Die Zeit

Five Years After

Articles — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 23:48:00 -0400

The idea that everything changed on September 11, 2001, was always a conceit. It was a conceit not because it exaggerated the importance of the event, but, curiously, because it underestimated it. The attacks on New York and Washington, for all their terrible human cost, did not change much by themselves. They did, however, change the horizon of political possibility. The shock of that morning, followed by the endlessly repeated images of the collapsing towers and New York’s blasted downtown, shook the country from nearly a decade of complacency and gave politics a fresh urgency. A new sense of danger… more

Democracy and Disaster

Articles — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 00:00:00 -0400

In a country as wealthy and technologically capable as the United States, there is no such thing as a simple natural disaster. Every disaster is also a social event, made up by human will and ingenuity--or neglect and indifference. Famines, famously, do not happen in democracies, because no matter how severe a drought or blight, only the voiceless and powerless are ever left to starve. Storms may sometimes wreck cities; but if they also claim thousands of lives, that is a not a natural disaster but a political wrong, and the judgment belongs on the city and… more

American Eating, American Politics

Articles — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

The so-called American character usually turns out to be a chimera. Americans are said to be blunt to a fault, or desperate to please. They are too soft and complacent to stomach combat, or they are warmongers quick to sacrifice their children. They are merciless materialists, or else they are hopeless sentimentalists and irrational religious believers. One quality, however, has grown unmistakable in the eyes of the world, and now enjoys the consecration of statistical confirmation: Americans are fat. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, it seems that the percentage of Americans categorized as "obese," which… more

Civilization of Violence?

Articles — Thu, 15 Aug 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Europeans can be forgiven the belief that they are confronted by what the American president might call an axis of violence. Bush administration officials are hunched over maps of Iraq, planning an invasion with or without European support. In recent months the United States has repudiated all obligations to the International Criminal Court and announced that it will not help prosecutors working for that court. At home, Americans have eagerly revived the death penalty and increased incarceration rates more than threefold in the last twenty years. The Attorney General believes that the American Constitution protects an… more

The Pure Heart

Articles — Wed, 27 Feb 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Earlier this month, a group of sixty American public figures issued a statement on the attacks of September eleventh and the conflicts that have followed it. Titled What We're Fighting For, the document was a measured defense of the American war against Al Qaeda and, by implication, its Taliban allies. What we are fighting for, the authors declared, are American beliefs that are also the universal principles of modern societies: all individuals possess equal intrinsic dignity; there are true and enduring differences between right and wrong; because truth is obscure, tolerance and civility are necessary political virtues; and… more

Us and Them

Articles — Wed, 01 Aug 2001 00:00:00 -0400

What should we make of these facts?

American economists supervise the policies of poor nations in debt to the International Monetary Fund, and the American economy every year presses its ethic of entrepreneurship and creative destruction deeper into Europe, East Asia, and India. American legal scholars and political scientists write constitutions for new governments in Africa and Central Asia, and Americans from financier George Soros's Open Society Institute fund the creation of local civil society.

English is the world's second language: 350 million people are native speakers, but more than a billion have learned enough to strike a bargain or argue… more