you've been waitin - albeit without a lot of patience - so let me go the other way. meditating on 9.11, i'd say that, as a country and as a government, our response was an extreme freakout. at the time people were so bewildered that they said things like 'this changes everything,' and over the last decade we've basically figured out how: we used it to drive an extreme buildup of state power and projection of it around the world: the us has tried to become an international police state. one of the least savory aspects was getting entwined with the most vicious regimes in the world (including gaddafi's, but also mubarak's and assad's and saleh's), which we figured could be of use because they could torture with impunity. also we managed to establish or beef up some of the world's most corrupt governments: afghanistan's and pakistan's, for instance. we established a gulag of secret prisons and torture facilities, and anyone who simply believes on the basis of their assurances that the obama administration has ended such programs is naive. we created surveillance programs, foreign and domestic, comparable in the electronic age to the stasi or kgb nightmares.
in short: first, we showed ourselves to be cowards, in that the reaction was a twitching irrational panic. we showed ourselves to be incredibly spoiled: we wanted only to be safe, even in a situation that did not threaten the safety of most people at all. (now when obama or anyone else says 'the first obligation of the government is to keep americans safe, it is a mere commonplace.) we showed ourselves to have progressed far beyond the values on which our country was founded. we showed that we are lovers or worshipers of authority: all we wanted was for dick cheney to protect us from the outside world and from each other. if we're now in a profound economic decline, this is an image of our profound moral decline: how far we have come from an ethic of frontier self-reliance and so on. we responded by acts of extreme oppression and pathetic mewling fear.
the fear and the oppression feed on each other. if america is in decline, we have shown elaborately that we deserve to be.
