Appeals To The Past Are Among The

There Is Also This Great Sense Of Triumphalism, That Just As We Defeated The Soviet Union, We Can Do This. And Out Of This Sense Of Desperation And Pathological Religion, There Develops An All-encompassing Drive To Harm And Hurt, Without Regard For The Innocent And The Uninvolved, Which Was The Case In New York.

And In This Relentlessly Unfolding Series Of Interactions, The U.s. Has Played A Very Distinctive Role, Which Most Americans Have Been Either Shielded From Or Simply Unaware Of.

... The Connection Between Imperial Politics And Culture Is Astonishingly Direct. American Attitudes To American "greatness", To Hierarchies Of Race, To The Perils Of "other" Revolutions (the American Revolution Being Considered Unique And Somehow Unrepeatable Anywhere Else In The World) Have Remained Constant, Have Dictated, Have Obscured, The Realities Of Empire, While Apologists For Overseas American Interests Have Insisted On American Innocence, Doing Good, Fighting For Freedom.

Speaking As A New Yorker, I Found It A Shocking And Terrifying Event [9/11], Particularly The Scale Of It. At Bottom, It Was An Implacable Desire To Do Harm To Innocent People. It Was Aimed At Symbols: The World Trade Center, The Heart Of American Capitalism, And The Pentagon, The Headquarters Of The American Military Establishment.

I Have Never Known What Is Arabic Or English, Or Which One Was Really Mine Beyond Any Doubt. What I Do Know, However, Is That The Two Have Always Been Together In My Life, One Resonating In The Other, Sometimes Ironically, Sometimes Nostalgically, Most Often Each Correcting, And Commenting On, The Other. Each Can Seem Like My Absolutely First Language, But Neither Is.