It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5% of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with 14m)? Various national characteristics - self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity - have created a deficit of empathy for thesufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American. Saul Bellow's word for this habit is "angelisation". On the US-led side, then, we need not only a revolution in consciousness but an adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,553638,00.html
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