I am not sure anymore if it is a quality or not if you balance all the outcomes, but America fuel is mythology. Faith in mythologies can move mountains. Probably mythology works for the good if the "high priest" is inspired and honest.

Example: the myth of new frontier has created America, a country where everyone is deemed to be a potential entreprenor, and many are indeed. This is quite an accomplishment. But what worries me is that most american actions are done in complete ignorance of the rest of the world. They have waited for the native culture to be almost completely wiped out to get interested in it. I am not judging here: every human action, be it by an individual or a group (here a nation) are colored in various shades of grey, so was the making of America.

In the WTC case, I am very worried that, for sake of a retaliation, America will eventually bomb citizens who have suffered various masters, the talibans beeing the last ones. I am also worried that this "war" is a diversion to forget about internal "wars" America is incapable or unwilling to fight: against guns and drugs.

Wanting to make a case, when searching numbers I supposed that the expected WTC casualties would be roughly equivalent to one year of gun casualties. How naive I was.

According America own government agency, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), cited by the Violence Policy Center: In 1997 more than 32,000 Americans were killed with firearms. Probably this is bad taste to suppose that not all americans are born equal, and that a great proportion of these casualties are blacks and latinos. I did not check out this specific assertion.

If I got it right. the incapacity to deal with one's own unacceptable pulsions leads to attribute them to other individual(s). In Freudian terms, this psychological mechanism is called projection. A nation being composed of inviduals, I suppose that the concept can be transposed to nations. This is probably an explication for integrism: one's own nation is Good and some other is picked to represent Evil. And like a witch, it must be burned.

Interistingly enough , in the French military jargon projection is the military operation that consists in sending an armed force in a remote operation "theater".

A side note: Freud taking a boat to America boasted to Jung that they will bring the plague. But the "plague" was really brought by Jung himself, his spiritual son. This "plague" was the spiritual concept of individuation that the always pragmatic americans mutated to the industry of self-improvement. Freud's intuition about the reenaction by Jung of the murder of the father was quite right!!

Final remark: in the name of freedom, ESR confuses gnu and gun. Sorry I could not resist the pun and (Sorry for the rant; I just got started and, well, you know...). Also I am working my English, so feel free to /msg me my mistakes.

-- stefp