Some years ago, at the University of California, San Diego, a young woman raised her hand in the middle of a seminar I was then teaching on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian Era. She seemed genuinely disturbed by something. « I know you’re all going to think this is crazy, » she said, « but I always thought Jesus was an American. »
A lovely moment. What she had articulated, as succinctly as I had ever heard it articulated, was the spirit behind three and a half centuries of American history: America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation. What she expressed, with an almost poetic compaction, was the core myth of America. […]
So much for globalism. What bothered me, however, was not so much the bald fact of our tribalism (which I found natural and excusable) as the hypocrisy with which we had denied it. What troubled me, specifically, was the kind of Benetton tokenism that allowed us to parade our global sympathies because we had eaten in a Sudanese restaurant last week, or featured a woman from Senegal in one of our ads. If we were going to weep for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center and not for the dead of Srebrenica, it seemed to me, then we should have the courage to admit where the frontiers of our allegiance lay. […]
How close, exactly, did tragedy have to come for us to bleed? Did we have to smell the smoke to have our imagination and our compassion activated? Did the victims have to be American? Or speak English? Was that enough? Or did they, perhaps, have to look like us as well? Was it possible, in other words, just possible, that our reaction to the tragedy was not wholly about those who had died – whom 99.9 percent of us had never known anyway – but about us? That what moved us, finally, what woke us up to the fact that people had died – unexpectedly and tragically – was the uncomfortable thought that « we » might? It was a bit of a shock. Here in America, under the protective eye of Jesus, we could die. Now that « was » worth a crisis of faith.
From A year later: Notes on America’s intimations of mortality, by Mark Slouka, published in September 2002 in Harper’s Magazine. It is the smartest and the most sensible piece I have read so far on the subject of the September 11th 2001 attacks.
