Conspiracy Theorists

I thought the presentations informed each other today - after all, Shakespeare is in large part commentary on political corruption. You'd think that after all these centuries we would've knocked that out with polio...maybe next century.

I mentioned in class today that I didn't get much out of the Shakespeare class I took here; let me make the following disclaimers: 1) Barfield taught the class (nice guy, not very engaging), 2) that semester I was learning the hard way that even architecture students need to sleep. So, if I could do it over again, I would do things differently. As it stands, though, I think Professor Fishman made a good point when she said that Shakespeare was meant to be seen and not to be read. The problem with a class that emphasizes watching the plays would be that people would have to act them out - and though the class might act some, it would also involve a lot of video and field trips. I wonder if that would be something that would be seen as academic? I think it could be, if the alternative is continuing to produce English students who are afraid of Shakespeare. And Kevin, I'm going to miss you when I graduate; looking forward to seeing you on TV.

Shakespeare made underhand comments about the government; unfortunately it appears from the second presentation today that we don't know enough about our government's actions to comment, much less in an underhand way. The topic of our corrupt news networks has come up repeatedly in class, and every time I'm more and more disturbed. My solution has been to not watch the news and glean what I can from my email version of the NY Times...but admittedly, I don't ever read it for very long. And no news source is really accurate...but I dare say most are more accurate than ours! So, my question is this: what should we do about the problem? The media is frighteningly powerful, and it can persuade a country to perform acts of atrocity without the people within thinking it's atrocious. Nazi Germany, always a good example. Do we make other, foreign news programs more accessible? Do we boycott American news and protest to the government? I don't know how much that would help since the government kind of controls the news...what do you think?