“Look like the innocent flower / but be the serpent under’t.” – Lady Macbeth” (1.5.76-77)

Appearance can be a dangerous thing, as it can completely hide a dark reality lurking within. I say this partially because of reading numerous lines like the quote above from Macbeth this week, but also because this statement rings true in our world. In taking a deeper dive into the 1950’s, we came to discover that one of the greatest threats to America in the Cold War may just have been America itself. Fear of communism infiltrating America was ever-growing, even though there was very little evidence to justify it, and all it took were a couple of people to fan the flames for all-out chaos to erupt. One man in particular comes to mind… the ingeniously malicious Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

McCarthy played the role of a fair and innocent leader, where in reality he was an ambitious equivocator whose foul play forwarded the conflict rather than fought it. During his near five year reign of terror, the senator falsely accused opponents left and right of being connected to the Red Menace, and ended up costing thousands their jobs, relationships, and livelihoods. He was a master of throwing people off the trail of his political agenda, but his empty claims eventually catch up with him and bring about his downfall. Hey…sounds pretty similar to another “innocent” leader with a Scottish name. For this week’s connection, I have decided to compare Macbeth and McCarthy in all ways possible, and to do that I have created…

Introducing my attempt at what I think a newspaper in the Middle Ages would look like (minus the ye olde English). Designed off of the Los Angeles Times paper, I created it with the app Keynote and some help from Superimpose, Clip2comic, and Fonteer. After I knew what my connection was, the first step I took in composing it was a truckload of external research on McCarthy:

Research docs

After this was the challenging part, which was to organize and connect all the info I now had (which included notes from the lectures from this past week). To make it easier for myself, I decided to create a connections map in Keynote which outlined what I was going to include in my artifact:

Although organizing everything was hard, I actually found making the connections quite easy, for the deeper we dive into Macbeth the more I understand it. For example, I’m starting to notice words which Shakespeare makes a point of drawing our attention to such as fair, foul, natural/unnatural, and blood. All of these connect to one of the greater themes of the play, appearance vs. reality, as they either convey something that appears noble and pure or something dark and evil. Understanding this helped me notice that McCarthy used similar buzzwords to convey hidden meanings, with words such as left, red, and communism taking on scary and evil connotations. I also am starting to notice other reoccurring themes, such as that of manliness being associated with worth and power. I once again was able to connect this to McCarthy as he used his manly action of joining the military as the argument which won him his Senator position. I was able to make several more connections through my investigations, and all of which are outlined above in the connection map and in my artifact if you’re interested in seeing them.

After creating the outline, it was time to actually make the newspaper. One unexpected challenge I found in this stage was accounting for all of the little differences between the 1950’s and the time period of Macbeth. For example, modern English is quite different from Shakespearean English, which made it challenging to insert quotes from the play along side with quotes from real news articles. There are also drastic differences in the two political systems I was conveying (a monarchy and a democracy), which forced me to think hard about what roles I wanted each character to play. Despite being a bit of an obstacle, it was fun to fuse these two worlds and I am quite proud of my final product.

No one wants to be accused of McCarthyism, which is why I’m backing up my claims with evidence. Once again, I made sure to read laterally and see what other sources had to say about the ones I am using. This was actually interesting to do, as I discovered that the New York Times is slightly biased to a Liberal opinion and will consider this moving forwards. I also wanted to make sure I was considering the big picture of all of my notes to not put something out of context, which was why I made the connection map above. The sources I used are listed below:

“Army–McCarthy Hearings.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 7 Jan. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army%E2%80%93McCarthy_hearings.

History.com Editors. “Joseph McCarthy.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 29 Oct. 2009, www.history.com/topics/cold-war/joseph-mccarthy.

“Joseph McCarthy.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 1 Feb. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Edward_R._Murrow,_See_It_Now.

“Joseph N. Welch.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 22 Jan. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_N._Welch.

“New York Times.” Media Bias/Fact Check, mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/.

Shakespeare, William,, Mowat, Barbara A.Werstine, Paul.The Tragedy Of Macbeth. New York : Washington Square Press, 2004, c1992. Print.

“Site Review: History.com.” Site Review: History.com | Education World, www.educationworld.com/a_curr/site-reviews/history.shtml.

“United States Secretary of Defense.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Jan. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Defense.

Wershba, Joseph. “MURROW Vs.McCARTHY: SEE IT NOW.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 4 Mar. 1979, www.nytimes.com/1979/03/04/archives/murrow-vs-mccarthy-see-it-now.html.

Willemse, Petra. “Beginning of the Cold War” Humanities Class, Seycove Secondary, North Vancouver, Jan 20-25.

MPols Connection

If you read my mPols post, you’ll remember that I mentioned I will be giving a brief summary of my progress towards my Learning Goal at the end of my blog posts. So far, I have been starting to consider the bigger picture in my three determined areas by taking little steps. I’m applying for my first scholarship, giving myself more spread out free time, and starting to think about the movie aspect of this unit: