The class I currently teach is an Introduction to Literature course focused on adaptations and retellings. I created most of the syllabus for the class in the Fall of 2009 for the Practice Teaching Literature graduate course at USF. When I put it together I selected Joyce Carol Oates’s story ”Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Don Moser’s “The Pied Piper of Tucson,” and the lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Its All Over Now Baby Blue.” Moser’s piece is an article that appeared in Life Magazine in 1966, and it is the basis for the Oates story. “The Pied Piper of Tucson” is about Charles Schmid who murdered at least three teenagers in Arizona between 1964 and 1965. The case, because of the reporting of Moser and others like him became a national topic.

As I said I selected these readings in the Fall of 2009. I first taught this course last Spring, and about two weeks before I was scheduled to teach this cluster of stories Jared Lee Loughner opened fire on a political event in Tucson killing six people including a federal Judge and a 9 year old girl and injuring eleven others, including U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

I was re-reading and annotating Moser’s article the weekend following this event in preparation for teaching it, and I was struck by an interesting passage at the end. After chronicling the events and the bizarre figure of Charles Schmid Moser notes: “The people of Tucson wait uneasily for what fresh scandal the two trials may develop. Civic leaders publicly cry that a slur has been cast o their community by an isolated crime.”

I was struck by this, of course because I–like most people who followed the shooting spree in Tucson–heard a number of local officials saying the exact same things. I saw the mayor himself attempt to dodge around the statements that the sheriff made, and insist on the health and happiness of the community. But, just like in 1966, there’s something wrong. These claims of isolation are perhaps true on the level of the individual crime, but it’s hard to deny that something is amiss. Don Moser’s article focused on Charles Schmid, but it also used Schmid as a way of thinking and talking about the dark things that were going on in America. It shouldn’t be surprising that Hitchcock’s Psycho which also examined the dark undercurrent in our national life opened just a few years before in 1960 and took as its territory that American no man’s land between Arizona and California, (starting in Phoenix and ending in a fictional Northern California town).

The correlation between my planned teaching of this article and the more recent events in Tucson was a coincidence, but an informative one. Moser recognized something going wrong in America and used the story of a young and apparently popular serial killer to illuminate it. I brought this up in class and my students responded pretty well, recognizing that the Tucson shooting perhaps should be viewed as a way for us to step back and search for precisely what ails us as a nation and as a culture, political or otherwise. While the conversations regarding civility, the damage of overheated rhetoric, and the problems of demonizing one’s political opponents have taken a back seat to more basic concerns (echoed in the Occupy Movements spreading across the country) my students responses give me a tiny bit of hope that we can perhaps in the near future move a little further away from the current paradigm.