Post-9/11 Prescription

Empire, Thrown down gauntlet 1 Minute
  1. Commemoration over; let’s get healthy!
  2. Take your medicine.
  3. Get a life.
  4. Get a new perspective.
  5. Get sober.

1

Kathleen Parker wrote yesterday on An America That No Longer Knows Itself.

We stumble at last upon a purpose for columnists — to say that which no one else dares.
…
At the risk of sounding bossy: America, heal thyself. Please.

There’s a similar purpose for bloggers.

2

First, take your medicine from Dr. Paul:

(HT Mike Bennett)

3

Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University is probably the best-known scholar holding forth periodically at Front Porch Republic. His thoughts about post-9/11 America are a stinging but apt indictment.

I think we should add eyes glued to reality TV to abandoned farms and crowded casinos as signs of our state of hope and despair.

So, next: Turn the damned thing off.

4

After you’ve turned off reality TV and regained human consciousness, you’ll need to regain a worldview. Since everything comes in sound bites today, I commend as your prototype worldview one of the post-9/11 epigrams posted by Jim Bovard at The American Conservative blog, of which my three favorites are:

    • The U.S. government is far more efficient at making enemies than at defending Americans.
    • Killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans.
    • A lie that is accepted by a sufficient number of ignorant voters becomes a political truth.

Sound bits and epigrams are worldviews with training wheels, but ya gotta start somewhere.

5

Speaking of killing foreigners, Marc Bousquet at the Brainstorm blog charts civilian casualties of 9/11, the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq. Read it and get sober:

Want to double down, yet again, on that “they only hate us because we’re good, and noble, and free” thing?

Maybe I should have asked for the wager at the beginning of the blog.

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