. Not to mention our modern thinking: Hang the facts, the truth is whatever I want it to be. And that thinking is an elemental reason why we're so screwed up, but that's another rant for another day.
It was that other side of Humpty Dumpty that disturbed me as a child, not his horrible accident. But then I came to realize his falling off the wall was really no great loss.
The truth is out: Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
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