Via Futility Closet, we learn that the four-year-old son Junior—called Tony—of humorist, critic author (an
auxiliary member of the Algonquin Roundtable) and eventual editor of the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section, Wolcott Gibbs, composed a defiant chant intoned one evening while taking a bath. With the opening and refrain, his father took down the words with the opening and refrain: He will just do nothing at all.
He will just sit there in the noonday sun.
And when they speak to him, he will not answer them,
Because he does not care to.
Folk singer and activist Pete Seeger (previously) adapted the lines into a song, finding the opposition highly relatable.
