The Small and Large World

One of the many ironies of life is that the small and local world can become so full that the large world is received only as a peripheral vision. The Blackfriars Stage Company visited the college on Tuesday and Wednesday (Feb. 7th and 8th) to serve up two magfificent doses of Shakespeare. First came a tour de force science fiction musical version loosely based on The Tempest. Then came a snappy and exhilerating WW II styled Much Ado About Nothin. This touring company, which used to be known as the Shenendoah Shakespeare Express, continues to exude energy and talent. I spent six weeks with the 1995 Company in Harrisonburg, VA while on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and have continued to follow their successes in the past ten years. Chief among them has been the building of a new theatre (The Blackfriars)in Staunton, VA. We hope to see this new building on our next trip South.

Inbetween the Shakespeare I have been doing a bit of Ibsen. The Monmouth College Theatre will be producing an adaptation of Ibsen's Peer Gynt called Gint in a couple of weeks and I lectured to the Old Friends Talk Arts group at the Buchanan Center on the background of the original play. Will be doing the same for the cast of the new production this coming Sunday.

So a great theatre week so far, while the Muslim world rages against the excesses of free speech in the West. I taught a Seminar on the Freedom of Speech for a number of years and in that class we always read On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. That great British philosopher wrote, "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being 'pushed to an extreme'; not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Allowing all does not excuse communicators from being responsibile nor receivers for violent reactions, but it does allow rational recipients to see how deleterious intractible or extreme positions generally are. My sense is that many of the violent reactions come out of countries where there has been little or no tradition of freedom of the press. These publics have no sense that there may be a difference between the media and the government as the communication organs in their states have always been controlled by the government. Thus a cartoon in a Danish newspaper seems to them to be a political position by the Danish government. It get more murky when violence breaks out at the Norweigian Embassy--I suppose because all Scandanavians are alike. And from here the extension to all Western governments is on the march. Multitudes of Muslims who righteously condemned being stereotyped as terrorists after 9-11, now blithely extend the crude and offensive satire of a few cartoonists to reflect the attitudes of whole populations.