Why Do (Some) Women Obsessively Post Pictures Of Themselves?

One eloquent answer to the question in the title was provided by a woman friend: "If society, and men in particular, valued women more in terms of intelligence, kindness, abilities, and talents, obsessive selfie-posting would vanish."

I understand her point, although absent a change in how women are valued, the vanishing has yet to be proven. Responses tend not to be quite as automatic and uniform as my friend thinks.

Now, I understand perfectly well that our society puts a premium on a particular set of fashionable female looks. These have varied from age to age, from Rubenesque to Twiggy. There isn't one objective standard of female beauty, or of beauty in general.

When a woman's body fits the recipe of the day, it results in male attention (wanted and unwanted), sometimes jobs, and other benefits. The "uglies" are shunted aside.

None of this is new to me. I was first exposed to feminism in 1972 by a very good woman I was dating,, who inspired me to read most of the feminist canon of the day. 

The result was that I felt quite guilty. My girlfriend Doreen was, to me, akin to Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai calling to my attention that I had been trained to be a Tsarist officer, in other words, a man trained to be a male chauvinist, even if I didn't realize it. It's not something you just shuck off easily.

Over the years, however, the childhood "womenist" stance I adopted when my father abandoned my mother and me, flourished with Doreen and further experiences into a well-founded ingrained intellectual attitude that I would describe as "feminist" from a somewhat reformed man. Certainly, I recognize the importance of abortion rights and equal pay as public planks that must be a prominent part of any progressive agenda. Also, I recognize that certain customs concerning women, including especially body over brain, need to change.

This is precisely why I find the obsessive selfies appalling! It's a step backward.

A young woman may be unable to change human history, but she can change her own life. As a Hispanic of Argentine origin, who has lived in both the USA and Argentina, I know perfectly well about being told to be someone that society wants and choosing my own path. 

The desire to be beautiful as society wants is a skewed idea.  Just as the desire to be successful the way society wants. What is beauty and success other than a social convention? At a defined point in adolescence and youth, each of us has the challenge of deciding for ourselves. This is a reasonable challenge, it's about becoming truly your own person.

A young woman may be unable to change customs that come down from millennia, but she can change her own life. 

There is a lot to be changed in society and I think feminism is doing a good job of identifying some of the things that most concern women. There's a conservative and regressive pull right now that must be fought by all. It's not just a war against women, it's a war against the 99%. We have to hold fast on these issues.

The idea of getting validation, or social acceptance, is a foolhardy goal. In my more devoutly religious days, I thought God was the only one whose acceptance I needed. The Quakers have a less religious view in seeing the spirit of God and Her wondrous love in the hearts of each one of us, regardless of creed. 

Let women, young and older, seek their own heart's acceptance above all. Toss out the cosmetics (even the antiperspirants)! Dress for yourself, without regard to fashion. In the same vein, men need to cultivate their inner selves by crying when needed, by accepting vulnerability, by declining to be money machines. No more fake stoicism, going to war and brawls and running the rat race. 

Labels to Respect

Woke, Antifa, Feminists, are a few of the labels coined in recent years for people who believe that humans should be equal before the law and treated with respect by all their fellow humans, regardless of traits, especially those that don't harm anyone and are largely involuntary.

Do you really want a society that pretends to be about equality but is not?

Do you really want to be ruled by someone whose mere whims are more powerful than reason?

Do you really want women to be barefoot and pregnant servants of men?

I didn't think so.

Let's try to be more respectful of feminists, small-d democrats who are willing to stop creeping authoritarianism, and folks who insist on being aware of ethnic prejudice in our society.

Is it me or is it The World?

You've probably experienced it: the browser gets syrupy, the OS hangs, your body makes a new demand you hadn't experienced before, no one understands you. Just because they're after you doesn't mean you're not paranoid.

So what is it and what do you? I wish I knew.

OK, yes, you just stop. You go play a computer game that works.

Praying to the Divine Lady

Here's a secret trick for praying: pray to Our Mother in Heaven. No, not the BVM that Catholics may recall from childhood, the real God just anthropomorphized as a woman, a caring mother.

Most of us know a caring mother. We know a mother who gave us life in a co-creative experience. We know a mother who laid down the law and spanked us or sent us to our room, a corner, or whatever. We know of a mother who accepted and forgave everything, without for a second forgetting. We know of a mother who was ready to give her life for ours, one who indeed did give her life, by devoting much of hers to us. 

This is much better than the usual experience with fathers. Many fathers leave, uncaring for anyone but themselves. Many others are distracted by their workplace, their own ambitions, their wants. Fathers can teach, can love in a more tough-love way. Fathers can seem all-powerful. But they can't God-like no matter how they try.

God the Father is a human image. God does not have a penis. Yes, God the Mother does not have a vagina, either. God could be an It. More likely than not, God's being is so unique it is closer to an It than a Him or a Her. 

God might as well be dog spelled backward, for all we know. God might bound over and lick us when we come home.

For now, I'll stick with anthropomorphizing, A human-like God is more accessible. It's only an image, a persona, if you will. No one has seen God (for the Bible-minded, see Exodus 33:20-23, 1 Corinthians 1:21, John 1:18, 1 John 4:12).

So, why not imagine Her as the beautiful Mother in the sky, among the twinkling stars!

Reminder About My Book

Here's the original "press release"

 https://letmountainshear.blogspot.com/

Saying Goodbye

Nothing tells you how utterly unimportant you are more than leaving a job or a social medium. Suddenly, you realize that when you die there will be nothing remotely like the JFK cortege to Arlington for you.

When I retired as an editor and publisher of a specialized publication three years ago, I wrote a farewell letter from the publisher. I was selling to an employee.

Number of calls, letter, and emails I got after 33 years? 0, zip, nada. I might as well have never existed in that admittedly obscure little world.

At least, less than a week before cancelling (being hounded out and gaslighted by a well-known social media outlet) I have received two emails. Also, quality beats quantity, no?

Still, the world has not come to a halt without me at the helm of my former publication or me at the SMO.

Sigh!

All Hail the Matriarchist Revolution!

The world is going to hell in a hand basket and no leader is presently going to provide the social order that allows everyone to survive happily. Time to try Matriarchism.

Anarchism, capitalism, communism, neoliberalism, patriarchalism, socialism, traditionalism, and any the other of the isms known to us, have all failed. We are less than a generation from climactic disaster, worldwide authoritarian rule and endless conflict.

What is Matriarchism, you ask? Fair question.

The Wikipedia tells us that "matriarchy is a social system in which females hold the primary power positions in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property." It's also called gynecocracy. 

That's not what I am proposing, which would be a mere inversion of the current patriarchy.

Matriarchism, and a revolution to empower it, means setting up a maternal form of social order in which the primary goal of those who govern and possess moral authority is to nurture and ensure the happy survival of all, in a peaceful and benevolent way.

The Matriarchist Revolution will not be achieved by beheadings, tortures, imprisonment, or social "cancelling" of purported "enemies of the people." A Matriarchist regards all people as if they were her children, favoring none, helping and loving all.

Most women are presently best prepared for leadership in such a society, by virtue of their preparation for or experience of motherhood; however, so are some men.

Yes, some mothers can be harmful. Also, Margaret Thatcher (and a few others like her) is not who I would want in charge; she was merely a patriarch without a penis.

But ideally, what is motherhood among mammals supposed to be about?

Think about the mothers you have admired. They were people who made sure their children were fed, clothed and otherwise nurtured, learned to distinguish right from wrong, benevolently enforced such values, always with the aim of seeing the child profoundly and permanently happy.

Angela Merkel, without knowing it, is an example of a Matriarchist leader. She has striven mightily to push for the best of all her citizenry, without easy shortcuts. Is she perfect? Of course not.

But what if we replaced all the world's leaders with Angela Merkels? Wouldn't our nations be cooperating to bring about a green economy globally? Wouldn't the poorest of the poor be looked after? Wouldn't there be benign leaders everywhere who attempt to persuade and direct society toward universal love?

I'm certain Angela Merkel, if she ever reads my puny blog, will be horrified to be placed on such a pedestal. That's precisely why she is there!

My Facebook friend Christina Kelly unknowingly voiced a Matriarchist belief when she said: "I would prefer [matriarchy] if all men and women had access to sufficient education, and training to fully self-govern, with no need for either male, or female dominance."

Think about it!

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS VS THE WAR MACHINE

I'm beginning to see criticism of Biden from the Left, of which I am a moderate member. Did anyone think that Biden was anything but a standard issue liberal Democrat? Remember LBJ and Vietnam? (But also LBJ's Medicare, AFDC, Job Corps, etc.?)

From a policy standpoint, liberal Democrats have always faced a puzzling paradox since World War II concerning the military. Think of the economic effects of military spending:

1) The military yields higher employment for otherwise unqualified lower-middle class and poor citizens and a generally very nice, wholly subsidized, suburban lifestyle for military families. (Admittedly, with drawbacks such as injury and death. Although US casualties have usually been kept comparably low. No wars since 1941 have involved civilian deaths in the mainland USA. In WW2, the USSR had 11 million military deaths, Germany 4 million ; the USA 407,000, less than half a million. With civilian deaths, in Europe and Asia, some 70 million were killed. The much vaunted 55,000 US dead in Vietnam pale next to the 700,000 military Vietnamese dead and the million or so civilians killed in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.)

2) The Pentagon also subsidizes a nice chunk of the civilian economy. Boeing workers, for example, are highly paid and unionized, as are most major military contractors. After WW2, Boeing declined to the point it shrank to having a clothing store, in Seattle I think, as its main facility in the late 1940s. The Korean War saved Boeing.

3) Then there are the communities in which bases are located, which, once again, reap untold indirect economic subsidies.

4) The military is the only social welfare program that can be sold as pro-business and "patriotic."

So the question is: with what do we replace the war machine?

The Real Independence Day

Cecilieaux is off for the holiday, but he left behind his now-traditional Independence Day blog post. Happy 2nd!

Today, July 2nd, rather than July 4th, is the actual day that independence of the territories that were to become the United States from Britain was first approved. This came in the form of a resolution that attorney Richard Henry Lee, a Virginian, proposed to the Second Continental Congress.

The brief document read:

    Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.
    That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.
    That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

The motion was approved by 12 of the 13 colonies. Indeed, John Adams, of Massachusetts, who seconded Lee's proposal, was so certain that a great step had been taken that he wrote to his wife Abigail:

    The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

Now, 241 years later, the festival is held on the 4th, when the delegates approved the wordier, some would say grander, announcement of the decision by Thomas Jefferson, who composed it in the absence of Lee, who had rushed back to Virginia due to his wife's illness.

In honor of someone born on this great day, however, let us fire off an imaginary firecracker.

The Regeneration of 2020

We, humanity, were adrift.

Men abused women. Caucasians oppressed Blacks and nearly everyone else. The rich and powerful had forgotten noblesse oblige, corrupting corporations to deceitfully seduce all others to greed and envy, reducing governments to institutions that, at best, are mostly adrift.

All of us were, the best of our personal abilities, despoiling our planet and sole native home.

Then came a pandemic and we got a chance to survey the world from our little caves. That’s when the need for regeneration became obvious to me. In biology, regeneration is a process of renewal, restoration, and growth that allows everything from cells and organisms to entire ecosystems to overcome natural fluctuations, or episodic disturbance or damage.

As a man, I recognize in pornography and erotic literature our savage pollinating fantasies of women as the source of sexual satisfaction available for the taking, penetrating, and controlling, at our whim. When I hear of domestic murder, gang rapes, sex trafficking, I realize that a #MeToo movement cannot stop this. Feminist research can’t rectify this.

We men need to be healed.

We need an outward regeneration, from the cells in our spinal cord and from the deepest recesses of our psyches. We need to cleanse society of all messages, supports, tradition, socialization, imagery and propaganda inducements to ravage and conquer women that have developed over thousands of years.

The same applies to Caucasians, the rich and powerful and their institutions, and indeed to all of humanity.

Even the oppressed and less fortunate have to change. Women have often enough enslaved themselves to fantasies of beauty sustained by malevolent industries. Non-Caucasians have absorbed notions of a tribal hierarchy of ethnicity, nationalities, and races.

No one is free of blemish.

After the pandemic, if we survive, we need to start a process of regenerating humanity.

My Transitional Year

The first full year of transition into retirement.

The first few mornings I came to my computer at the early rush hour and looked out my window to the busy thoroughfare on which I live. There were the lines of cars and buses, with passengers in suits and office apparel. I laughed.

“Suckers!”

I had first gone to work as an adult, with the end of a working life nowhere in sight — nay, unthinkable! — in 1975. I just added it up: forty-two years, longer than my older son has been alive.

My working life finished Dec. 29, 2017, with no working days left, so January to January is a fair measure of being retired rather than on a weekend.

I first came to retirement with a project and a schedule in mind: a blog I would turn into a book — check that as done — and a plan to walk the 8 blocks to a nearby library with my laptop in a new backpack. There I would edit my work and do some net surfing thanks to taxpayers like me, who delight in paying taxes so long as they go to schools and libraries and such.

Oh, I was also going to go room by room, one a month, chucking all the useless stuff I never had the time to sift from the treasures, then reorganizing the latter in an orderly way.

Those were the best laid plans of mice and men ...

I did complete the blogbook and published it as an ebook in November. You can read about it here Discover How a Faith Became Christianity — Even if You Skipped Sunday School and learn where to get it. (Hint: Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, other places.)

My walking to the library fell off somewhat.

Instead I gained a volunteer gig at a place called Samaritan Ministry, where I now help folks write their resumes and apply for jobs online.

My cleanup of my home stopped at my study in the third month, having done what could be done to the bedroom and bathroom.

Last Times

(A year ago, I wrote the following to myself.)

In the past year or so, I have had the rare and bittersweet pleasure of observing myself do or experience a variety of things for the last time. It has been a season of last things that ended today as I left my final employment, my office and the company I owned for the last time ever.

How often do you get to observe this? When was the last time you changed your child's diaper, hugged a deceased parent, made love to your last lover? Most often we don’t realize it’s the last time.

When last December ended, however, I suddenly realized that it was only a matter of months before I retired. That January and February, with that bitter wind on the walk to the bust stop five blocks away, was happening to me for the last time.

March I filed my last corporate tax return. I’d surrendered to my successor a number of editorial and production tasks and decision making. This year I would slowly surrender corporate operations. I have been a business owner since 1997. By year’s end, no more.

May I had my last board meeting in that season. July I took my last short vacation. When you are the boss, you’re always in. In November, I extended banking privileges to my successor, along with running the payroll.

Then came the inevitable last month.

Dec. 14 I put to bed the last issue of my weekly publication that I would have a hand producing. It would be the last issue before the Christmas break. It was my 1,525th issue.

“Putting to bed” is a journalism expression meaning to complete all editorial and layout work on a newspaper or magazine so that it is ready to go to press; it comes from an old printing phrase to lock up the type form of a publication in the press’ bed, before printing. My publication hasn’t been printed since 2006, but I was still putting it to bed on this day two weeks ago.

On Dec. 15th, I last saw my favorite luncheon checker, with whom I played the game of trying to find out what happened on the year matching the amount due; for example, if the lunch cost $14.92, the year was 1492, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

Dec. 19, I last saw my favorite street person outside the luncheon place I go pick up something to eat at my desk. We exchanged the daily refrain. His was “What’s the word? Thunderbird!” For that he got my ritual $5 “tip.”

On Dec. 22, I finished writing the last story I would ever write for my publication, no longer under my byline (just as the first one didn’t have my byline, both for institutional reasons).

Central Americans are an "illegal-alien invasion" and Europeans weren't?

The great hue and cry among U.S. Americans watching northbound Central American emigrant caravans probably resembles what the North American natives thought as hordes of Europeans from Britain to Spain started arriving some 500 to 300 years ago.

See what I just did? I turned a bunch of poor, brown, mostly Indo-American, emigrants from Central America and Mexico into peers of the august Thanksgivings' Day Puritans and the celebrated Genovese navigator Christopher Columbus.

"This was organized so that the illegal-alien invasion into the country would occur right around the elections in mid-November," exclaimed my Facebook friend Joe Tiernan in a post yesterday early morning (10/18 at 8:33 AM).

Perhaps we might envision a Native American response to the enterprises of Columbus, Purtitans and other European migrations organized without the slightest thought given to the American natives' rules.

A part-Chippewa scholar at Berkeley's essay draws on Desmond Tutu's famous words about European missionaries to offer the following reflection: "When the white man first came to this land, we had the land and they had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them again, we had the Bible and the white man had the land."

“Your mouth is of sugar but your heart of gall,” said more succinctly, the Abenaki leader Atiwaneto to a British official in 1752.

The caravan movement started with an original 1,000-person group in Tapachula, Mexico, this past March. Most of the caravans have been reportedly organized by Irineo Mujica, the Mexican-American director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders), who sought for them asylum in the United States for Central Americans fleeing gang violence and turbulent elections.

Out of that experience, in more or less spontaneous local bursts of outrage in response to the separation in the United States of children from parents, still ongoing, in recent months others have started caravans that Mujica and a string of local migrant help centers along the route to Mexico have decided to aid as a matter of humanitarian concern.

Tiernan, a retired television news executive, posted a Reuters story announcing that the governments of Honduras and Guatemala had agreed to halt caravans of would-be Central American emigrants. The emigrants have journeyed from as far south as Honduras to, so far, Mexico — triggering a spate of nervous Trump tweets threatening dire consequences if they try to enter the United States.

One would think Tiernan was waving red flags at a happy herd of Republican bulls. However, his associates, think he is "grossly minimalizing" the politics.

They come with ready-made explanations as well. "[The emigrants] are encouraged to come to America because of our totally insane and mostly unenforced border policies, as well as the decades of dirty politics by Progressives to flood the country with Illegal Aliens," writes one Sabra Merle, from California.

Tiernan himself offers as an explanation against immigration that "European American culture will be a minority culture in America by 2050. America was 85% White in 1965." He does not go so far as to suggest, as Dana Littlefield, a self-described former IT professional at Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, who declares: "Time to start deporting all illegal invaders, put the military on the border, and defend it at all costs."

Lost in all this is current immigration patterns from south of the U.S. border exhibit a combination of push and pull factors. The magnetism of the world's largest and most transparent economy on a per capita basis pulls would-be immigrants, while a combination of economic and political instability, high crime and corruption in their poor home countries pushes them out.

There are always transitory waves caused by events on both sides of the border. Civil war in several Central American countries the 1980s pushed emigrants to the USA. Both the Great Depression and the Great Recession caused massive departures of immigrants to south of the border.

Moreover, every study of the economic effects shows that except for slight job competition with the least schooled Americans, immigrants have a positive effect. Those without papers, moreover, leave billions in tax, social security and medicare contributions, from which they are barred from taking the slightest advantage.

One still is left with at the contrast between the great bemoaning of newcomers today and the North American natives' rumination on shore at the first arrival of Europeans at Manhattan Island.

As it was related to John Heckwelder by "aged and respected" Delawares, Momeys, and Mahicaanni, they wondered: "These arriving in numbers, and themselves viewing the strange appearance, and that it was actually moving towards them, concluded it to be a large canoe or house, in which the great Mannitto [or Supreme Being] himself was, and that he probably was coming to visit them."

Trump's Great Favor to the Republic

By becoming the obvious boil in the body politic and personifying the most venal characteristics of U.S. plutocrats, Donald Trump has done the republic the enormous favor of stripping bare the power relationships in our society. This is becoming ever clearer with every new outrage as the midterm elections of 2018 approach.

This is one reason that, rather than respond with epithets and anger, the true small-d democrats in the United States must vote against Trump's allies and work to undo the plutocracy in every way. Not for the first time, there is a broad awareness of this reality. We need to defend the civil rights won so far and expand democracy to include economic and social rights.

History teaches us that it is doubtful that the United States was ever a democracy — that is largely an as yet unrealized aspiration.

At its founding, the states, which regulated voting rights, allowed only male, free property owners to participate in electing political decision-makers. By law, this was in theory overthrown with finality by the 1965 Voting Rights Act and a 1972 Supreme Court decision (Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533); however, this is being undone by clever, largely Republican-inspired voter suppression tricks.

Moreover, even among the participating great unwashed, there existed a broad group of Americans of Northwestern European origin who lived in a near-poverty of under-education and underemployment. These Americans directed their resentment not at the wealthy who kept them down, but at the easy marks whose skin was darker and spoke with accents other than their own.

Nor has the United States honestly and deservedly been a land of milk and honey with streets paved with gold for anyone with pluck.

Sure, some younger sons of the English nobility, who inherited nothing, became wealthy thanks to slaves. Also, some landless English, German and Irish people became small farmers thanks to land theft from the natives.

Even the great American bonanza after 1945 came at the expense of a Europe mired in rubble and was merely a temporary accident — rather than the fruit of American know-how"; the broad middle class was a temporary myth, it had never existed before and it is vanishing now. Until the New Deal's and Great Society's mildly heroic soft capitalism, it was sink or swim for everyone and most sank.

The true story of American wealth is more aptly told by a famous epigram of Balzac's: "Behind every fortune lies a crime." The American crimes of slavery, land theft and industrial warmaking made a few very wealthy and these few convinced a broader less fortunate group of "whites" that they shared in the bounty, when they never did.

It's the classic Trump con.

Trump inherited money — we now know that it was more than he should have thanks to tax dodges. His own business acumen expanded that by little more than an ordinary savings account would have yielded — as shown by his now discredited feverish attempts to misrepresent his fortune to financial reporters. Moreover, he has publicly spoken of his own base as "stupid," women as something to grab and ethnic minorities as criminal escaping effective outhouses.

Thank you, Donald Trump. The scales have now fallen off our eyes and we can see the work that remains to be done to make the United States reasonably closer to its historic aspirations and goals. First, let's get rid of you and your allies.

Lessons Unlearned 17 years after 9/11

Nothing invites rebellion and doubt more than the ritual and the dogma of the American Civic Religion's new Holy Day, September 11.

I remember September 11, 2001. I was working two blocks from the White House when news started arriving. However, the idea of the alleged military heroes and the supposed patriotic meaning that is widely spread today rings hollow and false.

First of all, let's recognize that the attackers committed a crime but were never subjected to anything resembling justice under the U.S. Constitution, in part because they were willing to die in furtherance of their purpose. Instead, international goodwill toward Americans was squandered by the fake arms industry "patriots" who lined their pockets inflicting "vengeance" on Afghanis and Iraqis — over a million of whom were killed  — who had nothing to do with the crashing planes in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Second, the Twin Towers were artless slabs that destroyed the classic Manhattan skyline with the Empire State Building as its topmost point in a central location. I was born in Manhattan and that skyline was one of the first things I knew. Long before 9/11, I regarded the World Trade Center as an eyesore. If there is an icon for 9/11, the towers are not it. Moreover, the professionals who died in the various buildings were not heroes. Most of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were bond traders, thus not exactly worshipers of anything but Mammon.

Third, the fact that any unarmed plane could crash into the Pentagon without the slightest interference is a monument to the stupidity and overall incompetence of the U.S. military. The event told the world what idiots we are to spend gazillions on it. A few guys with box-cutters could destroy the building without meeting a single counterattack. As a consequence, the thousands of Americans who signed up to kill Afghanis and Iraqis were chumps — 9/11 vets, get what you were promised while you can because the guys who promised you lollipops are about to take them away.

As to real heroes, I propose the Flight 93 passengers, who saved the United States from government by presidential fiat alone, under no less that George W. Bush, unquestionably the second worst president we have ever had. The plane is known to have been on a trajectory headed straight for Capitol Hill. As for one-man rule, this is not mere surmise: the Dubya White House sent Congress a message within days of 9/11 asking for extraordinary powers to act in case Congress was attacked. The legislative branch wisely declined.

But there is an anti-hero who should be studied. Mohammad Atta, the on-site leader of the hijackers, exhibited a moral and philosophical consistency and cogency, and even an asceticism and conviction sadly lacking among American leaders at the time and since. To Atta, the United States was the cause of much suffering in the Middle East. We can debate whether his view was correct — it hasn't been seriously examined: why did they think what they thought? — but given such an opinion, what he did was consistent with his beliefs. Moreover, it was brilliantly planned and executed.

In considering the possible grievances that people in lands far away may have against the United States — meaning the government, mostly, and its most deluded followers — 9/11 offers an intriguing paradox. On September 11, 1973, with CIA collusion and U.S. military and financial support, Chile's military overthrew the elected president of that country, Salvador Allende, a democratic socialist. Might not the Chileans who were subsequently terrorized by their government see with some sympathy the claims of aggrieved Muslims from a vastly different culture many years later?

In sum, we still need to learn the real lessons of 9/11, which I fear the current pageantry and slogans only dim.