Glad to see Truthdig removed that gawd-awful advertisement!  We should be able
to hide out from such crap at least on the blogs!

Writer-on-the-Storm, you are completely right and I wish there was something
we, the thinking public, could do about it.  I wonder if he could have his journal
program on satellite TV?  I plan to write to him at his blogsite.  perhaps if a lot of
people did that it could happen.  Or, if he wants to retire, and that could also be
the case, although look at Daniel Schorr at 90 is Twittering and writing columns
for NPR!  If only there were one or two in the pipeline that has Moyers’ balanced
inquiring mind and the audacity who will take those in power to task regardless of
which political pole they represent. Sigh.  He is so needed.

A true loss in Bill Moyer’s Journal. I relied on it for an unflinching and philosophic overview of broader political
trends. Moyers is a humanist of the highest order, and his reports threw aside political branding, staged
faux-debate, and standardized talking-point megaphoning in favor of the greater (if naive) values of justice
and egalitarianism.

If this kind of programming can’t survive, it’s not the media’s fault. It’s ours.

Villalobos1986 your huckstering is not appreciated by me in the least.  It is a
sneaky way to get free commercial advertisement at the expense of commenters
who are interested in dialogue about the issues presented.  Should we all
complain and report you to Truthdig?  I believe we should.

I am reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 where books were burned and a
group of renegade intellectuals, created an enclave away from the city
commenced to memorize books.  Don’t tell me people don’t love old language
literature!  I can just see humans in the not too distant future because of the
very reasons gerard mentions, a collective of intellectuals retiring to some cave
or other beautifully rugged and velvet draped, with comfy chairs, engaged in
digitizing the entire works of Shakespeare, and his brethren users of
obscurantic language, Rilke, Dante, Horace, Beckett, Foucault, Heidegger!, or
linguistic experimenter Spanish poet, Luis de Gongora y Argote,  and on and on
and on.  Oh oh, it has already been done!  Well it’s being done by the
Gutenberg Project.  Oh sigh, the group will just sit around having a coffee or
tea and talk about the good old days before the 21st century people didn’t
reduce themselves to grunting and yammering or reading and writing in neo-
hieroglyphs and talk about what was Italo Calvino meant in Cosmicomics, or as
Macbeth reflects on the transformation he has gone through saying the he has
changed from someone whose “senses would have cooled, To hear a night-
shriek…to someone whom “DIreness…cannot once start…because he has
“supped full with horrors

As I posted elsewhere…it is not like anyone’s arm is getting broken to attend to
anything Shakespeare.  Yes, let’s reduce everything to the gutteral utterances
that describe the poorly educated!  Poorly educated in this case includes those
who went through high school or even earned a bachelor’s degree, but who
still don’t haven’t a clue how many apparent secrets can be revealed through
the extraordinary use of their language.  Shakespeare’s language is poetic and
poetic relies heavily on metaphor.  Too many of the common folk cannot
discern the import of metaphors in their common modern idiom because do
not know how to make such discriminations.  It’s a pathetic thing to even
suggest that the theatricality of Shakespeare be reduced to garden variety pop
speak. Actually that has been done now and then, Romeo is Bleeding and
Richard III transcribed into a Nazi Germany scenario.  They are only
momentarily memorable and will not last through the centuries that Willie’s
Work have.  They are rip offs and don’t attain the status of high art.  They fall
into oblivion just as everything hackneyed does.

Does it really matter “how many of us actually dig” Shakespeare?  To say there
is significance to that question is to also say that Shakespeare does not matter
at all, and if so then why the bloody argument?  Using common consensus as a
measure is to say the human mind has no capacity to transcend the mundane. 
It might be difficult to traverse Shakespeare’s vernacular, but once across the
river of encrusted hearing, a world not accessed before is now available in
which to intellectually bask.  If the argument is inaccessibility of his ideas, we
only have to present the number of classes where that translation is the focus. 
Do we really want to get rid of all the Shakespeare teachers?  It is a slippery
slope then to commonalize the language of all the translated Greek and Roman
authors or Ezra Pound.  Yeah, let’s do a colloquial clean up all of them.  Get rid
of the Latin prose and poetry as well.  While you are at it get rid of anything
that rises above the level of mediocre.  If it’s a chore to experience
Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies, and one simply snores off, then go
watch the drivel on television that does use common language.  Don’t bother to
stretch the mind, which probably is already stretched to its limit anyway.  I
don’t know of anyone who read Shakespeare or anyone who went to see a
performance that suffered apoplexy, or a seizure of any kind, boredom of the
commoners is not a measure of a man’s work.

Re: Shakespeare:  There is some question here about to whom or to what the word “dense” had better be applied.  Doubtless the language was not “dense” to the people of that time, for they attended the plays in crowds. But languages change constantly.
  English might be said to have “undensified” since then, and, if we are to judge by present polyglots and barbarisms, has now reached a new low of simplemindedness and assininity:  (u r rt bt i gotta go c u latr gatr by)
  It is all too logical to presume from this degradation that the human mind is losing its grip and we are being unconsciously reduced to a state of unconsciousness.  Add to that our increasing tendency to murder each other for no good reason and if your ears are ringing, it is the sound of silence blowing in the wind.  Tweet, tweet!  Grrrrr.  Arf, arf!  Meow! 
  Oh, well.  Never mind.  We won’t be troubled anymore with “stuck-up middle class intellectuals!”

The height of human consciousness is to use the mind not only to clearly see and
understand experiences but to be able to articulate them well and with truth as
the basis, and to take appropriate action in accordance with the morals of the
society.  With all these articles noted how many could use discerning thought to
evaluate each story?  Of those who can, how many can express their opinions that
are thoughtful and balanced?  How many will take my words here and make light
of them to hide their shortcomings to make reasoned remarks?