STATE OF FEAR
著者 ： MICHAEL CRICHTON
出版社： AVON BOOKS Nov.2005 672ページ、定価US$7.99で￥1092を735で買った。
感想 ： 2007.1.22以降７回にわたって記載
気になった文章 ：
＊ after all, most Americans believe that crime in their country is increasing, when it has actuakky been declining for twelve years, The US murder rate is as low as it was in the early 1970s, but Americans are more frightened than ever, because so much more airtime is devoted to crime, they naturally assume there is more in real life, too. (…) そうなの？ 犯罪減ってるの？ 確かに、マスメディアで繰り返し犯罪について報道されるから、余計にうんざりしてくるし。
＊ in 1983, nobody in the world had ever heard of nuclear winter. Then, a big media conference was held and by the following Wednesday the entire world was worried about nuclear winter. そうだったの？ 記憶にない。
＊ O.K.Corral ははは
＊ Hapalochlaena fasciata オーストラリアのたこ、テトロドトキシン、ほんまにいる？ ヒョウモンダコ で、いるらしい。怖ろしい。オーストラリアだけではないじゃないの。日本にもいるんだ。日本では死亡者いないらしいけれど。
＊ Back in the 1970s, all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming. They thought the world was getting colder. But once the notion of global warming was raised, they immediately recognised the advantages, Global warming creates a crisis, a call to action. A crisis needs to be studied, it needs to be funded, it needs political and bureaucratic structures around the world. And in no time at all, a huge number of meteorologists, geologists, oceanographers suddenly became ‘climate scientists’ engaged in the management of this crisis. これ確かにね。 氷河期に入っているってのを耳にした記憶あるし。科学者もたくさん右向け右になる。儲かる、脚光を浴びるだろうし。
＊ just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them.(…) the two sides of the brain do not work separetely in a healthy person. But in the popular culture, the concept does not die for another twenty years. People talk about it, believe it, write books about it for decades, after scientists have set it aside.
＊ There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the mdia did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. (…) There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic.
＊ ホント。マスコミ、特にTVはニュースですら派手で言葉の使い方が大げさで、うんざりさせられる。 この辺りがSTATE OF FEARという題になるわけよね。地球温暖化も人々の恐怖を煽っている、というわけで。なんのために？ To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear. DPRKだけじゃないわよね。日本も、もちろんアメリカも国民の恐怖心を煽って防衛、軍事…
＊ For fifty yearas, Western nations had maintained the citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of the nuclear war. The communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finised. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. ベルリンの壁が崩壊した1989年、新たな恐怖心を煽るものを探した。それがマスメディアの大げさな表現につながる。
＊ POLITICO-LEGAL-MEDIA COMPLEX - PLM
Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. そして、アメリカは日本の司法システムに口出した。日本がbe米国流訴訟社会になるように。
How astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can’t even see germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. そう、分かっている。自分とは無関係だろうと思うのにやたらと恐怖心を煽られる。ただね、中には例えば石綿なんてまさかだったのに影響受けている人増えてきたし、鳥インフルだって、とも思うし、情報って必要だとは思うわけで、バランスが難しい？
＊ Fifty years ago, if you wanted to lead what was then called ‘the life of the mind’, meaning to be an intellectual, to live by your wits, you had to work in a university. The society at large had no place for you. A few newspaper reporters, a few magazine journalists could be considered as living by their wits, but that was about it. Universities attracted those who willingly gave up worldly goods to live a cloistered intellectual life, teaching timeless values to the younger generation. Intellectual work was the exclusive province of the university. (…) the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastion of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry, formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. (…) They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. そうよねぇ。They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can’t say. Thoughts you can’t think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangeres, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can’t smoke, can’t wear, can’t screw, can’t think. (…) The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, (…) The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are facist to the core. (…) ここで上段みたいに出てくるのが日本の磁石、磁気治療製品、ははは。
＊ 発展途上国に対して、countries were just told that if they used it, they wouldn’t get foreign aid. (…) based on UN statistics, is that before the DDT ban, malaria had become almost a minor illness. Fifty thousand deaths a year worldwide. A few years later, it was once again a global scourge. Fifty million people have died since the ban.
＊ Civilization doesn’t separete us from nature. Civilization protects us from nature.
＊ 西洋思想だなぁ。東洋は共に生きるんだけどね。「新大陸発見」以前のアメリカ大陸の自然は自然といってもインディアンがそれなりに共生していたんだよねぇ。
＊ 人食い人種に関して：
Cannibalism in the American southwestは、
http://www.nature.com/nature/fow/000907.html・・・無い？
記載されているけれど、無効なURL
以下は有効
Celts in England
http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Info-Office/news/archive/cannibal.htm.
2001年
Neanderthals
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/462048.stm
1999年
© Rakuten Group, Inc.
