A Website of the Radical Imagination
I came here tonight to talk about the response of American intellectuals to the events of September 11—and I use the neutral, meaningless term “events” to start off right where any intellectual response begins, with an attempt to name what took place, or to avoid naming it. We are all familiar with the words that … Read more
A couple of days after the attacks on the World Trade Center, a number of NYU students were wearing white ribbons in solidarity with the dead firemen. A friend who teaches there was fascinated to see undergraduates singing “God Bless America” in Washington Square Park, a spectacle she could not have imagined forty-eight hours before. … Read more
Bin Laden seems to have acquired his political ethics through religious rhythms coursing through his region of the world. Though I am an aging and settled secular person, quite a few of the people whose strivings I admire have drawn on sundry religious ways of being. The fact that I cannot emulate them in my … Read more
The author was in NYC from Sept. 9th to Sept. 15th and this piece was written in the week after the attack. A few days after the event, the New York Times ran an interesting article on the advertising “industry” and its crisis. Not only zillions of dollars a day etc. etc., but a weird … Read more
I’m all for enduring freedoms here and worldwide. I’m for finite human justice, “patient justice” (Bush) as a path toward peace, and Gaia’s Infinite Justice too. I want terrorists, war criminals, mass murderers of all sorts turned over to a world court for trials and punishment. Sometimes I can think I’m on the same page … Read more
On September 11, the question whether there would be war was, by 0900 hours, settled. But people didn’t know what was needed right away; and so they hurried to give blood, and all the city’s hospital beds were made ready for the wounded. Given the peculiarities of this first battle, however, the donors were turned … Read more
A few months before her death, Ellen Willis emailed to say pieces by Charles O’Brien andFredric Smoler on the Danish Cartoon Controversy posted on this site were “good.” (That was high praise from Ellen whose mode of approbation was the opposite of American idolaters.) Struck by how much those pieces “echoed themes” in what she’d … Read more