Here is Cogitating Peter celebrating The American Wound, as if the suffering and death of Americans is deeply wrong, as opposed to the suffering and death of a category of beings designated as Other. Although the deaths of the Other is not so momentously, melodramatically or grievously, brutally enacted, except the, now, infamous drone attacks on innocent victims identified as ‘Collateral Damage’. September 11, 2001 was engineered to fit into the mold of the World Historical, as played out in full view of the unblinking eye of television, and its demand for the arresting images of cataclysm, played out in real time before the shocked gaze of millions, and endlessly, numbingly replayed. As the towers fell so did the idea and practice of American Invincibility on the world stage, and so most tellingly did the Republic begin its final decline into cultivated political irrationalism: the triumph of notion of the unending War on Terror began here and its corollary of domestic political oppression, The Patriot Act . How can one make war on an idea? One could have begun by simply discussing this heinous act of criminal violence as the act of stateless criminal actors. But the opportunity that offered itself to the Neo-Conservatives in the Bush Administration was too good. The project to remake the ‘Middle East’ was a policy opportunity, shaped by a random murderous event in history.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/02/after-september-11-pankaj-mishra
Compare Cogitating Peter’s short but well worn collection of phrases and just the just plain lazy opinionating, in the current mode of American Exceptionalist parameters, with this essay by Pankaj Mishra at the Guardian.
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