There are people who don't know who President Nixon was? Did they go to school?
Sadly, the answer is probably "yes" to both questions.
I just remembered a good one.
Seven years ago, I taught a course on world history in the second half of the 20th century.
I began my lecture on international terrorism in the 1970s by referencing 9/11, and then saying: "But of course, this wasn't the first major attack on the USA by international terrorists. The first such attack took place during Super Bowl X, in 1976." Then, I paused, and asked : "You've all heard about that, right?"
My students all looked at each other, confused. "You haven't heard about that?" I said. No, they said.
So I explained how, in January 1976, aided by a deranged former US Navy blimp pilot, members of the Palestinian Black September organization rigged a shrapnel bomb onto the gondola of a blimp. And how they tried to use this blimp-bomb to attack the crowd at the Orange Bowl in Miami during Super Bowl X, but were stopped at the last minute, with the help of the Israeli Mossad.
I paused again. "Are you sure you've never heard of this?"
No, they said. "Well," I said, "that's because it never happened. I've just been giving you the plot for the novel
Black Sunday by Thomas Harris, who later went on to write
The Silence of the Lambs. It was made into a feature film in 1977."
My students were outraged that I had fooled them. My point, of course, was to show that terrorism was not a new phenomenon; that it was a big deal as far back as the 1970s; and that, to a certain extent, people were imagining 9/11 long before it happened.
But I didn't expect the
whole class to fall for my bullshit. I thought for sure one or two of them would have seen this movie on late-night TV, or something.
