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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
PAGE 5A
opinion
apps.facebook.com/dailykansan
Why do the leader of the free world and the most hated person in America have names that both start with "o" and end in "ama?" I keep catching myself saying, "We killed Obama!" FAIL.
i bet bin Laden regrets allowing his iPhone app to "use his current location"
"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." Mark Twain
TUESDAY,MAY3,2011
I hate getting to class and realizing the pants I grabbed off the bathroom floor were dirtier than I thought.
I had an epic orgy last night with my roommates ... AMERICA!!
Look at all the freshmen acting like they didn't just sit in their dorm lobby and talk about how they wished they could go celebrate with the true American patriots who aren't afraid to show our passion.
Dude who shot Osama shouldn't have to pay taxes ever again.
I don't care if you're not super into politics or current events, but how can you say Osama being killed isn't a big deal?
So it takes Osama's death to get cuss words back into the paper? It said "fuck" on the front page yet we're still censored online ...
I can't wait to see the next "South Park" episode.
$10 says the guy who killed Osama had sex last night.
Uh you expect me to read 110 pages for a two-page response paper? And we get to drop three papers? Not a very hard decision.
You know my favorite drinking game? Senior year in college.
Two guys in front of us at Wendy's ordered $100 worth of food. Must be a bad case of the munchies. I bet they regret that one in the morning!
I'm going to start listening to porn while working out to get more pheromones pumping.
A prince got married and the bad guy got killed. Yes, we are really living in a Disney movie.
So he was found in the mansion smack dab in the middle of a huge city? Pakistan has some serious explaining to do.
Osama bin Laden: world hide and seek champion (2001-2011).
Got to love these few moments in time when America unites in patriotism through Facebook and Twitter.
What a beautiful day for country music. I'm sure Alan Jackson and Toby Keith are thanking the heavens right now.
The United States will continue to rain on England's parade forever. Because we are cool like that.
A VETERAN'S REACTION
The death of bin Laden strikes differently for veterans
Junior year chemistry class. That's where I was almost 10 years ago.
A classmate came in and told us that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. The TVs were turned on to watch the news and students were called home, me included, by panicked parents.
At this point, there are several emotions coursing through me. Skepticism, anger, relief, sadness. My mind is a mix I have rarely experienced.
Fast forward to this Sunday evening. I was sitting at home watching "Tron: Legacy" with a friend. A friend of his tweeted about Osama bin Laden being killed. A few moments later, Facebook exploded with the news. The message was delivered differently, but it was no less powerful than the one 10 years ago.
BY AARON HARRIS aharris@kansan.com
I find myself in doubt. Doubting that it really happened. It's been 10 years and I honestly thought he might have died years ago. A ruse to keep a cause going.
impact is not erased due to one mans death.
Foremost in my mind, though, is the fact that this changes nothing. Call me a cynic. I don't care; it's the truth. Ten years ago, lives were lost and others changed forever. Such an
The "leader" of al-Qaida is dead. Yeah, I put quotations around that for a reason. After serving in Iraq, I saw leaders of terrorist cells die or get captured. There was always another waiting in line. This will be no different. And that's saying that Osama has been leading al-Qaida these past few years.
There are roughly 350 students on this campus, plus several faculty members, who will see this differently, as I do. My opinion is not the same as all of theirs, probably not even the majority. Their lives, especially those who saw combat, were affected because of this man. Their families lived in fear of them dying on foreign soil because of the domino
effect caused by one person. They will see this as a beginning, though. A beginning to a time when an era can possibly end.
We will go on living. Some will use Osama's death as a political move. Others will turn him into a martyr. Several will have the closure they have longed for these past 10 years. The world has moved on the past decade, and it's time that we joined it.
When you all go out for drinks this weekend, be cliché. Raise your glasses in a toast to a world that needs to heal. A friend and I will raise ours to those who were lost, in the towers and on the battlefield. Enjoy the moment that they had to die for.
Harris is a senior in journalism and history from Kansas City, Kan.
COMMENTARY
Osama's death may lead to different reflections of former president Bush
After taking a few steps back from our crowded American flag, one has to wonder, from this point forward, what sort of implications Osama bin Laden's death could have regarding how the public remembers former President Bush.
Most people don't argue that Bush was a highly unpopular president. A quick look at Gallup polling data shows an all-time low of twenty-eight percent approval of his job performance, placing him in the bottom four most unpopular executives in United States history.
With a staggering economy and a highly unpopular and unsuccessful war lingering around his closing years in office — among other things — it doesn't take much to understand how the public's opinion of the most well-known government figure can lack so much confidence.
But, two days ago, after President Obama announced the "capture" of the man who caused Americans so much devastation, after nearly a decade of searching and seven years of combating his violent, fundamentalist organization (not to imply that this combat is over), people are likely to be susceptible to 9/11 nostalgia, that is, jump back into that patriotic mindset following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
People might have thoughts about where they were on that day, images of the crashing towers running through their minds and George Bush's confident, Western voice asserting that America would respond to the violent attacks made on its soil, and they can't help but remember who was commanderin-chief at the time, how confident they were in his ability to successfully lead the United States in a counterattack, as evidenced in his record 90 percent approval rating at the time.
This is not to imply Bush should be credited with bin Laden's lifeless body being in the hands of the American government, or that this event will have any positive effect on
BY JAMES CASTLE jcastle@kansan.com
peoples' attitudes toward American military presence in the Middle East, but it could nonetheless have a positive effect on peoples' remembrance of his time in office.
For many, remembering this confidence and connecting it to these new feelings of pride and feat as a result of bin Laden's death could re-shape how they think about the former president, perhaps, what I would hypothesize, reinforcing existing positive attitudes or weakening negative ones. And some people just might not give a damn.
Perhaps more critical to affecting peoples' remembrance of George Bush would be the future level of stability or instability in store for the Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite his unpopularity while in office, stable democracies in these uncertain Middle Eastern countries, on top of bin Laden's death, may have an even greater positive effect on public perceptions of the former president than predicted with the latter alone. Conversely, continued instability in these areas could have the opposite effect on such attitudes.
Nonetheless, we have yet to see the effect bin Laden's death will have on public attitudes toward Bush, and this could potentially have some interesting implications as to how this major political actor is portrayed to future generations.
Castle is a junior in political science and human sexuality from Stillwell.
Where were you when you heard the news about bin Laden?
on
witter
twitter.com/KansanOpinion
zgetz Zach Getz (former Kansan writer) @kansanopinion Seoul, South Korea, just waking up.
bretttermichael Brett Salsbary
@kansanopinion On my
couch, eating potato
chips, farting around on
Twitter#storiesformygrandkids
ashclayton13 Ashley Clayton @kansanopinion In my room doing homework when I saw that Fox News tweeted it. Immediately turned on CNN!
AlexBoyer90 Alex Boyer @kansanopinion I was at Famous Dave's checking my Twitter. I'm cool like that.
CULTURE
Will the real Shakespeare please stand up?
Later this year, Columbia Pictures is releasing the film "Anonymous", a political/historical thriller about the succession of Queen Elizabeth I, the Essex Rebellion and whether or not Shakespeare was really Shakespeare. The authorship of Shakespeare's plays and the political turmoil surrounding the succession of Queen Elizabeth might seem to be totally unrelated, but the movie promises to merge the two seamlessly and, judging from the trailer, it will probably do so with a lot of action sequences.
The film is being directed by Roland Emmerich, known for "Independence Day," "2012," and other disaster movies revolving around calendar dates. It might seem totally insane to give a movie about Shakespeare to a guy who made a movie in which killer ice chased Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal through New York City, but the cast list boasts prominent Shakespearean actors. Despite the fact that the premise sounds like a bad dream, it's actually based on an actual theory that has many prominent followers.
BY LOU SCHUMAKER
ischumaker@kansan.com
Personally, I don't put a lot of credence into the theory that Shakespeare didn't write the plays with his name on them and I would love to say something smug like, "Of course, no real historian has ever paid attention to this ridiculous theory," but that's not even going to be true.
The question of the authorship of
kenneth paul spears plays goes back to the
The list of people who don't believe Shakespeare wrote his plays, known as anti-Stratfordians, includes Orson Welles, Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. Keenum Reeves is also an anti-Stratfordian, which raises the question: Why isn't he in this movie? Because, honestly, I probably go see that.
middle of the 1800s, when guys like William Henry Smith and Orville Ward Owen first began espousing the idea that the philosopher Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays. After that, more and more candidates began popping up. Christopher Marlowe, Sir Thomas More, and William Stanley, among many, many others, have all been promoted as the real author of the plays.
Often, anti-Stratfordians will draw parallels between a historical figure and the characters in the plays, which makes sense, because Stephen King has had a ton of problems with evil clowns and Jerry Siegel is from Krypton.
In addition, there's usually some kind of conspiracy theory as to why Shakespeare got credit for someone else's plays. The Oxfordian theory, on which the film "Anonymous" is based, postulates that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was Queen Elizabeth's secret lover and had a secret love-child with her, which somehow kept him from being able to take credit for writing his plays. A variant of this theory suggests that, not only was de
Vere the Queen's lover, but also her son.
I don't think that's true, but I desperately wish it were, because English class does not have nearly enough illicit incestuous affairs.
Despite the list of prominent supporters, anti-Stratfordians make up a relatively small percentage of Shakespearean critics. Contemporary critics and Shakespearean experts such as Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapiro have dismissed the idea time and again, only to have it rear its ugly head once more. In response to Emmerich's upcoming film, Shapiro wrote the book "Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?" in which he criticizes both Stratfordians and anti-Stratfordians for trying to glean biographical facts from Shakespeare's plays.
Anyways, I'm not going to take anti- Stratfordians seriously until they listen to my theory about how Shakespeare shot JFK during the fake moon-landing, which then caused 9/11.
Schumaker is a junior in film and media studies from Overland Park.
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD Members of the Kansai Editorial Board are Nick Gerik, Michael Holtz, Kelly Stroda, D.M. Scott and Mandy Matthey.
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