Tortured rhymes, sicko minds

There ain't nothin' like bad poetry. Especially when it's written by teenagers, when it smacks of anti-semitism and when it's distributed to schools across the UK in a book called Great Minds.

What is this poem? - it's called Jews.

And it goes a little like this.

"Jews are here, Jews are there, Jews are almost everywhere,
filling up the darkest places, evil looks upon their faces
....

Make them take many paces for being one of the worst races,
on their way to a gas chamber, where they will sleep in their
manger.

... I'll be happy Jews have died."

I heard the whole thing on the radio last night - more of the same, I'm afraid to say. Though there is a line somewhere about three quarters of the way through the poem which reads something like "I am Adolf Hitler". So that's supposed to make it all ok, you see, because the poem's author - one 14 year old Gideon Taylor is supposed to be putting himself in the mind of Herr Hitler. You see he's empathising with an historical character, it's part of the new style of history teaching in the UK.

Here's more on it in an Associated Press story via Haaretz.com and at Discarded Lies there's a post called "Who is Gideon Taylor?" that raises that very question and quotes Julie Birchill, a British columnist, quite heavily. (Julie's piece is well worth a read). And Labour MP Louise Ellman has got in the act criticising the publication of this poem.

But the publishers have defended the poem's inclusion in the book:

Young Writers editor Steve Twelvetree, who also edited the book, said the
poem was included as it illustrated how the writer was able to empathise with
the infamous Nazi Fuehrer.

Twelvetree told the Telegraph: "From Gideon's poem and my knowledge of the
National Curriculum Key Stage 3 his poem shows a good use of technical writing
and he has written his poem from the perspective of Adolf Hitler.”

Well, I don't have a problem per se with using empathy exercises as a way of teaching History. Nor do I have a problem with trying to get into the mind of a Nazi in a bid to understand how such a thing could happen. In Bill Brown's English class at West End Jr High in Nashville, we all had to empathise with an historical character and compose a little short story. The example he read out in class was from one of his old high school students, who had "empathised" with a Nazi concentration camp guard. It was a powerful piece of writing, and yes it had stuff in there about hating Jews, but it was done in such a way that it wasn't sympathetic and it captured the level of darkness in a soul who could murder fellow human beings on an industrial scale. It was brilliant.

But this poem is just unremittingly bad, chirpy little greeting card verse about gassing Jews. It doesn't really belong in a book to be distributed to schools across the UK.

_________

Here are some thoughts on this by other bloggers:

Dangerously Subversive Dad
Points of Jew
Little Green Footballs