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What is that old rhyme? Boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails? But girls are sugar and spice and everything nice?

I am convinced that that nursery rhyme has has become one of our cultural artifacts not because it is descriptive, but because it is useful as part of the socialization process.

As our other child socialization processes like two parent families and stories about heroic or virtuous people break down, it is becoming increasingly evident that unsocialized females are extremely vicious and mean, especially to each other.

The reason adults didn't used to turn out like animals, as so many seem to do now, is that we used to teach children things like "little girls are made of sugar and spice." Absent this lesson, it turns out they're not.

This whole issue of breaking and smashing every form of child socialization we used to have -- from two-parent families, to schools that taught things like morals and ethics, to having spotless heroes like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to look up to -- is part of a truly evil Gramscian-style plot to make the whole society fall apart. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people would want to do this. Their own kids are going to have to live in the mess they make. And an ugly mess it's going to be.

it is useful as part of the socialization process.

I agree with your core idea, but that nursery rhyme compliments only half of our society, and that unrealistically. Little girls are just as vicious by nature as little boys, who are not nearly the monsters tradition would have us believe they are. The "liberation" of women has allowed -- nay, encouraged -- them to seek their own levels of depravity, as though somehow THAT was the image to which they should aspire, rather than an elevated sense of propriety and domestic excellence.

In other words, little girls gave up the sugar and spice, which was fine since it was pretty unrealitic to begin with. But they gave it up in favor of snakes and snails and puppy dog tails. So now we've got an entire society comprised of reptiles, mollusks, and the caudal appendages of domesticated canines.

-- is part of a truly evil Gramscian-style plot to make the whole society fall apart. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people would want to do this. Their own kids are going to have to live in the mess they make. And an ugly mess it's going to be.

I guess certain "elite" members think that a broken-down society will be easier to rule. They don't necessarily think that their own offspring will be in the middle of it -- they might think they will be secure in guarded enclaves.

The last time Western civilization broke down was after the fall of the Roman Empire. Then we had a "nobility" who were lived in luxurious "gated communities" (castles), protected by armed guards, and where the peasantry was forbidden access to arms, and literacy was the exclusive perogative of the elite.

The problem the old nobility faced was that they weren't inherently smarter than the people they ruled, so as soon as civilization re-established itself in the 1400's, the old nobility were eventually overthrown. But they sure lived well for the thousand years before that...