Two weeks after the attacks of 9/11 created a Ground Zero in New York, I went looking for the emotional Ground Zero in the suburbs. I found it in Middletown, N.J., only 20 miles across the bay in physical distance but as remote as one of the Trobriand Islands in its complacent consciousness. That was, Read More
Politicians and others capitalize on it and use it, but the American Death Cult is a folk phenomenon. It's a syncretic rite taking from this and that, not unlike a bird's nest which contains odd bits of things made by human hands that don't seem to go together, but do. There is a bit of Read More
Oklahoma City , Okla . - This city has helped New York over and over in the last nine months. It sent counselors and victims' family members to talk to New York survivors. It sent boxes filled with teddy bears, the Oklahoma talisman of healing.
Now, as New York considers what sort of memorial to Sept. Read MoreThe world has changed since Sept. 11-or so the
commentators keep telling us. Everything is altered, nothing is the same as before, all is irretrievably different since the planes flew into the World Trade Center. "Everything changed": This phrase has been shouted from every media rooftop in America, and it simply isn't true. For those who Read MoreThe sociologist Alan Wolfe, who has just written a book, seems to have found a common belief system of the middle class, a kind of cool centrism that holds the country together despite the bombings of abortion clinics, the military games of the Christian identity groups, the race-tinted glasses we all wore during the O.J. Read More
