Slate staff members discuss the current crisis.

Dear Moira,

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I don't understand your schadenfreude after the worst terrorist attack in history. We're quite accustomed to terrorism here. Have you heard of Oklahoma City or Olympic Park or abortion clinic bombings or EgyptAir Flight 990? But the scope and the scale of this tragedy go beyond those incidents, and beyond anything the world has seen before. This hasn't happened anywhere else.

But I'll let your people in the Fray speak for me. A.G. Android nails it when he writes: "it's not really arrogance. It's more like a feeling that once again our forbearance is being presumed upon. After an attack of this magnitude, most great nations would do as Rome did to Carthage.

"The United States absolutely could do that. It could kill pretty much everyone in every Muslim country in the world, with an effort less than it put out in World War Two. Nobody could stop it, and nobody could do much about it. (Or, to be brutally honest, would bother to try). A billion people dead, and a desert we could call peace. Islam as a culture exists entirely on American sufferance at this point.

"Now be clear: not only am I not advocating that, but no American (except maybe Ann Coulter) is either. But every American knows that the only reason that this isn't happening is because we don't want it to happen. ... We haven't dropped a single bomb yet, and when we do it will be much more narrowly targeted.

"This being the case, the ceaseless complaints about American 'arrogance' and 'bullying' that we hear from people in other countries ring rather hollow. Those calls mostly involve, when you look behind them, American refusals to be bullied into doing things that we don't want to do, which is an odd form of bullying indeed."

Or try this from Quintus Slide:

"Imagine this: Your spouse is dying. I appear at her deathbed to inform you matter-of-factly that other spouses have died before. And after she has died, I decline to honor her death, but instead elect to honor the death of All the Spouses Who Have Gone Before."

Or Thrasymachus:

"The rest of the world is welcome to draw global lessons about the ephemerality of humanity and its works, universal suffering, and man's abiding inhumanity to man; but surely Americans can't be blamed if they take all this a bit personally. It's dastardly hard to maintain a philosophical perspective under the circumstances (or, for that matter, under the swirling cloud of dust and particulate debris that blankets lower Manhattan to this day).

"Also, as you pointed out, the death toll was shockingly, unprecedentedly high. The WTC attack wasn't just the biggest terrorist attack in American history; it was the biggest terrorist attack in history. Period. By a factor of six."

Moira, I don't know what the U.S. should do next. And your questions about civil liberties and the relief fund and Gordon Sinclair are legitimate. But it's petty and small to sneer at a funeral.

Sincerely,
Chris

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