Apparently over at Health Canada they’re feeling sick over a nursery rhyme turned health warning turned PR debacle. And while their botched effort to have Jack and Jill promote condoms might look like yet another assault on the innocence of childhood, it seems to me it was primarily a crime against bad poetry.
On the whole I’m against dragging the classics into the sexual revolution. Including its failing battle against microbes. But since every anglophone (yes, they even stubbed their toe on the linguistic matters that obsess Official Ottawa, while tying themselves in knots over every kind of inclusion except that of proper metre and scheme) knows the rhyme, I can see its utility.
Many years ago when I was at grad school in Austin there was an anti-litter slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas” which I thought was a bit too cute until I heard a girl in front of me at a football game, as she put down a piece of paper to sit on a dirty bench, tell her friend “Remind me to pick that up when we leave. Don’t let me mess with Texas.”
So OK. Have Jack and Jill be naughty but clean. The real question is, how can you take a simple, beloved, very well-known poem, utterly mangle both rhyme and rhythm, and have a bunch of expensive managers all go “Nailed it!”?
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See Also:
(1) Trudeau asks for plan to cut high citizenship fees imposed under Harper government
(2) Playing politics with the ‘R-word’ as Canada’s economy sputters
