Wasn’t Obama going to kill all the irony? Well, wasn’t he? We were going to enter an age in which partisanship would end, the elite would inherit the earth, tofu would taste fucking awesome, and no one would ever dare make oblique, self-referential sport of well-known and much-beloved kiddie songs.

Yet, unlike that whole public option thingamhoochie, irony has yet to go the way of the dodo bird.

Thus, from the hipster scum over at McSeeney’s I can give you a short work of fiction satirizing a mother (or a child) who may be taking the classic children’s songs a wee bit too seriously:

No, you can’t put a person in a pumpkin shell. Really, I’m starting to worry about you.

Is the old man snoring? Or is he in a coma? Because if he bumped his head and can’t get up we need to call someone. And it’s going to be tricky since it’s raining. And it’s pouring.

Well nobody asked you to carry a banjo all the way from Alabama.

I don’t care how many of them there are, get the monkeys out of the bedroom!”

So am I perhaps enjoying a quick read at the expense of my son, one in which, in this case, the irony is directed at a poor, defenseless, tot?

Forfend, I would never.

No, what I had in mind was my son JP, this very evening, correcting me as I meandered my way through the lyrics of “Twinkle, Twinkle” as I put him to bed. (bath, book, song, lights out. Is there any other way?). You mean it isn’t “Like a siren in the blight”? or “Like a tyrant on the right”? Really?

I mean, come on, isn’t he missing the point?