Die Zeit

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.