Word: driver
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DeLong, who had taken a leave of absence from her Harvard job due to depression, was homeless when she began working for the bank as a truck driver...
Almost immediately after the rioters took to the streets, Angelenos experienced the brutality of mob rule. At 6:30 Wednesday evening, an airborne television camera captured the beating of Reginald Denny, a white truck driver who made the mistake of stopping at a red light in the neighborhood where the first riot erupted. At least five black men pulled Denny from his sand truck, bashed him with the vehicle's fire extinguisher, punched him and stole his wallet. Another fired a shotgun into him at close range. As a blood-soaked Denny called for help, he was hit with beer...
...horror and freezes instantly as attitude -- as racial stereotype. Society becomes a war of videos, in which orderly brainwork, any reasoning over rights and wrongs, is impossible. Cosby gave way on American television screens to endlessly reduplicated, hall-of-mirrors replays of the Rodney King video and the truck-driver video: the truck-driver video being the one shot from a helicopter when a group of blacks dragged a white driver from his vehicle and beat him almost to death (he survived...
...moral flatness of button-pushing sensation, the truck-driver video accomplished the amazing task of nullifying the Rodney King video. The dumb, blunt message of the Rodney King video was: white cops are monsters beating defenseless blacks. The bottom-feeders' message of the truck-driver video was that blacks are savage, racist animals who would beat a man virtually to death because he is white. On that level of discourse, if Americans choose to stay there, there can only be a gridlock of rage: blacks make demons of whites, whites make demons of blacks...
...videos are a matched pair, complementary. They are choreographed like mtv, performed by Road Warriors. The Rodney King video shows cops in the stylized tribal rioting that men in groups on dangerous excursions sometimes use as a form of bonding -- solidarities of atrocity on the late shift. The truck-driver video looked like ritual sacrifice, the helicopter circling overhead, the rioters circling the trucker's flung body. Both videos recorded naked power dances, conscienceless, brainless, evil, pain inflicting: I have your life under my boot. To look at them last week was to see Americans of both races going backward...