Morning announcements

[maeve66]

These are read every morning by "leadership students", e.g. Student Council members. This morning's history nugget was that X number of years ago (I don't recall what they said, because I wasn't listening until the following gem) "15,000 refugees left the kum-YOON-ist country of Cambodia, SUB-squinet to...." blah blah blah I stopped listening to marvel at those pronunciations, especially of communist. Oh, ancient history. Oh, students born in 1996, 1995, or 1994.

Comments

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I used to read the morning announcements. I wasn't on student council, though.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I would make a thousand dollar bet that you never said 'kumYOONist', though.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Nope. Worst mistake I ever made was when someone came in the 'booth' and started bugging me I accidentally pronounced "corps" like it's spelled.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Maybe you were being ironic about the Marine Corpse?

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I think it was flag corpse.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

That's just as good! Better!!

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Oh -- and what's up with the hand? Have you gone in to Student Health, yet? Cat bites, man, no foolin' around.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Not yet. Need to take shower.

[florence-craye.livejournal.com]

...

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Also, in middle school, I pretty much felt that being on Student Council was tantamount to being not the petty but the big bourgeoisie, and it took me quite some acrobatic rationalization to allow me to crush on a boy who was on the Student Council -- it helped that his mother was from the Italian CP and his father, the German CP (Oooh! A Eurocommunist and a Stalinist! That was like double the taboo attraction for a Trot like me, at age 14). Of course, given his parentage, Student Council membership was all the more a betrayal of his presumed class politics...

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Also, I'm pretty sure I got both of these cartoon icons from you, by the way.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

Not that one. The Hello Mao, though, yeah, I made that one.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

This is like when a student of mine asked if I remembered the Korean war.

Dude, I don't even remember Vietnam. I was three when the US pulled out.

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

I was 7; and then 9 when Saigon fell. But my parents woke me up to come out to the living room and watch the coverage on TV, in jubilation, basically.

The thing is, though, I *would* say I remember the Vietnam War, despite being so little. I remember being afraid of all the army green trucks, in Madison, being horrified by that famous photo of the woman who'd been napalmed, worrying everytime I heard a plane overhead, going to demonstrations and helping make signs...

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

LOL. I definitely knew what Communism was by around that age, but I grew up in Wacky Liberal Land. (No one at my high school joined the Young Democrats Club or whatever it was called because they preferred the Socialist Club, which had another name but which was clearly the Socialist Club.)

I think (or rather, I'm hoping) that it was a case of them never having heard the word rather than not having a clue of who the Communists were/are. That still happens to me sometimes. I'd never heard the word "fracas" before about a week ago and I was shocked when I heard a newscaster pronounce it "FRAY-cas" because I'd always thought it was "FRAH-cas."

[maeve66.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have a reader's vocabulary, too. And I think I would have said "frackus"... or maybe (ha!) "frahcah"!

How old are you, though? And where is wacky liberal land? East Coast?

[shanrina.livejournal.com]

I'm 21, so for me it's still in the realm of history, but not quite as far off.

And yes, wacky liberal land is the East Coast. DC suburbs in MD. We had a lot of teachers who had been jailed for civil disobedience in the 60s, and IIRC my US History teacher actually set some sort of NC State Supreme Court precedent for conscientious objectors. He told us stories about his time in jail, too. :D

So yes, I have renamed it wacky liberal land.