Bread, Freedom and Halftime Sickles?

Workers of the world unite at the 50-yard line?  Apparently, that’s the tune played recently at a halftime show by the New Oxford High School Marching Band whose ” St. Petersburg: 1917″  theme was replete with students dancing with red flags, hammers and sickles!

No, I can’t make this up, and, no, comrades, this isn’t another alliterative assault on Czars of Zinfandel and their PLCB perestroika plan.   But you might stay thirsty for freedom after reading the explanation from the school’s superintendent who fought off criticism, saying, “It is what it is. I understand people look at something and choose how to interpret that, and I’m just very sorry that it wasn’t looked at as just a history lesson.”

Yes, it is what it is indeed and actually, ma’am, you gave us a tremendous opportunity to deliver a history message here.  That composer you were celebrating, Dmitri Shostakovich, was a devout communist, member of the Supreme Soviet and BFF’s with Trotsky’s chief of staff, Mikhail Tukhachevsky. But never mind the revisionist history or attempts to whitewash figures behind the slaughter of millions of people whose only crime was to reject collectivism.  It’s about the music, right? 

So if that’s true, why go there?  Why not teach some history through music that educates about great American heroes or rails against slavery?  After all, your school sits just a just a few miles from the battlefields of Gettysburg.

On the heels of deplorable test results for Pennsylvania’s public schools, this cannot be seen as anything less than a sign of poor times and poor representations of the very freedoms that allow for poor judgment.  Until Pennsylvania parents can trigger their own judgments on how schools and programs should run, stay tuned for more off-key assaults on freedom, comrades.