Мужчины тоже плачут

[tijd]

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Действие последней выпущенной серии " Mrs. America" происходит в 1974. В одном из эпизодов герои смотрят телевизионную программу Free to Be... You and Me. Этот сборник скетчей и песен был успешным феминистским проектом, призванным сломать гендерные стереотипы у детей.

В одном из номеров программы двухметровый гигант, бывший профессиональный футболист Роси Гриер пел песню "It's all right to cry".

It's all right to cry
Crying gets the sad out of you
It's all right to cry
It might make you feel better
Raindrops from your eyes
Washing all the mad out of you
Raindrops from your eyes
It's gonna make you feel better
It's all right to feel things
Though the feelings may be strange
Feelings are such real things
And they change and change and change

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Проект "Free to Be... You and Me" изначально появился в качестве детской книжки и пластинки в ноябре 1972, на фоне перевыборов Никсона. В предвыборной кампании этого года за публичные слезы поплатился сенатор из штата Мэн Эдмунд Маски. Маски был демократическим кандидатом в вице-президенты на выборах 1968 и рассматривался в качестве фаворита на выборах в президенты 1972, лидируя в ранних опросах. Кампания Никсона с ее организацией грязных трюков CREEP (Committee to RE-Elect President) опасалась Маски и предпринимала шаги, чтобы сбить его с дистанции на дальних подступах.

Из статьи "Dirty Tricks" 1973 года:

In February, 1972, New Hampshire voters received phone calls at night, often after midnight, from representatives of the “Harlem for Muskie Committee” who, in plainly “black” accents, promised Muskie would deliver “full justice for black people.” Then on Feb. 24-less than two weeks before the New Hampshire primary - came the clincher. On that day, The Manchester Union‐Leader published a letter from a “Paul Morrison” of Deerfield Beach, Fla., which said that Muskie, campaigning in Florida, had been asked what he knew about blacks. “He didn't have any in Maine a man with the Senator said. No blacks, but we have Cannocks [sic]. What did he mean? We asked - Mr. Muskie laughed and said come to New England and see.” Inspired by the letter, the paper ran a front page editorial headlined “Sen. Muskie Insults Franco‐Americans.” Two days later, Muskie wept while speaking in front of the Union‐Leader office. (Paul Morrison has never been found. Months later, Marilyn Berger of The Washington Post wrote that Kenneth Clawson, deputy director of communications at the White House, told her, “I wrote the letter.”)
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/22/archives/dirty-tricks.html

В той же статьи упоминается деятельность молодого сотрудника CREEP Роджера Стоуна, который был занят тем, что сбивал с дистанции Пита Макклоски, соперника Никсона на республиканских праймериз.

The projects carried out were varied and imaginative. Porter dispatched Roger Stone, the head of the District of Columbia Young Republicans, to New Hampshire to make a contribution to the McCloskey campaign on behalf of the Gay Liberation Front. (At the last moment, he balked at identifying himself as a homosexual and made the contribution in stead in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance.)



В истории есть не до конца проясненные моменты.

Рассказ о слезах Маски ("Muskie wept while speaking in front of the Union‐Leader office") мог быть вызван ложным впечатлением. Маски выступал необычно эмоционально, что сразу уловили репортеры, но после утверждал, что его единственной эмоцией был гнев, а вместо слез на лице были тающие снежинки от идущего в это время снегопада: "I did not cry. I know it is not easy to distinguish between anger on the verge of tears and crying, but there was no flow of tears …. There was melting snow. But I choked up in my anger, and it was a bad scene, whatever it was."

Как бы то ни было, история про слезы была раскручена журналистами и обрушила популярность Маски, в итоге вышибив его из президентской гонки.

"In defending his wife, Muskie broke down three times in as many minutes - uttering a few words and then standing silent in the near blizzard, rubbing at his face, his shoulders heaving, while he attempted to regain his composure sufficiently to speak."
The story - accompanied by a photo - ran under a four-column headline as the off-lead of the Sunday Washington Post and continued for 23 paragraphs inside. David Nyhan’s story, which described Muskie as “weeping silently,” was played even more prominently on the front page of the Boston Globe. The New York Times ran a photograph on page one but relegated the story to page 54, perhaps because reporter James M. Naughton cast his story around Muskie’s denunciation of Loeb and mentioned the tears and broken speech only once, in the sixth paragraph. The Washington Star used a UPI story on page two that noted in the eighth paragraph that Muskie was “visibly shaken,” but offered no further details.
Saturday night, CBS News had an arresting clip of the event, which Roger Mudd introduced by saying that Muskie, after denouncing Loeb, “suddenly became emotional and found it difficult to continue.” The screen was filled with Muskie’s face, his features contorted.
Watching it on a weekend visit home in Washington, political reporter Jack Germond, then with Gannett’s Washington bureau, instantly decided to fly back to New Hampshire because, he said, “I knew something was happening.”
Indeed it was. Within 24 hours, Muskie’s weeping became the focus of political talk, not just in New Hampshire, but everywhere the pattern of the developing presidential race was discussed. His tears were generally described as one of the contributing causes of his disappointing show- ing in the March 7 primary. Muskie beat McGovern by a margin of 46 to 37 percent, but his managers had publicized their goal of winning at least 50 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic vote. Underdog McGovern claimed that the results showed Muskie’s weakness and his own growing strength. Muskie never recovered from that Saturday in the snow.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/february-1987/the-story-that-still-nags-at-me/



Фальшивыми или нет были слезы Макси, несомненно фальшивым было письмо (Canuck letter), вызвавшее его эмоциональную реакцию . Есть основания полагать, что редактор газеты, опубликовавшей эту фальшивку, делал это по сговору с администрацией Никсона в обмен на помилование его "крыши" Джимми Хоффы, героя времен срастания мафии с профсоюзами.

Loeb was a prominent Republican, and his newspaper, the largest in Manchester, had long played a central role in presidential politics for the simple reason that the New Hampshire primary was then, as now, the first primary state to vote. The Teamsters loan so obligated Loeb to Hoffa that when the Teamsters boss went to federal prison a few years later, Loeb immediately began scheming for his release. He also demonstrated his fealty by flying a giant banner over the prison wishing Hoffa a happy birthday.
Loeb’s first bright idea was to bribe J. Edgar Hoover, the legendary head of the FBI, into fabricating evidence that Hoffa had been illegally wire-tapped by Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department, thinking such evidence might overturn his conviction and trigger his release. Loeb made his bribe offer over the phone to Hoover’s number two, Cartha (“Deke”) DeLoach, offering $100,000. Loeb told DeLoach that Hoover could either keep the money for himself or, alternatively, that Loeb would direct it to Hoover’s favorite charity. Hoover declined and DeLoach later testified about the call.
When that attempt failed, Loeb’s next stop was the White House. He wrote a letter to Nixon’s campaign chair and attorney general, John Mitchell, claiming that the president was in “political trouble,” and that he, Loeb, was more than willing to help, but “By God, I expect something in return.” The existence of this letter eventually became known because Arthur Egan, Loeb’s top investigative reporter, shared the information with a man named Edward Partin, the government’s main witness in the Hoffa case. What Loeb wanted from the White House - had wanted for years - was Hoffa’s early release from prison. What Mitchell and presumably Nixon himself wanted in return was dirt on Muskie. Muskie was a well-respected centrist Democrat with a clean record, so any dirt would have to be fabricated.
Thus was born the quid pro quo: dirt on Muskie for a pardon for Hoffa. Nixon executed his part of the bargain at the end of 197I, awarding Hoffa a “Christmas clemency” on December 23. Hoffa walked out of Lewisburg prison the same day. Once outside the prison’s walls, Hoffa’s first telephone call was to Loeb. The second half of the quid pro quo would come two months later in the midst of the New Hampshire primary, even though no one other than the principals knew at the time that the two events were connected. It turns out that while the details of Hoffa’s executive clemency were being hammered out in the White House, Nixon’s reelection campaign headquarters were busy working on a fake letter to sabotage Muskie. The notion was that Loeb would hold onto the fabricated letter and then “drop” it at the most propitious moment on the unsuspecting Democratic frontrunner. It was a matter of exquisite timing, much like the 2016 drop of John Podesta’s emails just hours after Trump’s mortifying Access Hollywood tape (“grab them by the pussy”) broke in the news.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2019/12/19/history-rhymes-trumps-quid-pro-quo-reprises-nixons/

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"Грязные трюки", которые помогли Никсону выиграть 49 штатов в 1972 - явление более эфемерное, чем культурные сдвиги, которые помогли Рейгану выиграть 49 штатов в 1984. Культурный разворот 1980ых включал в себя анти-феминистскую контрреволюцию и попытку утвердить традиционную гендерную иерархию во главе с брутальными мужчинами, чуждыми размазыванию слез и соплей.

Выступая на праздничном банкете по случаю победы над ERA, Филис Шлафли рассказывала про плачущих мужчин - членов законодательного собрания Иллинойса, которые не нашли в себе силы противостоять давлению либералов и проголосовать против ERA: "I have seen grown man in our legislature - the ones who caved in - with tears rolling down their cheeks because they caved in, and they knew it was wrong but they had to vote yes."



Среди участников банкета был Джордж Гилдер, представитель явления экономического прометейства - манеры откапывать псевдоэкспертов, которые подводили бы базу под политические маневры вроде урезания налогов. Книжка Гилдера "Wealth and Poverty" популяризировала "supply-side economics" - псевдонаучную идею стимулирования экономики и общественной морали путем урезания налогов и социальных программ.

Andrew Carnegie, Wealth, 1889 PEOPLE magazine immortalized his Massachusetts homestead. Money is doing his finances. He has peered out of the pages of both Time and Newsweek, been profiled by the Washington Post, and cross-examined by both Bill Buckley and 60 Minutes. When the restless eye of the media decides to focus, there is no fooling around.
The object of all this publicity is a 41-year-old writer named George Gilder, an unlikely literary lion whose new book, ''Wealth and Poverty,'' has been embraced by Washington with a warmth not seen since the Kennedys adopted John Kenneth Galbraith.
This latest marriage of power and the pen has been blessed by President Reagan, who has given copies of the book to friends. William J. Casey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the book would ''serve as an inspiration and guide for the new Administration.'' And David A. Stockman, the President's budget adviser, proclaimed the book ''Promethean'' in power and insight.
''Wealth and Poverty'' has already sold some 135,000 copies, making it one of Basic Books's hottest items ever. Mr. Gilder attributes its success to Mr. Stockman, ''for editing and selling it.'' The young head of the Office of Management and Budget planned to give a copy to each of the 15 members of the new Reagan Cabinet before the press conference introducing them.
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/26/business/george-gilder-s-hymn-to-getting-rich.html



Идеи Гилдера в области экономики трудно отделить от его героизации традиционного роли мужчины-добытчика, который уходит зарабатывать деньги, оставляя дома жену рожать детей. По всей видимости помогло то, что Гилдер вырос в семье без отца.

Most critics have described ''Wealth and Poverty'' as an emotional, though often eloquent, rehash of the supply-side economic theories originated by Arthur Laffer, the economist, and Jude Wanniski, an economic consultant. (The Gilders' Norwegian elkhound is named "Laffer," and his tail is "the Laffer curve.") But the economics comes in an ideological fruitcake that many find hard to swallow.
The book's success has startled even its publisher. (Mr. Gilder's previous book, "Visible Man," a two-year study of poverty, sold little more than 500 copies.) For better or worse, "Wealth and Poverty" has struck a chord.
Not since the Gilded Age of the late 1800's has anyone advanced so enthusiastic an endorsement of capitalism and capitalists. At a time when even free enterprise's champions limit themselves to two cheers for capitalism, George Gilder has written an unabashed prose hymn to making money.
Like Andrew Carnegie and the Horatio Alger heroes, Mr. Gilder believes that the finest thing a man can do for society is to accumulate wealth. Fortunes, in his view, are acquired by providing desired goods and services, and are spent on new entrepreneurial ventures, the engines that generate growth and general prosperity in the future. Pursuit of one's own material self-interest is a force for social good.
The capitalist instinct is itself a moral one, Mr. Gilder writes. The entrepreneurial act rests on faith, courageous risk-taking, and an ''altruism'' that calls forth investments, or "gifts," without an assured return. <...>
Paradoxically, while Mr. Gilder celebrates capitalism as a creative, energy-releasing system, he envisages a limited place for women and a hard row to hoe for poor minorities. His capitalism is for men, driven by the need to support wives and families. Without that discipline, Mr. Gilder explained in earlier books entitled ''Sexual Suicide'' and ''Naked Nomads,'' men drift into licentiousness and jungle stupor.
Women, on the other hand, should pursue their primary roles as wives and mothers. That women earn less than men, Mr. Gilder insists, is entirely due to their being less aggressive and less hard-working. It was opinions like these that earned Mr. Gilder Time magazine's award of "male chauvinist pig of the year."
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/26/business/george-gilder-s-hymn-to-getting-rich.html

Gilder was honored by the Eagle Forum for "his unique eloquence, good sense and good humor in defending the American family and for his courageous manliness in enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous feminists."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1982/07/01/schlaflys-gala-goodbye-to-era/511e3e69-fe30-475e-b133-97ad78a9a008/



Культурная контрреволюция в переходе от Картера к Рейгану во второй половине 1970ых дала вторую жизнь такой организации, как NRA. NRA существовала давно, но была просто клубом для охотников и любителей пострелять в тире в качестве хобби. Они поддерживали разумные ограничения на продажу оружия и планировали перенести штаб-квартиру в Колорадо, поближе к природе. Но в 1977 произошел путч в руководстве с целью сохранить NRA в Вашингтоне и превратить ее в бескомпромиссную и влиятельную лоббистскую силу. Ключевую роль сыграл однофамилец президента, бывший техасский пограничник Харлон Картер. В 1980 Рейган стал первым кандидатом в президенты, поддержанным NRA на выборах.

Throughout the 1970s, the NRA’s sportsmen tried keeping their organization apolitical. They purchased 77,000 acres in New Mexico for what they called a National Outdoors Center-not shooting center. They proposed moving national headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Colorado Springs. And, reflecting Washington’s lobbying boom, they established an Institute for Legislative Action in 1975 headed by Carter. That move doomed them.
Carter wanted to “win” the gun control battle “on a simple concept: No Compromise. No gun legislation.” Unsettled by his extremism, Old Guard leaders fired 74 employees. Mimicking the left’s histrionics, evoking Watergate’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” Carter and his allies mourned this “Weekend Massacre.” Carter was too popular in the NRA to be fired. He resigned in protest-and sought revenge.
At the next annual meeting, in May 1977, Carter choreographed his Cincinnati Revolt. The rebels worked the Cincinnati Convention-Exposition Center floor wielding orange hunting caps and walkie talkies. “Beginning in this place and at this hour, this period in NRA history is finished,” Carter thundered as a rank-and-file up in arms dumped the Old Guard. He became executive vice president. NRA headquarters remained in Washington. “This is where the action is,” he explained.
Harlon Carter’s timing was perfect. The weak leadership, wild inflation, social chaos, and foreign policy humiliations of Jimmy Carter’s presidency were rousing conservatives. That year, Ed Koch, born 11 years after Carter, became New York’s mayor, vowing to impose “law and order.” In 1978, Howard Jarvis, born a decade before Carter in Utah, led the Proposition 13 Revolt against California’s crushing property taxes. And by 1980, Ronald Reagan, born two years before Carter, had won the presidency-benefitting from the NRA’s first presidential endorsement ever. These and other members of the World War II generation believed they were restoring the values, patriotism, and order that the baby boomer rebels born in the 1940s and 1950s trashed.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-teen-killer-who-radicalized-the-nra

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He had the makings of a leader
Of a certain kind of men
Who need to feel the world's against him
Out to get 'em if it can
Men whose trigger pull their fingers
Of men who'd rather fight than win
United in a revolution
Like in mind and like in skin

В 1981 Картер признался, что 50 лет назад застрелил мексиканского подростка.

The head of the National Rifle Association, Harlon B. Carter, acknowledged today that he shot and killed a Hispanic youth in 1931 and said that he regretted the killing.
"I continue to regret the incident deeply as would anyone where a fatality is involved," Mr. Carter, 67 years old, said in a statement issued by his Washington office.
(When The New York Times asked Mr. Carter last week about the killing, he declined to discuss it, saying that while he had "nothing to hide" he was "not going to rehash that case or any other that does not relate to the National Rifle Association at this time.")
Mr. Carter, then 17, was convicted in 1931 of murdering a 15-year-old Mexican boy, Ramon Casiano, in Laredo, Tex., and was sentenced to three years in jail. Mr. Carter testified at his trial that he had fired his shotgun after the boy threatened him with a knife.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the conviction on the ground that the trial judge had not given jurors adequate instruction on the law of self-defense.
Mr. Carter said that the action of the appeals court and subsequent dismissal of charges by the state's attorney demonstrated that the killing "did not involve culpability on my part."
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/05/06/us/leader-of-rifle-group-affirms-that-he-shot-bot-to-death-in-1931.html

1979: End of ERA
Standing at the podium at an anti-Equal Rights Amendment dinner in Washington are, from left: Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), activist Phyllis Schlafly, and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT), March 22, 1979. #StopERA pic.twitter.com/lMmPwdZisW
- Eagle Forum (@EagleForum) March 22, 2020

У сенаторов Джесси Хелмса и Оррина Хэтча, соратников Филис Шлафли по культурной контрреволюции, была своя история про слезы - но не мужские, а женские.

In a widely publicized incident on July 22, 1993, Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman in the Senate and the only black Senator at the time, reported that Helms deliberately sought to offend her by singing "Dixie" in her presence. After Moseley Braun persuaded the Senate to vote against Helms's amendment to extend the patent of the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia, which included the Confederate flag, Mosely Braun claims that Helms ran into her in an elevator. Helms turned to Senator Orrin Hatch and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries." He then proceeded to sing the song about "the good life" during slavery to Moseley Braun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Helms

Оррин Хэтч, которому было суждено проработать в Сенате 42 года - дольше любого другого республиканского сенатора и стать старейшиной (временным президентом Сената) при Трампе, после выбора Рейгана возглавил сенатскую комиссию, которая выдала заключение, что Вторая поправка к Конституции, в которой говорится о "well regulated militia", подразумевает на самом деле абсолютность права каждого гражданина на владение оружием.

In 1981, Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in 24 years. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch became chair of a key Judiciary Committee panel, where he commissioned a study on “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” In a breathless tone it announced, “What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear-and long lost-proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The cryptologist discovering invisible writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence in the Disney movie National Treasure could not have said it better.
Despite Hatch’s dramatic “discovery,” a constitutional right to gun ownership was still a stretch, even for the conservatives in Reagan’s Justice Department, who were reluctant to undo the work not only of judges, but also of democratically elected legislators. When Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, commissioned a comprehensive strategy for jurisprudential change in 15 areas ranging from the “exclusionary rule” under the Fourth Amendment to public initiatives to private religious education, it did not include a plan for the Second Amendment.
But in time, the NRA’s power to elect presidents began to shift executive branch policies, too. In 2000, gun activists strongly backed Governor George W. Bush of Texas. After the election, Bush’s new attorney general, John Ashcroft, reversed the Justice Department’s stance. The NRA’s head lobbyist read the new policy aloud at its 2001 convention in Kansas City: “The text and original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.”
In the meantime, the “individual right” argument was starting to win in another forum: public opinion. In 1959, according to a Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans favored banning handguns; that dropped to 41 percent by 1975 and 24 percent in 2012. By early 2008, according to Gallup, 73 percent of Americans believed the Second Amendment “guaranteed the rights of Americans to own guns” outside the militia.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/nra-guns-second-amendment-106856_Page3.html

Юридическая эквилибристика при поддержке NRA навсегда изменили интерпретацию вопроса об оружии, превратив его в элемент культурной войны. Любые попытки контролировать продажу оружия можно было отныне представлять попытками либералов покуситься на исконные права и свободы.



Вопрос о достаточной "мужественности" кандидата в президенты вновь всплыл в 1988. Буш-старший был героем войны и бывшим директором ЦРУ, но в представлении обывателя ему не хватало брутальности голливудского актера Рейгана.

Брутальный имидж добавили по совету Роджера Эйлса, заставив Буша членораздельно произнести "Read ... my ... lips", прищурив глаза на манер Клинта Иствуда в роли Грязного Гарри.

In early August 1988, Richard G. Darman got his first serious look at a draft of Vice President Bush's upcoming speech for the Republican National Convention. It contained the now-famous campaign promise: "Read my lips: no new taxes."
For Darman, who aspired to be budget director in a Bush administration, such a pledge would be preposterous. It was Darman's view that Bush, if elected, would surely need the option of new or increased taxes because of the growing federal budget deficit.
Darman immediately told speechwriter Peggy Noonan and media consultant Roger Ailes that such a pledge would be "stupid and irresponsible," according to sources and participants in the decision-making about Bush's speech. As the designated editor, Darman struck the phrase from Noonan's draft.
Noonan and Ailes protested. The bold pronouncement was central to refashioning Bush's image and changing the perception of him as weak and loyal to the point of subservience.
"The Clint Eastwood factor," said Ailes, explaining that they were taking their "Read My Lips" cue from the actor's tough-guy "Dirty Harry" movies. <...>
Aides took the speech text and the cuing material and wrote in the proper pauses after each word so it would come out with at least a semblance of the Eastwood flare.
Bush was to say, "The Congress will push me to raise taxes, and I'll say no, and they'll push, and I'll say no, and they'll push again. And all I can say to them is:
"Read (pause) My (pause) Lips (longer pause): No (pause) New (pause) Taxes."
Ailes proved correct: The six words were picked up as the key sound bite. Focus groups of voters around the country, set up by the Bush campaign to measure reaction to the speech, registered the highest positive response by far to the six words.
Urged by Teeter, Ailes and his other campaign advisers, Bush capitalized on the popularity of the phrase and repeated it in one form or another almost everywhere he spoke over the next 12 weeks until Election Day.
After the victory, Teeter polled, asking voters what they remembered Bush saying during the campaign. The most common answer was "Read my lips: no new taxes."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/10/04/origin-of-the-tax-pledge/b669c4fc-79b2-4d2d-8289-c0398e3e2895/

Одновременно имидж Майкла Дукакиса был замазан тем, что он выглядел смешно, сидя в танке в танковом шлеме, на чем от души оттопталась операция Ли Этуотера. Байка про оружие тоже пришлась кстати.

One of the crowd’s largest rounds of applause occurred when Bush repeated a Dukakis quote in which the Massachusetts governor was cited as opposing gun ownership for all but police officers and the military.
“That is not the American way!” Bush shouted. “That is not the Texas way! And I feel just the opposite!”
Bush approached the amphitheater in a two-barge flotilla that traveled down the river through downtown San Antonio.
Crowds lining the river greeted the vice president with cheers.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-26-mn-1151-story.html



Тем не менее культура ожидания мужской брутальности и женской безмолвной покорности к этому времени начала понемногу испаряться. В конце 1980ых на телевидении появились комедийные сериалы "The Simpsons" (идущий до сих пор) и "Married with children". Стандартная американская ячейка общества белого среднего класса - семья с работающим отцом-добытчиком и матерью-домохозяйкой - представлялась в них в пародийном виде.

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Фильм 1983 года "A Christmas story" ностальгически показывает традиционную семью из американской глубинки и неопределенно-далеком прошлом, когда отец служил добытчиком, а мальчик мечтал о стреляющем ружье в качестве подарка на Рождество. В фильме 1988 года "Die Hard" действие тоже происходит на Рождество. Но у героя-полицейского Джона Макклейна разрушена патриархальность семьи - жена делает карьеру в международной корпорации и зарабатывает больше него. И при всей его брутальности герой Брюса Виллиса вдруг оказывается не лишенным человеческих чувств и не удерживается от слез - как от физической боли, так и от боли сочувствия.

"It’s rare in film to see a man show pain doing something painful, whether it’s pulling glass from your foot or listening to a child tell you about their day. But Bruno is up to the task, perhaps because his scene partner is someone he truly respects…himself. Looking at his reflection while talking to Urkel’s neighbour on a walkie-talkie, he holds back tears and digs his bloody fingers into wounds to pull out the shards that have been embedded in his feet."
https://www.headstuff.org/entertainment/humour/top-5-moments-of-men-crying-in-a-film/

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MCCLANE
(long pause)
Look...I'm getting a bad feeling up
here...I'd like you to do something
for me. Look up my wife...don't ask
how, you'll know by then...and tell
her...tell her...I've been a jerk.
When things panned out for her, I
should've been behind her all the way
...We had something great going until
I screwed it up...She was the best
thing that ever happened to a bum
like me. She's heard me say I love
you a thousand times, but she never
got to hear this...honey...I'm sorry.
(pause)
You get all that?
POWELL
(clearly touched)
I got it. But you can tell her
yourself. Just watch your ass and
you'll make it.
MCCLANE
I hope so. But that's up to the
guy upstairs.
(pause; struck by
a thought)
Upstairs...
(thinking, to himself)
...Hans, you bastard...what were you
doing?

https://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Die-Hard.html



Действие этого необычного рожденственского фильма происходит между Нью-Йорком и Лос-Анджелесом, за пределами "коробки" Финкельштейна.

Finkelstein uses a simple graphic device to show his Republican candidates, geographically, just how differentiated the country is. Put a pen point on Washington, D.C., and draw your way across a map of the continental United States, edging up between Iowa and Nebraska, running through the Dakotas and Montana, dropping down through Washington and Oregon and along the western border of Nevada into California, and then heading back east, with the tips of Texas and Florida south of the line. The box that results leaves you with two different political countries.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/06/the-southern-captivity-of-the-gop/377123/

В следующие тридцать лет культурный разрыв между прибрежными "элитами" и преимущественно южной глубинкой продолжал увеличиваться, закончившись в итоге моральным тупиком.

Trump won’t stop saying he makes big, strong men cry pic.twitter.com/twAbOTQiiK
- NowThis (@nowthisnews) October 6, 2019