Then I provided source material. The war in Vietnam, the unforgettable fork in the road for males of my generation, was over and the last American soldier had flown home before all but one or two of my students were born. Even the one or two exceptions to this rule were in 1975 just children. They knew little about the war. Educated mainly by the gossipy talk shows of commercial radio and television and the tendentious columns of self-righteous political conservatives printed in the local Republican newspaper, my students associated the decade of the 1960s not as I did with the daily horror of war and the shock of political assassination but with rock and roll music, drug fun, fashion, personal liberty, and free love. Their sixties was Woodstock, mine was My Lai. The Waste Land is a war poem, Eliot’s meditation on the great war, the world war. His poem’s first section is entitled “The Burial of the Dead.” To help students to comprehend the magnitude of the war and something of the poem’s historical context, I reminded them of the devastating personal, social, political, moral, and cultural effects of the American involvement in Vietnam, in which only (!) 58,000 Americans died. Twenty million people, half of them civilian noncombatants, died in the first world war. Another thirty million, half of them civilian noncombatants, were wounded. To document this claim I photocopied and distributed statistical tables of the war’s estimated casualties (and for purposes of comparison also tables of the casualties suffered in the second world war in which an estimated forty million people died, half of them civilian noncombatants). Together we considered the genius of aerial bombing, poison gas, the machine gun. The often remarked ahistoricity of the young is no mere exaggeration, and few students were aware of the interconnections of cause and effect between World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Cambodian Revolution (to name only the largest and most terrible of the century’s violent political conflicts). I then introduced and we defined (or tried to define) and discussed terms I thought would be useful to my students in interpreting The Waste Land.

Anomie
Apocalypse
Archetype
Armageddon
Avatar
Aversion
Buddha
Christ
Delusion
Desire
Ego
Egocentrism
Enlightenment
Ethnocentrism
Evil
Heaven
Hell
Hero
Ignorance
Prayer
Prophecy
Quest
Vision
Wisdom

We discussed briefly the premises, methods, and inferences of comparative religion and anthropology, the mythic and archetypal associations and connotations of the term world war, and the belief in millennial signs which have led some persons of faith, evangelical Christians in particular, to hope or to fear that the peoples of the planet are entering upon the final days of life on earth and are approaching doomsday, the day of judgment. I took pains to emphasize that these beliefs were not necessarily my own and that I offered them for student consideration only because I thought them relevant to the intellectual climate at the time of the composition of The Waste Land. It was not unusual for our discussion of such matters to evoke in students both confessions and questions quite personal. The class included more than several skeptics and agnostics, one atheist, many nominal Christians, a majority of them Catholic, and several Protestants I would call devout, fundamentalist, or evangelical. Almost everyone was totally confused about what could and could not be said or done in school on the subject of religion.

Was this legal?

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WASTE to be continued