On Ms. Muffet
Rogers, Tommy W
On Ms. Muffet Little Miss Muffet Sat on a tuffet, Eating her curds and whey ... Those afflicted with in-group Americanism feel that Little Miss Muffet was frightened away because a spider sat...
...Muffet," Chefung feels, "was seeking to turn back the clock of twentieth-century industrialization, back to an era when people sat on tuffets, ate whey, and handled international problems unilaterally...
...Social psychiatrist Rodbart Coals added "Muffet's actions indicate that she is emotionally unstable, immature, hostile, and mentally unbalanced...
...Fraudulio concluded that Miss Muffet's actions conform to the basic pattern exhibited by the authoritarian...
...Professor Festus Grunt, director of the Authoritarian Personality Evaluation Institute, a National Institute of Mental Health funded interdisciplinary group, has countered this ethnocentric mythology with the view that Miss Muffet's suspicion, distrust, and panic can be more clearly understood as the result of Muffet's effort to maintain integrity and self-esteem at the expense of others...
...Political scientist Wing Wong Chefung stated that from a symbolic projection perspective the menace of cosmopolitanism and sweeping change which Miss Muffet interpreted as an affront to her security and status were projected as an irrational fear, suspiciousness, and distrust of spiders...
...And why not a coalition government to share the tuffet...
...Such ultra-reactionary rightist qualities are often the result of arrested psycho-sexual maturation, Coals explained...
...Coals noted that it is probable Miss Muffet was a Goldwater supporter since she demonstrated the pathological prejudice and unconscious visceral hatreds that attracted twenty-seven million unbalanced persons to the Arizona Senator...
...To the extent this preferential position is threatened, there is a presumption of foul play...
...Noted political scientist Thomas F. Petticoat observed that the simplistic, impulsive, unreflective qualities evident in Muffetism (a term coined by political pornography expert Herb Rott) identify the "authoritarian personalities" who tend to project their own inner problems onto persons and events outside themselves...
...Such persons rarely substitute for patriotic intuition the nostrums of we Intellectual Messiahs, he lamented...
...Were Miss Muffet more willing to accommodate the legitimate aspirations of spiders, he suggested, she would not have taken such illiberal, unilateral escapist action...
...Their rigidity inclines them to stereo-typic thinking...
...Petticoat noted that such a person perceives every social encounter as dangerous, interprets every provocation as threatening...
...I mean, how did she know the spider's intentions were not peaceful...
...And who was Miss Muffet to consume whey that should have been nationalized by the spider for the benefit of all the people...
...With varying degrees of self-righteousness and inflexibility, persons bred by conventionality and fundamentalist religious convictions see society as a neatly ordered hierarchy in which their group occupies a select place...
...Sociologist Antonio Fraudulio pointed out that the person who is politically and economically conservative usually comes from a home that represents a prototype of the authoritarian world...
...Her actions indicate that "she not only accepted the national paranoid delusions of persecution and megalomania that attracted WASPS, small businessmen, rural Midwesterners, and other churls to McCarthyism, but she has pronounced delusions of persecution in regard to her own person...
...Chefung pointed out that Miss Muffet demonstrated the typical paranoid reaction of the marginally insecure person that becomes transformed into a conspiracy belief...
...Her projection of her own fears, hostilities, and inadequacies prevented her from displaying statesmanlike qualities, of seeking bold new approaches...
...Anyway, let's look at it from the spider's viewpoint...
...Those afflicted with in-group Americanism feel that Little Miss Muffet was frightened away because a spider sat down beside her...
...Tommy W. Rogersy W. Rogers...
...Implicit in Muffet's attitude, Grunt explained, is a strong distrust of those who are different and therefore alien...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
