Blog 9: American Idot

Every time we learn about the United States’ involvement in Latin America I am always surprised to discover how much information has been kept out in our history classes.  For example, most of our history books don’t even include the Haitian Revolution.  While reading Chomsky’s book on the Cuban revolution, I learned a lot about the United States that I did not know before. Previous to this book, when I thought of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I thought that Cuba was wrong to bring the missiles in and threaten to attack us for no reason. What they did not teach us, however, was that there was a reason. The United States was essentially using terrorism against Cuba and they were merely trying to protect themselves from us. The United States sabotaged and destroyed sugar fields by bombing them and crashing planes over them. They were involved in bombing ships that entered Cuban ports and bombing or destroying Cuban mines. They also set fire to Cuban stores. All of these acts of terrorism and arson that killed many Cubans were done in secret. The U.S denied their involvement. Not to mention the many failed attempts to assassinate Castro.  As students, we were kept in the dark about all of this. Instead, we portrayed Cuba as the bad guy. This is just one of the many examples of a time where we covered up things that we did that were embarrassing and then portrayed the other country as the bad one. The song “American Idiot” by Green Day kind of reminds me of how we tell our history. Here are the lyrics:

GREEN DAY LYRICS

"American Idiot"

Don't wanna be an American idiot.
Don't want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind f*** America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Well maybe I'm the faggot America.
I'm not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along to the age of paranoia.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

Don't want to be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information age of hysteria.
It's calling out to idiot America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Where everything isn't meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We're not the ones who're meant to follow.
For that's enough to argue.

It may be kind of a stretch but I think there are some similarities. First of all, in a way, we can be “idiots”. We only know history from our biased point of view. We listen to what we are taught in school and in our history books and don’t question it. We don’t bother to get the other side of the story. We are influenced by the media and propaganda that is put out to sway our views to see things the way people in power want us to see them, “one nation controlled by the media”. I’m sure they did not put pictures of us bombing the Cuban sugar plantations up on the news and in newspapers. But I bet they put negative things about Castro and how the Cubans and Soviets were bad during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This created a lot of apprehension, “welcome to a new kind of tension”, “Sing along to the age of paranoia”. In a broader sense, I think that by trying to intervene in the politics and economies of many Latin American countries, we did much more harm than good. We only created enemies in the end and in a way, alienated ourselves from them. For example, Cuba wants nothing to do with us. We have, in a way, created an alien nation by trying to control other countries. Green Day may have been just trying to promote individualism through this song, but in my opinion, it can also talk about the way our history is portrayed to our citizens.