“Pop Goes the Weasel”

 The Breakdown-

Pop Goes the Weasel--a deceptively chipper little tune masking a story of constant harassment, bullying, and abrupt termination. In the version I grew up with our scene is a mulberry bush, the sort of shrubbery one might associate with berries, jam, and innocence. Instead, it becomes the setting for an increasingly unhinged game of cat-and-mouse--well, monkey-and-weasel, but the dynamic is the same.

The monkey, either through ignorance or basic cruelty, believes he's just having a little fun. He thinks he's in control, thinks the chase is mutual, harmless. That’s the tragedy of it--he fails to understand the weary weasel just wants to be left alone until it’s too late. The monkey circles, he giggles, he thinks he’s winning... then pop! No warning. No grand finale, no final villainous monologue. Just the cold, sharp punctuation of reality asserting itself, as a fatal game of F.A.F.O.

Can you really blame the weasel? He just wants to live in peace. Perhaps he just wants to put his Special Forces past behind him and live unmolested like a hermit in his isolated cabin by the mulberry bush. He’s a silent, stoic, PTST afflicted mustelid that is probably packing heat.

It is an earworm that does teach a valuable lesson: never assume it’s just a game when you’re incessantly harassing someone smarter, more cunning, and far more capable of violence than you.

                              (Raven’s Re-Write)

All around the mulberry bush,

The monkey chased the weasel,

The monkey thought it was all in fun,

Pop! Pop! Pop! Goes the weasel.