Know Your (Fascist) Onion

For the second semester in a row, I'm teaching a writing class using depictions of terrorism in film and literature. But this semester has been a rude awakening for me as I realize the shocking lack of knowledge my students have about current and historical events. Just last week, I realized (after asking them) that at least half of my students had never heard of Guantanamo Bay or what the United States has been doing there for the past five years. On another occasion, I found myself having to explain the experiments performed on African-American men at Tuskegee. And last Thursday, a student interrupted my discussion of fascism as it is presented in V for Vendetta. She did not recognize the term.

Most of my students were, I realize with a shiver at my advancing years, only junior high students in 2001. But does that excuse what I can only assume to be a willful ignorance about what has been done in their names in the ensuing five years? It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to dismiss statements such as these, which I read in a student paper this evening:

"Rock and roll didn't come around until Elvis made his first song. Before him was only country music."

"You have to understand that this song [Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A."] is saying that we went to war, and committed rape while we were there. These women get pregnant [and] give birth without the father around."

"Vietnam was before my time, but from what I understand we were helping and didn't have to be in that country at all. We were sticking our nose in affairs when we shouldn't have."

All of the preceding statements come from a paper that criticizes the Dixie Chicks for making what the student calls "extremely unpatriotic" statements about George W. Bush. The student concludes:

"I think that people will still take chances [by] making stupid comments in public. . . I feel that bands [giving] their opinions of politics and taking the chance of being 'dixie chicked' [the student's term for having one's career ruined because of negative public reaction to unpatriotic statements] should just shut up and play the music that made them popular."

Here is a student who knows nothing of the background of the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (or the history of popular music, especially the kind performed by black folk), who advocates blind patriotism, and would curtail the right of free speech to entertainers. This student's sentiments are not unusual among his classmates, most of whom have (I assume) graduated from high schools in rural areas of the southwestern United States.

But I will give him credit for this: he knows a thing or two about fascism, and is a model student for the next New Order, whose soundtrack will be provided by our Wagner for the 21st century, Elvis Presley.