Tuesday Recap; On Tap for Thursday

Great job this morning making sense of a hearty and sometimes heady essay. I applaud you for your willingness to talk about ideas that make you uncomfortable because, as Susan Sontag wrote, it is only when we face our own discomfort can we begin to understand "the other side." And the other side, as the Vietnam War has shown us, is just as important as our own.

On Thursday we will try our best to do the following:

1. Read and talk briefly about another Susan Sontag article.

2. Talk about your final projects: what you are doing and what are the main questions motivating your project. In other words, it is only the beginning to say "I'll be interviewing so and so." Next you need to tell us why you are interviewing so and so and what questions you hope to answer by doing whatever you're doing; that is the difference between an unsophisticated and flat report and an insightful and worthwhile project. Think about Sontag: she didn't merely report that the Vietnamese use of language was "flat" but also asked herself why she was perceiving it that way which in turn enabled her to break through her own cultural perspective and allowed her to come up with an answer as to why they speak the way they do.

3. Talk about Fog of War and Path to War. Your RAs for this week should be about how the two movies compare and contrast to one another. One angle, for example, might be to ask how we feel about Robert McNamara after seeing Path to War and why? Then: how do we feel after seeing Fog of War? Why? What is it about the rhetoric of the films that moves us toward these ways of seeing?