and neither do a lot of folks, it seems.

Stuff like Marianna [and some equally nasty things that went on in my very own home town, and some slightly less nasty things that were still happening as of around 1960-62] used to be swept under the rug. One of the very interesting byproducts of our fighting WWII with draftees and "mainstream" Americans, instead of the previous practice of staffing armies with gutter-sweepings and treating them that way, was the attitudes the GIs brought home.

Hiding that sort of thing away was no longer acceptable, and in the Fifties we made some tremendous strides in that respect. Anyone who claims it's all done and we can relax is too stupid to be listened to, but anyone who claims it's the same now as it's always been simply isn't paying attention -- or never got to see how it really was before. You may argue that it's a difference of degree but not in kind, but, dammit, we have a black man as Secretary of State and a black woman as one of the President's chief advisors; if you'd come to any random small town in the South in, say, 1960, and said that that would come to pass in forty years, you'd have generated a serious start at CWII right there.

The potential remains. There is, still, no particular reason for a rich person from any culture to move to the United States, but many reasons for a poor person to do so. We are, all of us, descended from the group that ranged from "tolerated" to "despised", where we aren't recent immigrants who are actually members of that group. Our culture is, yes, Ashton, our culture is that of rich soccer yobs. But the Good Warriors noticed that, and started to try to change it, and managed to do so in large part.

At the same time we managed a sea-change in economic status. Please note that if our war stocks hadn't been depleted during the Clinton administration, we would have funded the entire Afghanistan effort out of the training budget, and not missed the cash. The WTC is the biggest insurance loss after hurricanes, ever -- and nobody is seriously considering that the policy won't be paid off, or that the payoff will hurt anyone deeply. Even the loss of life on 9/11 was minor compared to normal -- as Jerry Pournelle put it, two months' highway casualties. Note an important fact: the reason for the highway casualties is that almost everyone in the United States has a car. Rich. The poverty level in the United States is many multiples of the per capita income of most countries, and per capita income overstates the income of the real "poor". There are corporations most people have never heard of with more cash flow than many of the Duck Soup republics of central and south America, let alone Africa.

And one of the things we've constantly tried over the years is to not be the 800-lb. gorilla. The Palestinians are mistreated [the reasons why are many and manifold, and aren't the point here]; but for years the United States has counseled the Israelis to go slow, be nice, don't get rough. We have actively avoided confrontation when possible, and when we did get into violent messes, as in Viet Nam, the operative philosophy was to keep the violence to a minimum. "Measured Response". I can't even remember what Bobby MacNamara and the Whiz Kids called it -- the idea that just enough force should be used to change the other guy's mind.

Didn't work, of course.

Bin Laden and the Arabs don't understand any of that. They don't understand that what's been holding us back is the timorousness of the below-stairs crew being afraid of accusations of aping our betters. They don't understand that, despite Marxist propaganda, the United States has not, in general, been an Imperial nation. (We don't want to conquer your pissant country, dammit; running our own is hard enough.) And they definitely don't understand that we're not just surface rich like some oil sheikh; we're rich in depth, and can afford to do pretty much as we like.

They also don't understand that we've been where they are, discovered that it didn't work, and have pushed that tactic on the back burner. In fact, the most contemptible thing about the KKK and similar groups is that they've been trying to do what the Radical Islamic Fundamentalists are also trying -- to modify the course of the United States (and the West in general) by isolated acts of violence. We've done the Crusade bit; it didn't work. We've done the Revolution bit; it sort of worked, but it isn't permanent. We've done the Led by God bit; it winds up in the swamp. We've done the Kill a [X] for God bit; that doesn't work either.

If you want to play by our rules, welcome to the game, but we don't give out many favors -- if your batting average won't make the cut, you don't get to join the majors, and that's the end of it. If you don't want to play by our rules, fine by us, but keep your trash off the playing field, you dig?

So the truly, truly worst part of 9/11 and our response is -- much of that will go by the boards. As of August, you could still find lots of sympathizers for the Palestinians here -- and I use the Palestinians only as a sort of exemplar, you understand -- but as of September, lots fewer and their influence is reduced. American response to the notion that we're being cruel to the Afghani prisoners is: ::shrug:: So what? And about the time that looks like changing, CNN plays another clip of one of them fighting the soldiers like they're on crack or something, and we go ::shrug:: again.

In one of the Clancy novels, the President tells his SecDef that he wants the other guys wetting their pants before the first American soldier steps off the plane. I don't like that; I'd prefer to be respected. But if that's the only way to keep the assholes off our backs, ::shrug::. It worked for Nicky.

I happen to think that in the process we'll screw up the system that got us rich and powerful in the first place, but that's just me.

may very well be an improvement, Ash. Sounds to me as if your formative years were spent among what I'd call upper middle class -- engineers, [real] managers, high-end techs. My own boyhood was quite different: the "ownership" there was more Southern Baptist, and the local preacher had political power not too different from that of a mullah or sheikh.

How refreshing. HyperMegaCorp LLC doesn't want your soul, and doesn't care what you listen to/read/have sex with on your own time. Every day, in every way, we keep getting better and better --