----- Original Message ----- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 9:54 PM Subject: Re: Moore's comments about Flight 93
> At 3:02 PM -0800 1/14/03, Brian O. Sheppard wrote:
> >According to a columnist from the British Independent, Moore described
the
> >9/11 bravehearts as "scaredy-cats because they were mostly white. If the
> >passengers had included black men, those killers, with their puny bodies
> >and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes."
>
> Are you and Doug sure that we should trust the columnist from the
> Independent (UK) in question Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and swallow her
> report wholesale?
The D-Squared Digest has a piece on this incident:
http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/
[ . . . ]
Here's the story. The first thing that I want to say is that the headline is misleading. I saw Moore's stage show (which is the only reason I'm writing this; I have local knowledge), and he emphatically did not "mock the Sept 11 passengers as scaredy-cats". He was trying to make a point about the docility of the middle classes, and about the fact that middle class people tend to expect others to do uncomfortable jobs for them. He mentioned black people, but also mentioned poor whites, football thugs and (topically for London at the time) firemen as members of dispossessed classes who in their daily lives did not typically have the option of letting other people handle their problems. He also made a rather moving tribute to the white middle class passengers on Flight 93, and I have no reason to believe that he wouldn't have done the same thing on the night which is being written about. His bit on this subject came immediately after a tortured piece of self-questioning about his Columbine film, asking what it was about a police tape that made the parents of the Columbine children hold back from running into the school after their children. I thought that it was an interesting idea, but a bit half-baked. I also thought at the time that it was a mistake to try and conflate the point about conformity with a point about the fact that you don't see many black faces on aeroplanes, and not in the best of taste, but the "scaredy-cats" remark is an unfair precis. Only a columnist as unremittingly stupid as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown could have interpreted it in the way she did, as glorifying black people for being violent.
[ . . . ]
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