Word: inspectors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...NIGHT IN A CHEAP HOTEL USUALLY REQUIRES payment in advance. But relations between major defense contractors and the Air Force are thought to be a cut above that. Not always, according to a report from the acting Pentagon inspector general, which recommends disciplinary measures against a cluster of Air Force generals and civilian procurement specialists. The report accuses several Pentagon officials of advancing McDonnell Douglas Corp. $500 million in 1990 to see the aerospace giant through troubles associated with the C-17 military transport plane. The report urges disciplinary action for three generals and two civilians alleged to be involved...
...spill of the radioisotope phosphorus-32 was not serious enough to warrant an immediate inspection of the site, said John Kinneman, an NRC inspector...
Sullivan, who wrote the script in collaboration with the actors, borrowed the theme from Gogol's masterpiece The Inspector General, about a corrupt town that goes all out trying to bribe a feckless clerk whom it collectively mistakes for a government investigator. The setting and some of the plot, however, came from an episode Sullivan heard about when serving on a National Endowment for the Arts theater panel: a beleaguered troupe, desperate to sustain its grant, offered to bribe an agency inspector who was also a playwright by pledging to produce his plays...
...Sullivan's version, the man mistaken for an inspector is actually a computer wonk turned would-be actor. Aggressively talentless, he is nonetheless welcomed into the panicky troupe and cast as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The play's finale, a catastrophic Christmas Carol that is the funniest scene on any American stage this year, echoes the uproarious mangling of Romeo and Juliet in Nicholas Nickleby. Props and gimmicks fail. The set collapses. One actor forgets all his lines in terror. And Tiny Tim, played all through rehearsals by a plump pubescent brat who has held the role...
...National Endowment (a funder of Sullivan's show) and at what Sullivan calls "the process of both censorship and self-censorship," as when the imaginary troupe's artistic director cites the works she dare not mount except in bowdlerized form. In the play within the play, the actual inspector arrives just in time to see the fiasco and adores it, despite getting knocked unconscious in the melee: she perceives a deep expression of the decline of Western civilization and a succession of welcome bows to political correctness...