Tag: American identity

Looking back on 9/11

Robert Gould Shaw and Massachusetts 54th Regiment Memorial, Boston

A few weeks ago I recommended checking out the new Substack of my friend Rachel Lu. Yesterday, Rachel posted a piece looking back on 9/11 in Law & Liberty which I highly recommend as well. It’s a piece I find especially resonant because Rachel writes about joining the Peace Corps in the wake of the attacks, and I did exactly the same thing.

In fact, we were classmates at Notre Dame at the time, and both happened to end up as Peace Corps volunteers in different former Soviet Republics in Central Asia — Rachel in Uzbekistan and I in Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan was certainly the more Islamic of the two, Kazakhstan more cosmopolitan and secular. More than the biographical similarities, however, I found myself resonating with the sentiments Rachel expresses — from a slightly naive but still fundamentally good youthful idealism to a deeper concern over the self-destructive tendencies American culture has shown in the quarter century since 9/11. I even learned a new word — oikophobia — which seems apt.

Here’s Rachel’s blurb about the essay in Substack:

I never risked life or limb like [those who signed up for military service], and signed on only for a form of service you’re allowed to quit at any time (though I didn’t, at least not until my term of service was up). Still, my little contribution meant something, at least to me, and I go on to reflect on how Americans’ understanding of themselves has changed over time. So much, in fact, that one sometimes wonders: Did Osama bin Laden finally win the war of hearts and minds?

Check out the whole essay “Mirrors of 9/11” here.

Is the Great Gatsby the Great American Novel?

The dome of the Cathedral of St. Paul from Summit Avenue, not far from where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up.

As an undergraduate, I was an English major, so it was a real treat for me to have the chance to reread one the classics of American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby this spring. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the novel’s publishing. My essay to mark the occasion recently appeared in Law & Liberty, and you can check it out here. The occasion prompted me to dig up another essay I wrote several years ago about “Benediction,” one of Fitzgerald’s few stories with an explicitly Catholic theme (check it out here).

As much as any other book, I think, Gatsby can stake a claim to be the Great American Novel, in part because the novel itself grapples with the question of what it really means to be “great.” Equally important, it wrestles with the nature of the American character. It is an elegantly slim novel but, as I realized while writing and rewriting my reflection on it and still feeling like I couldn’t quite do it justice, it is taut with beauty, irony, and subtle meaning.