Insight into Post- 9/11 America

I will usually refrain from doing this, but I like this response so much (and its in such a weird format originally) that I will report it here in full. This is Michael Vlahos' (Fellow and Principal, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory & notable defense analyst) response to a debate question (entitled "On The 9/11 Anniversary: The Dog that (Still) Hasn't Barked") asking why there hasn't been 'another' 9/11 and what should be done to prevent one in the future:

Michael Scheuer is eloquent as he shakes us by the shoulders: That damn dog has been barking nonstop for eight years!

But what to make of the question — which is posed really as an all-American trope — That there was no next bark?

9-11 was a work of art the likes of which we have not seen since Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens. If war is a liturgy of identity, then war’s theater is truly religious art. Walking through its bloody gallery across the Anthropocene, it will be hard to find a more compelling and transcendental masterpiece. 9-11 shifted the trajectory of America in History.

Surely America’s relationship with the world has been darkly transfigured.

Until 9-11 the people of these United States were still (somewhat) passionately committed to the redemption of humanity. Today we are committed to the dog that didn’t bite.

In a sunlit September instant we jumped a passage from here to eternity. From the City on a Hill (John Winthrop, 1630) to a United Nations (Franklin Roosevelt, 1945) — our entire mythic passage of becoming — we ditched it all eight years ago. Bucked that baggage.

In that instant our sacred narrative went from New Testament to Old Testament. Submit to us, convert to our faith — become like us — and ye shall prosper as our special wards.

Fight us — for whatever reason — and we will punish: Forever if need be.

We are so afraid now of another humiliation that we have made the entire world a source of threat — not simply to our physical self, but also to our geist, our very identity.

This is the dog that keeps on biting, drawing psychic American blood daily, draining our national persona, making us thrash in the pain: That we cannot control those who heap us, who task us.

Like Ahab we have been baited into heaping and tasking ourselves: Boxing ourselves into a never-ending cul-de-sac national ethos.

No longer “We Are the World” — more like, we hate the world. Just graze American blogs and listservs: NATO slackers and girly-men in Afghanistan, evil bearded Muslims, conniving and treacherous Chinamen, tattooed Latin drug pushers, pathetic Africans for whom “we can only do so much” ...

“The dog that didn’t bite” is a pristine portrait of regnant American nativism not seen since the 1930s. But at least the isolationists of that other eight-year era (1932-1940) were honest and true to their tough religious take on American nationalism. Now, what masque and masquerade we offer to the world! Our new nativists cloak their xenophobia in the magical rhetorical raiment of “Liberal Internationalism” — all the while hewing to a zeitgeist that is everyday pushing our nation remorselessly away from the mission — the essential American altruism — that once defined our identity.

What does all this mean?

It means that 9-11 achieved it all: It is an enduring realization in war’s theater. It is History’s ultimate performance art.

To bark again would put all this at risk.

This dog has had its day.

(here's a link to the original: http://security.nationaljournal.com/2009/09/on-the-911-anniversary-the-dog.php#1360027)