Jennifer Dikes

When I hear about an internet meme, it usually means that it is beyond over. So when I hear about Rickrolling, it was long finished as a phenomenon.

(In case you’re more behind the times than me, according to MentalFloss:’ “to Rickroll” someone is to sucker them into clicking on a particularly tempting link, which then turns out to be the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Hit counts for the Astley video online indicate that between 13 and 18 million people have been Rickrolled thus far — and in an amazing twist, the phenomenon has begun to spread (virally?) to the real world. Public events like basketball games, local newscasts, even Scientologists have been Rickrolled. On April Fool’s Day 2008, YouTube Rickrolled the world by making every one of their front page videos a link to “Never Gonna Give You Up”.)

So, this old meme has been updated and gone political. Barack Obama…like you’ve never heard him before! Welcome to the BarackRoll. And watch John McCain get BarackRoll’d!!. I assume that this is totally done since I know about it.

I love this show. If you don’t know it, you’ll get the spirit by taking this Halloween quiz.

OK, after completing super history nerd activity number one, I moved to George Mason University in northern Virginia to take another, two week long, course on the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s. These are my compatriots at a minor league baseball game:

Besides watching baseball, we spent two weeks examining the events leading to the end of the Communist system in eastern Europe (and its continuation in the People’s Republic of China). The work was based around the website Making the History of 1989 put together at George Mason. Taking the opportunity to focus on this fairly narrow topic was really exciting. I also got to help update the site – I found some background information about one of the documents on the website. The site has not been updated with this information as of yet…when it is, you’ll see it here.

The final day of the workshop was quite interesting, although it did not blow me away the same way that day 3 did. The topic on the syllabus was the Arab-Israeli conflict. The presenter, Aaron David Miller, was a part of the group in the State department that worked on US policy on this topic. He’s recently written a book on his experiences that sounds quite interesting. Rather than provide a summary or explanation of the problem or US policy development, his talk was more of a meditation on the possible future of the problem, possible avenues for further negotiations, and the pitfalls of American involvement and blindnesses to the issue. The discussion really helped me to frame some thoughts about current events, not so much about the history that I teach.

Overall, the experience of these workshops was an amazing and fantastic, though quick, crash course in all sorts of ideas and histories. Next year’s seniors will get a completely different class from previous years…for good or for ill.