After the show last night, I was talking to a friend who teaches English at a local high school. He was complaining about having to teach Arthur Miller's The Crucible next spring. I nodded my head in sympathy: without question, it's the most annoying piece of literature ever written.
Now, I'm not saying that the writing's bad--hell, it's Milton compared to something like All My Sons (in which Miller forces the lead character to speak the title of the goddamned play). No, it's the setup that drives me crazy, particularly the maddening "mob mentality" that drives the piece. As an audience member, it's unbearably frustrating to have to sit there and know the truth of the matter (since the writer's handed it to us on a silver platter) while uninformed, witch-obsessed, somberly clad townsfolk run around the stage for two hours accusing everyone of sleeping with Satan. I can only assume Mr. Miller wanted to be absolutely, positively certain that we identified with his protagonists. Mission accomplished, Art.
In lieu of focusing directly on the play, I suggested to my friend that it might be more interesting to teach The Crucible as a kind of history lesson, devoting the bulk of classtime to the historical origins of the play--specifically, the McCarthy hearings. He could talk to his students about The Wooster Group's performance of LSD: Just the High Points, which essentially deconstructed the play and the hearings and the counterculture of the 1950s...but then, the title alone could be enough to earn him a reprimand from the principal. ...Well, maybe the class could talk about John Ashcroft and his recent McCarthy-esque pronouncements.... No, it's not a great example of "group think," but there's plenty of fodder for discussion there.
Today, however, I'm greeted with something even more terrifying and bizarre and ripe for debate in my friend's classroom: the UN has apparently decided that the child sex trade is "a form of terrorism." Go ahead--you don't believe me, read the damn thing. I defy you to fully explain how "child pornographers" can possibly be synonymous with "suicide bombers." If they're just being logically and semantically lazy, assuming that everyone who's not in complete control of his own life is somehow being terrorized...well, that's a can of worms they probably shouldn't be opening--unless they want to go to the trouble of explaining the difference between their version of terrorism and, say, economic terrorism or cultural terrorism. Like McCarthy, they're using "terrorist" as a convenient label to villify everyone and everything to which they object.
Ladies and gentlemen, let the terrorphilia begin....
