Scared Straight

Mr. Miacca

Click to read this fable While I had my childhood story book out for the post below, I thumbed through it.  Not that I needed evidence that Mr. Miacca was the story I gravitated to most often as a toddler, but the grubby little finger prints all over the page provide it.  It's  the one my sister and I requested be read to us most often because ... well, it scared hell out of us.  Anyway, this is where I play anthropologist.  Over the years I've been struck by how old fairy tales and nursery rhymes have been bowdlerized in order to spare Dick's and Sue's precious sensibilities, or cause them to question the liberal dogma "I'm okay; you're okay." From earliest childhood these stories were tools society used to reinforce the notion of  right, wrong and consequences. From time to time I'll reprint some of these as reminder of  those quaint times.