"Barry Glassner - The Culture of Fear (incomplete)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Glassner Barry)

Only in passing does Crier note that the pay nursing home aides receive "is notoriously low" for a job that is "difficult and often unpleasant." Nor does the report deal with problems that, unlike rape and other forms of assault, occur on a regular basis in American nursing homes. (According to some reports, 40 percent of nursing home residents suffer from malnutrition, to take one urgent example.)

No, as Crier herself says at the very beginning of her report, "This is not a story about bad conditions in nursing homes, it's about bad people who end up working there." It is, in other words, another in the endless cache of stories about villains and victims, stories in which real people in their real complexity and the real dangers they and the larger society face can be glimpsed only in the shadows.



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"The Sad and Sordid Whereabouts of bin Cheney and bin Bush"
A Free Online Chapter addition to "Stupid White Men"
by Michael Moore

Part One:
"What Does a 99-cent Bic Lighter Tell Us About the Bush War on Terrorism?"

On September 22, 2001, just 11 days after the terrorist attacks in New York and Arlington, I had to fly. I had actually wanted to fly on September 11, and in fact had a ticket on the 3:00pm American Airlines flight from LAX to JFK. As we all know, that flight never made it off the ground as hours earlier four California-bound flights, two on American and two on United, were hijacked as part of a coordinated suicide mission to attack the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, DC.

Stranded in Los Angeles, my wife and I (out there for the annual Prime Time Emmy Awards for our series, "The Awful Truth"), were awakened that morning by my wife's mother, calling us from Flint at 6:15 a.m., L.A. time. I answered the phone and heard her say that "New York was under attack, New York is at war." I remember thinking, "So what's new," but she suggested we immediately turn on the TV. I fumbled for the remote and switched on the hotel room TV. And there it was. The twin towers on fire, black smoke billowing upward.

"OK," I thought, "a really bad fire." But then they ran the replay from 15 minutes earlier, of the second plane hitting the south tower. This wasn't an accident. We tried to call our daughter in New York. The phone lines weren't allowing any calls. We tried calling our friend, Joanne Doroshow, who works a few blocks from the towers. Again, the lines were jammed.

A horrible panic started settling inside me. Finally, I reached Joanne's office. A woman answered, frantic. I asked if Joanne was there. "NO!" she shouted. "She's not here! We have to go! Ohmygod!" She dropped the phone and I heard a loud roar, like a train. My wife said, "Look at the TV." I did, and I saw from L.A. what I was listening to over the phone: the collapse of the south tower.

It would be another four hours before we were able to reach our daughter, and seven hours before Joanne calls us, safe inside her apartment (she had ducked into a building just in time as the cloud of debris rained its way down the street).

That night, as we watched the images repeated on the TV, a ticker began running the names of some of the dead who had been on the planes. Along the bottom of the screen came the name, "William Weems." A friend of ours the next morning confirmed that this was, in fact, the same Bill Weems, a line producer from Boston with whom we had recently filmed a batch of humorous TV spots targeting the tobacco companies. Bill was on the Boston-to-L.A. plane. He died as the jet, traveling at 586 miles per hour, slammed into the south tower. He left behind a wife and 7-year old daughter. It was all so unbelievably horrific.

The airports were closed and all planes were now grounded. I found a Hertz dealer who would rent me a mini-van for $1,700 -- and 43 hours later we pulled out of our hotel on the Pacific Ocean and began our 2,990-mile journey home to our apartment in New York City.

Somewhere around Oklahoma City, the airports were all open again, but my wife did not want to ditch the mini-van and get on a plane. So we continued on home for the next few days, the first ever trip each of us had made driving coast to coast. It was, as it turned out, well worth it, as it gave us a chance to gauge the reaction of average citizens, especially as we passed through Bush and Ashcroft country (The internet letters I wrote - and read - from the road can be found on my website).

By September 22, I had no choice but to get back on a plane. I had been scheduled to give a talk in San Antonio, and so off I went on an American flight out of Newark. At the airport there was a newly, hastily put-together list of all the items that I could NOT bring aboard the plane. The list was long and bizarre. The list of banned items included:

No guns. (Obviously)
No knives. (Ditto)
No boxcutters. (Certainly now justified)
No toenail clippers. (What?)
No knitting needles. (Huh?)
No crotchet hooks. (Now, wait a minute!)
No sewing needles.
No mace.
No leaf blowers. (OK, now it's personal)
No corkscrews.
No letter openers.
No dry ice.

The list went on and on. A lot of the items made good sense. I wasn't quite sure if terrorists also made quilts in their spare time, and I guess I must have missed the terrorist incident where some poor bastards smuggled dry ice aboard a plane (were they trying to keep their Popsicles cold until they ate them and then used the sticks for their attack?).