Holy Week and the Perils of Irony
An old college buddy dug this up from his basement, scanned it and sent it along. It originally ran in the Observer, Notre Dame's student newspaper, on May 11, 1970.
This was during the Student Strike, when schools around the nation shut down in protest of the invasion of Cambodia. The Kent State shootings had been May 4, and Notre Dame (or at least my department -- there were a lot of meetings that week!) had taken the position of allowing students to take their grade at the time of the strike, take an incomplete or finish the semester.
There were a lot of speeches being made and I was once again in the uncomfortable position of opposing the war, opposing the incursion which a lot of people felt brought with it the risk of Chinese intervention and of having high school friends serving in Southeast Asia. For me, the answers were not as black-and-white as they were for students whose high school buddies were also attending universities where correct answers were either one thing or the other.
So I wrote this piece, with the headline signaling my approval of John Lennon's approach of "you better free your mind instead." I don't know how my fellow students took it, but my department head told me he was at some parish council meeting when someone came in waving it and shouting about what they were teaching kids at that college of his.
We both laughed, but it was an early lesson in how irony is often lost on readers and you're better off just stating what you think without trying to make them think in turn.
However, it being Easter and relevant to the Scripture being parodied, I post it here for those of my readers who enjoy thinking. A higher percentage, I think, than I had back then or in any of my paying venues since.
(Click for a readable version. Please remember that, in them thar days, your hard copy was typed into the system by someone whose spelling skills might not be as good as your own.)
2 comments:
...having high school friends serving in Southeast Asia. For me, the answers were not as black-and-white as they were for students whose high school buddies were also attending universities where correct answers were either one thing or the other.
At that very same time, April of 1970, I was a first-year grad student at UC Berkeley, and our state's governor had just said that he thought that a "bloodbath" might be a good way of dealing with students' objections to their elders' ways of doing things. The smell and sting of tear gas frequently hung in the leaves on campus, and many of our little astronomy graduate class meetings were held off-campus, in the safety of faculty homes.
We even took our first, written round of our preliminary exams in two profs' houses. The guy who sat next to me for that exam, one of my two lifelong good friends thereafter from grad school, was going through a very bad case of torn sympathies. He, like almost all of us, was fervently anti-war and vocal about it -- but his father, a pilot, had been missing in action in southeast Asia for four years. (His dad's remains were finally recovered in Laos in 1994.) My friend went on to a brilliant career, but was always hounded by his conflicts, and sank under the weight of alcoholism to his death in 2007.
Our allegiance to the anti-war movement -- or anything else -- could never be complete. I think we, and especially he, would have had a good laugh over your piece had it made its way west across the Rockies to Berkeley.
I'm sure not lettin' you speak at any commencement!!
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