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March 18, 2008
What a great song! Jamiroquai, Mussolini, and pedagogy
What can I say - I'm thinking about the Fool in Western literature tonight. On average, we need more of them.
All this comes from preparing to teach Mussolini tomorrow. I'm not sure if he had a sense of the tragic - but I really wonder if he had a sense of the Fool. Fascism is hard to teach - starting from the contemporary evacuation of any meaning from the term other than "what American leftists think is bad" to the general idea that Fascism is nothing but Nazis-south.
The origin of words is always hard to teach - the idea that something wasn't there before someone said it confuses students to no end. There was no totalitarianism before Mussolini invented the word, if you believe the world works that way. Me, I think Lenin was well on his way to pulling it off without the vocabulary to explain himself, but then I'm an anti-Communist.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at March 18, 2008 12:40 AM