History and Idiots

Here is a quick anecdote that is a perfect example of the old truism "those who don't LEARN from history are doomed to repeat it"

And now...straight from a friend of mine:

the winner for this year's most idiotic quote by a bookstore customer: "My daughter loved that Anne Frank book. What else did she write?"

OWOWOWOWOWOWOW...FUCK THAT HURTS !!OWW!! *such frightful ignorance is painful to me..*

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a wild assed guess. The customer that asked this is probably about my age, maybe a little older, with a school aged teenaged daughter. I say teenaged because The Diary of Anne Frank was required reading when I was in school....8th or 9th grade as I recall. The history teachers dedicated a whole week to just that subject culminating in the viewing of the old black and white film version of it on Thursday and Friday.
Now what is truly disturbing is that if it was required reading in my school it was very probably required reading in this parents. Hell I think it's still required reading in High School today. I don't know..I could be wrong. I think I'll ask some of my friends with teenage kids that question.
What this means is this parent had NO excuse to be THAT stupid. Unless they skipped out of school for a week, or slept through history class all week.

(Edit 2/20/10: Someone pointed out to me last night that different localities have difference required reading requirements. Therefore it's eminently possible the Diary of Anne Frank wasn't part of this parents required reading when this parent was in school. I'd forgotten that. Apologies. Mea Culpa)

The insipid stupidity inherent in that parent's question is frightening to me.
It's small moments of ignorance like this that sometimes make me truly fear that we are completely, irrevocably doomed as a nation.