Archive for the ‘david bromwich’ tag

Words After 9/11 #

March 14th, 2008 | In Worth Reading 

David Bromwich’s piece in the New York Review of Books feels like the extension of the argument made by Ed Ruggerio about My Lai. His — decidedly anti-Bush — conclusion:

Yet nothing so much as language supplies our memory of things that came before today; and, to an astounding degree, the Bush and Cheney administration has succeeded in persuading the most powerful and (at one time) the best-informed country in the world that history began on September 12, 2001. The effect has been to tranquilize our self-doubts and externalize all the evils we dare to think of. In this sense, the changes of usage and the corruptions of sense that have followed the global war on terrorism are inseparable from the destructive acts of that war.