Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [214]
4. “The Walt Disney Company is helping build one of the most unusual public schools in the nation—a high-tech model for the next century, a learning laboratory with fiber optic cables linking classrooms to the homes of every student. But the most unusual aspect of this public school … is that it is linked to an adjacent national teacher training academy that could make Disney a lot of money. Disney will use the academy and school to develop classroom videos, software, and other educational products to be sold nationally.” Mary Jordan, “This School’s No Mickey Mouse Operation,” The Washington Post, National Edition, July 25–31, 1995, p.33. The town of Celebration (in Florida), where the school will be located, will have 800 homes, hospital, fire station, lake, inn, barber shop, churches, movie theaters, and ice cream parlors. Disney has also opened a for-profit Chautauqua called The Disney Institute. Meanwhile, through its ABC division, Disney fired controversial talk show hosts on the left and right, including Jim Hightower in 1995, and Alan Dershowitz and Bob Grant in 1996—Dershowitz because he called Grant a racist, Grant because he was a racist!
5. Kinsley drew Newsweek cover attention and a long New Yorker profile, earning back his salary almost instantly. See “Swimming to Seattle,” Cover Essay, Newsweek Magazine, May 20, 1996. Ken Auletta, Gates/Kinsley essay, The New Yorker, April 8, 1996.
6. Cited by Thomas L. Friedman, “Revolt of the Wannabes,” The New York Times, February 7, 1996, A 19.
7. Even the Nazis played this game: “Work will make you free!” (“Arbeit macht frei!”) was the slogan that greeted incoming “guests” of the work/death camps.
8. See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, “Paris is Burning,” The New Republic, January 22, 1996, pp. 27-31.
9. Fareed Zakaria, ibid.
10. See my op ed essay “From Disney World to Disney’s World,” The New York Times, August 1, 1996.
11. See, for example, Philip Gourevitch, “Misfortune Tellers,” The New Yorker, April, 1996.
12. President Clinton, in an extended critical exposition of the book’s themes before a breakfast gathering of religious leaders in Washington, September 7, 1995, C-Span.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BENJAMIN R. BARBER is Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and director of the New York office of the Democracy Collaborative. He is the author of the classic Strong Democracy and most recently of The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House and A Place for Us. In 2001 he was honored with the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin and the Palme Académiques (Chevalier) of the French Government. With Patrick Watson, Barber also created and wrote the prizewinning television series and book The Struggle for Democracy. He writes regularly for The Nation, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications. He is married to the dancer and choreographer Leah Kreutzer.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1995 by Benjamin Barber
2001 Introduction copyright © 2001 by Benjamin Barber
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Times Books, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1995.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96061
eISBN: 978-0-307-87444-3
v3.0