Why Don’t My Students Want to Talk About the War?

There are a lot of weird things about the Trump administration's war with Iran, but one of the strangest is that my students don't really want to talk about it.

This is quite unusual. Though the students at the high school where I teach are not always interested in the world around them, they usually perk up when there's the threat of war. They get the sense that they're living through an important historical event, and some of the students worry that, if things go a certain way, they're at risk of being drafted. My students usually have a lot of questions as they try to wrap their heads around the ways that their world might be changing.

I remember back in 2020, when Trump assassinated the Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani, and it felt like our two countries were on the brink of wider hostilities. Teachers held a session during extracurricular time for students to come and ask questions, and so many kids showed up that we ran out of seats.

I thought we might have the same experience when we held a similar session a few days into the current American bombing campaign in Iran, but I was surprised when a modest number of students showed up. In my classes, too, especially after the initial day of attacks, it seemed that students weren't all that interested in discussing the war.

I probed a little, trying to figure out why the kids weren't asking questions. Was it because they didn't think this was important? No, they clearly understood that war with Iran was a big deal. Was it because they didn't think it would affect them? Again, no — they had seen the higher gas prices, were worried about the impact on spring break travel plans, and had studied enough history in my class to understand that wars can quickly spiral out of control.

It eventually became clear that they understood the significance of the war, but saw no point in trying to have a logical conversation about such an irrational event.

Back when the Bush administration was building toward war in Iraq, I remember discussing the case for war with my classes. Some students thought that the administration had made a strong enough argument to justify an assault on Saddam Hussein's regime. They believed that Iraq was a brazen violator of international law and, especially in a post 9/11 world, the United States needed to take action against it. Others thought the administration's evidence was flimsy and that it had not met the high threshold necessary for war.

Even though Bush's case for war was weak and shot through with falsehoods, there was at least something to discuss. The administration had made an argument for war and presented evidence to support it. It was possible to evaluate that argument and have something resembling a rational discussion. This time around, the administration has peppered the press with a bunch of different rationales for the war (*The Atlantic* counted ten different official cases for war; *Popular Information* tallied seventeen). The abundance of arguments isn't evidence of a desire to persuade the American people; instead, Jonathan Lemire argues that it's evidence of a disinterest in convincing people to support the war.

My students were well aware that the administration had not bothered to present a coherent or consistent case for war in Iran (or, for that matter, Venezuela), so there was no point in asking why the war had happened.

I could feel them considering and then discarding other questions about the war. What's the American strategy? What are our country's goals in the war? What do the Constitution and international law say about the legality of this war? How do experts think this will play out?

But they didn't ask them. The students understood that the answer, in most cases, would not be much better than a shrug. There's no point in talking about the way that the American foreign policy decision-making apparatus is supposed to work, nor is there any reason to talk about what Congress can or should do. Everybody knows that we're at the mercy of one unpredictable man's whims.

In many ways, this war presents a slippery surface for my students (and maybe Americans in general). This is not an administration that thinks it needs to convince anyone of anything, after all. Politics, to them, is an exercise in dominance rather than persuasion. What Trump wants is a public bifurcated into two groups: a die-hard core of Trump supporters who are willing to support anything their leader does, and the rest of us, who are too distracted, disoriented, or overwhelmed to resist.

If the Trump administration had done the normal thing — with Trump making a clear case for war in his State of the Union, followed by a Congressional debate over war authorization and a prime-time TV address to the nation as the attacks began — there would have been something for Americans to get hold of. But this nonsensical war is hard to talk about, because there's so little there.

Another thing that makes this war hard to grasp is the flood of, well, content coming out of the administration.

The war is not being presented to the public in a way that invites rational thought. Rather than make a traditional address to the nation, the president kicked off the war with a middle-of-the-night social media post featuring a short video he made at his country club.

The administration has followed that with a flood of memes. James Poniewozik described them in the New York Times:

In one video, footage of explosions is intercut with a clip of SpongeBob SquarePants saying, "You want to see me do it again?" In another, football tackles and battlefield detonations are synced to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, gives a briefing to the score of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" (whose use by the Trump administration the band protested last year); munitions hit their targets to Nelly's "Here Comes the Boom."

A clip from the game "Grand Theft Auto" opens one video; a wartime scene from "Call of Duty" begins another. In yet another, munitions detonate over and over as an animated lizard — taken from an end credits scene of "Elio" — mashes a lizard icon on a touch screen and a voice repeats, "Lizard," ushering in the brainrot era of wartime propaganda.

The key word here is brainrot. There's no argument being made, no logic at all.

It's an updated version of the old Vladimir Putin-Steve Bannon strategy of "flooding the zone with shit," bombarding people with so much information of dubious usefulness that citizens simply give up and submit to authoritarians.

Now, they're flooding the zone with slop. There's too much content with too little information in it. It's all memes and references with no actual substance. There's nothing at all to think about, nothing to argue with. There's really nothing there at all.

It's hard to have a conversation about a war that doesn't make any sense, especially when the leaders who launched it aren't interested in trying to make it make sense. I don't blame my students for struggling to engage with this war. But I also can't help but wonder whether a cynical shrug, a defeated turning away from trying to make sense of what's going on, is exactly what the people running the country want from the public.

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