07
Sep
We had already tamed our own hostile landscapes, the enormous stretches of the West, stamped out what came before, emptied and erased a vast run of earth so that we, the Americans, could have a tabula rasa, could invent a new nation and grow strong. And then September 11 came and infected us with the idea that we could tame all the wilderness of the world, too, and make ourselves perfectly safe.
Los Angeles Times reporter Megan K. Stack in Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War, the best book I’ve read about the Mideast since Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, and more lyrical than that. (Think Joan Didion, with cluster bombs.)
