Harvey and Bezio

Both Bezio and Harvey’s reading addressed aspects of leadership in question like what it means to be a leader truly and what can the pop culture of a time period reveal about leadership. I thought that Harvey’s article was a more analytical, to the point interpretation of leadership that similarly mirrored what we learned in leadership 101. The questions he proposed on determining who are leaders are in relation to our needs as a society were very similar to what I remember learning in Kaufman’s class. When he asks “who are we?”, “where are we?”, “how are we doing?”, “why do we care?” and etc, this presents a great opportunity to reflect on what our leaders are bringing to us and how they are catering to the current needs of our society and how our leaders are going about accomplishing them. These are necessary questions to review in reflection of our leaders so that we as a society can grasp at how our leaders are making us better or making us worse and to be able to go from there and fully critique our leaders.

Not only do these questions reflect a self-realization of what we ourselves seek from our leaders but it helps us put into perspective what other members within and outside our society need. This in-group out-group reflection is important in terms of world conflict. For example, most recently, the U.S air forces struck Syria’s chemical weapon facilities because it was apparent that the Syrian government was using chemical gases on its people. The biggest part of this news is that the Trump administration was not certain that the chemical gases were even used against the citizens. The plays out the problem of in-group out-group communication. It’s easy for the Trump administration to paint the Syrian government as evil and capable of these attacks on their citizens (which I’m not saying didn’t happen), therefore it’s easy to jump to conclusions and use military force without full disclosure on the incident. It would be necessary for the Trump administration to fully understand what is occurring there and answer those questions Harvey presented us about leadership to better asses the situation.

I really liked Bezio’s comparison of Shakespeare and the Brexit situation. It’s so apparent now that our pop culture reflects what our leadership is doing and has ties to current events. While Bezio is referring to looking at history and the different contexts famous leaders were placed in, the pop culture of those time periods can reflect critiques of those leaders like Shakespeare’s plays did. It’s so important to review history and the time period to assess the qualities and accomplishments of leaders. For example, after reading Zinn in the other class, we are able to recognize with more contextual history that Christopher Columbus wasn’t really a good leader and his successes were marked with rape of Native American women, the killings of Native Americans, the enslavement of Native Americans and bringing diseases to the Americas that wiped out entire populations of natives.