One of my lesson plans back when I was an adjunct at SLCC in the 2010s, was that I would divide the class in two, and ask group one to watch the official music video for Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” while group two followed along reading the lyrics. Despite the generational divide, this was a song with which all my millennial students were long familiar, having heard it at many a 4th of July fireworks show growing up, in a state where “patriotism” was considered a self-evident virtue.

After playing through the video, I’d ask group one what the song was about, to which they’d inevitably ramble something about pride in being born an American or some such–I mean, what else is there? It’s right there in the freakin’ title.

I’d then turn to group two and ask group two what the song lyrically was about, and it was always a delight to see my student’s eyes bug-out, or giggle uncomfortably, or jaws drop, as they for the first time ever read carefully the words to a song they had heard a million times before. The opening line, after all, is “Born down in a dead man’s town/The first kick I took was when I hit the ground…” The narrative that develops during the verses is that of a poor young man in a dead-end town constantly getting jumped and beaten up; who joins the military not out of any sense of deep-rooted patriotism or love of country, but solely to avoid prison time and assault charges the one time he tried fighting; who loses his best friend in Vietnam; who can’t find a job when he gets home; who, ten years after the war ended, stares down “the shadow of the penitentiary” where he may still end up after all, because he ain’t got “Nowhere to run, ain’t got nowhere to go.”

That is, when he repeatedly belts out “I was born in the USA!” for the chorus, he is not in fact celebrating the American dream, but grieving the betrayal of the same. His is a shout of anguish , not jubilation. It is an incredibly depressing song–and we play this at fireworks shows! It’s Springsteen’s most popular song! Ronald Reagan used it as his stage-entrance music in Election ’84 without a shred of self-awareness, till Springsteen sent him a cease-and-desist letter–and Reagan still won 49 out of 50 states, including New Jersey! This song is a dire reminder of the importance of paying attention to what the words actually say, not what you want them to say.

I had similar success teaching this lesson in predominantly-white Iowa for my PhD program, and again when I resumed adjuncting at Utah Valley University. I then landed one of those all-too-rare tenure-track positions at a junior college in New Jersey–Springsteen’s home-state no less!–where I quickly stopped teaching this lesson entirely.

The student body at my college, you see, is overwhelmingly Gen Z, working-class immigrants, refugees, and minorities struggling against multi-generational poverty traps, which meant that: 1) they tended to be much bigger Hip-Hop than Rock fans, so had no prior familiarity with nor commitment to the Boss; 2) as Hip-Hop fans, they have much more experience with dissecting and deciphering lyrics (their rhetorical analyses last year of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” for example, was graduate level); and 3) the idea that the American dream has been repeatedly betrayed was no great revelation to them. They were already living it. They were themselves living in a dead man’s town, struggling for work in the shadow of the penitentiary. Hence, the lesson always fell flat with them. I had to find other ways to teach them to pay attention to what the words actually say.

Because it’s such an infuriatingly common problem! I go to Church for example, and I’ll sometimes speak up during some Sunday school class discussion, where I point out that Christ told the rich young man to sell all that he has and follow me; and I’ve lost track of the number of people who try to argue that that counsel was specific only to the rich young man–to try him with the one thing that meant most to him, individually–utterly ignoring that the very next verse features Christ very famously saying that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. This is a very unambiguous passage! You actually have to work hard to misinterpret it! Yet how many of us do so all the same.

Or the way folks sometimes tell you to bear your sufferings silently, with the “patience of Job,” even though in the actual Book of Job, he clearly complains to God, loudly and angrily, for 37 chapters straight. Or how other folks will quote “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” to justify punitive prison sentences, even though Christ explicitly said not to do that anymore in the Sermon on the Mount. Or how the number of people who finger-wagged to me growing up that “the ten commandments are not multiple choice”, all somehow found a way to justify why “Thou shalt not kill,” or “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not bare false witness,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery”–or even the most basic commandment of all, “Thou shalt love one another”–didn’t apply in this or that case.

This is all directly relevant to my composition classes, because I am keenly aware of all the research which indicates that most people, when presented with new information that contradicts their beliefs, do not then change their mind, but only double-down, dig in their heels deeper, dismiss the new evidence as “fake news,” as “biased,” or simply ignore it entirely. It sometimes causes me a bit of an existential crisis, because my department requires me to teach at least one argumentative essay a semester, even as I’m fully cognizant of the face that in the vast majority of cases, argumentation simply does not work. As the Bruce Springsteen lesson demonstrated, even if you have all the most articulate and eloquent and well-reasoned arguments in the world, if they don’t hear you correctly in the first place, it will all be for naught.

Not that this is new information: in fact I, like most RMs, learned this exact lesson on my mission. It’s not words that convince; it was never words that could convince. That requires something outside of discourse, something that surppases all understanding, a still, small voice that doesn’t say anything in particular, and yet somehow still says everything—