From the Archives: Virginia businessman Tim Donner relates ‘eerie’ memory of 9/11 in New York City

Virginia businessman Tim Donner relates ‘eerie’ memory of 9/11 in New York City
September 10, 2012 7:38 PM MST

Like all Americans who were old enough to comprehend what happened on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, Northern Virginia businessman Tim Donner has vivid memories of that day. His recollection, however, includes what he calls a “chilling coincidence” that borders on the eerie.

Donner is the owner of Horizons Television in Great Falls, Virginia, which specializes in documentary, educational and promotional video production, and founder of One Generation Away, an educational and public policy organization. He was a candidate for the U.S. Senate before withdrawing from the race and endorsing Republican nominee George F. Allen. He also contributes commentary to the online journal of news and opinion, Bearing Drift.

It was his role as a video producer that placed Donner and his wife in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Remember the Regency

As he related the story to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in a telephone interview, “[we] were in New York on business that day doing a historical documentary for a longtime client and we were staying at the Regency Hotel.”

The significance of the name of the hotel and “why that fits into the story,” he added parenthetically, would become clear “in just a little bit.”

Continuing, he explained, he and his wife got their “gear together for a video shoot that day and as we head out the door, the doorman at the hotel says a plane just hit the World Trade Center.”

Unperturbed by that news, Donner figured “that perhaps this was a light plane, similar to one that had flown into the White House months before that, so we didn’t make much of it.”

So they went about their business and, once they arrived at their client’s office, he recalled, “we sat there and watched on TV live as the second plane hit the World Trade Center.”

‘Chill up my spine’

At that point, he said, like so many others, “we realized we were under attack and at that moment it struck me -- it struck me hard, it sent a chill up my spine -- that I had been to the Regency Hotel [just] three or four times in my life.”

His first visit to the Regency, he said, was when he was about eight years old: “The first time that I had been there was having lunch with my grandparents on November 22, 1963.”

On that occasion, Donner said, “a waiter came up and told my grandmother, ‘The president has just been shot.’”

Two seminal moments

Tim Donner

The spinal chill he felt eleven years ago, he explained, “came from the sudden realization that I was in exactly the same spot on November 22, 1963, when John F. Kennedy was shot and killed, that I was on September 11, when we were attacked in New York and Washington.”

Those dates, he went on, “are the two seminal moments that anybody our age will remember for the rest of their lives. They’ll remember where they were and what they were doing.”

For Donner, “this is a coincidence of incalculable proportions,” he said, “because you couldn’t even set any odds upon being in the same place for both of those events, especially when it was some random hotel that I’d not been to more than three or four times in my life.”

That coincidence, he concluded, “was eerie, to say the least, because the chances of that happening were so astronomical as to be off the charts. The realization of that just makes one wonder about larger metaphysical questions.”



Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 10, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

From the Archives: On 9/11, Muslim libertarian scholar Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad addresses religious freedom at Georgetown U

On 9/11, Muslim libertarian scholar Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad addresses religious freedom at Georgetown U
September 11, 2010 10:29 PM MST

At the invitation of Hoyas for Liberty, a libertarian student group at Georgetown University, Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad made a presentation on September 11, 2010, on the topic “Freedom of Religion and Speech: We can, but should we?”

Just before he took to the lectern, Dr. Ahmad, the president of the Minaret of Freedom Institute, spoke briefly with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the topic he was to address and the mission of his Maryland-based organization.

Sensitive to Others

The topic, he said, poses “the question that, because America is unique in allowing any religion and any kind of speech, does that mean that we should always employ, should we not be sensitive to the feelings of others?”

He would also, he continued, “try to answer that question with regard to a number of topical issues going on right now.”

Ahmad used his presentation to “show how attempts to draw parallels in applying this question between, for example, the Manhattan Islamic center on the one hand and the burning of Qurans on the other, [are] rather misguided.”

'A provocative act'
Why is this? Because, he explained, “certainly the burning of Qurans” – such as the action threatened by Florida Pastor Terry Jones – “is a provocative act, deliberately intended to insult another people, whereas the building of the Islamic center in New York has as its intention to adopt the model of the Jewish community center there, which is to build a bridge between a minority community and the larger society.”

As for the Minaret of Freedom Institute, Ahmad noted that it “was founded in 1993 with a fourfold mission: to counter the distortions about Islam, to show the origin of certain modern values that came out of the Islamic civilization, to educate both Muslims and non-Muslims on the importance of liberty and free markets, and to advance the status of Muslims (whether they live in the east or the west).”

To advance this mission, he said, “we write papers for refereed academic journals, we do op-ed pieces for the mass press, we have educational programs, and we have a web site and a blog. On our web site, minaret.org, you’ll find virtually all our academic papers and links to about half of our op-ed pieces.”

Answering Skeptics

Acknowledging that there might be some skeptics who will say that as admirable as the mission of the Minaret of Freedom is, it’s an outlier and it’s not really representative of Islamic culture, politics, or economics, Ahmad said he would “first grant them a point in that, in the degree to which we are passionately devoted to the cause of liberty we are not in the mainstream, in the same way that the libertarian movement in America is not the mainstream of America.”

With that said, however, he added that, “if you look at the mainstream of the Muslim society, you will find that it is very compatible with our views, they’re just not as consistent as we are, in the same way as American society is very inclined towards liberty but just not consistent about it.”

Ahmad pointed out that he and his colleagues at the Minaret of Freedom Institute do not look for easy answers.

“The issues we deal with, we deal with in a nuanced manner,” he said. “We do not try to make things simple, bipolar, yes-or-no.”

Keeping that in mind, he concluded, he would encourage Examiner.com readers “to go to our web site and get an opportunity to study the nuances.”


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 11, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author Interview: Jesse Walker on 'The United States of Paranoia'

Reason magazine books editor Jesse Walker is author of the recent book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (HarperCollins, $25.99), which reaches back to the earliest days of American history to examine how conspiracy theories take hold and what kind of influence they have on politics when they fail to fizzle out.

Acknowledging that his new book draws partial inspiration from and is partially a reply to Richard Hofstadter's famous monograph, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Walker explained in an interview with me last month at the Cato Institute that The United States of Paranoia “grew out of a lot of things.”

'Folklore of conspiracy thinking'
He had “been writing stories that touched on these issues for many years. At one point in the book, I quote from interviews I did way back in 1995 for a magazine article.”

In particular, Walker said, he “wanted to explore the folklore of conspiracy thinking in America and just what we can learn from these stories – even the ones that aren't true [and] hat they say about the anxieties and the experiences of the people who believe them.”

Walker acknowledged that conspiracy theories and urban legends “overlap,” but they are not the same thing.

“The two big differences are that sometimes a conspiracy theory is true and, by definition, no urban legend is true,” while “not all urban legends involve conspiracies, but many do.”

He pointed out that “one rich source of material in the book was just looking at the works by the sociologists and anthropologists who collect urban legends and that sort of folklore.”

Anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism
Similarly, while some conspiracy theories have anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic roots, not all do.

“There are a lot of anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which is not to say that anyone who believes in a conspiracy theory shares those bigotries,” Walker explained.

“Of those conspiracy theories that involve scapegoating a group, the three that seem to have the most potent influence in American history were those involving Catholics, blacks, or Indians. Obviously, there are also ones involving Jews, gays, liberals, conservatives, and others, but those were the big three.”

On the other hand, he said, “if I were writing a history of European paranoia, anti-Semitism would be much closer to the core,” adding that there are “a number of anti-Semites in the book,” which focuses on American history.

Even little-known and generally forgotten conspiracy theories can re-emerge unexpectedly, Walker said.

Some of them “will continue to be around and mutate and find new forms. I never would have guessed in the 1980s,” for instance, “that there would be all sorts of rap lyrics about the Illuminati” two decades later.

At my prompting, Walker commented on some well-known conspiracy theories involving President Barack Obama, the AIDS virus, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Birtherism
One common conspiracy theory of the past few years has been based on the claim that President Obama was not born in the United States. This has earned the sobriquet “birtherism,” and includes such elements that Obama was born in Kenya and his official birth certificate from Hawaii is a fake.

Jesse Walker

“There's a lot to unpack there,” Walker said about that theory.

In the book, he said, he gives three reasons for why “birtherism has taken hold and even has believers now, even though it's pretty hard to make the case for it being true at this point.”

The first is a “desire for a magic bullet, something that can win you a political victory without the pain of political persuasion. It's worth noting,” Walker explained, “that birtherism initially caught on among the diehard supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries in 2008 before it migrated to the right.”

A second reason “is the fear of the foreign.”

If someone is “afraid of foreign Muslims and [doesn't] like the president, it's easy to be attracted to the idea of the president being foreign and/or a Muslim.”

In general, he continued, “if people who are uncomfortable with the idea of America as a multicultural nation, to them, the President is metaphorically foreign for all sorts of reasons and a conspiracy theory is very good at making the metaphoric into the concrete.”

The third reason, Walker said, is that birtherism is “a way to maintain your respect for the presidency while rejecting a president. If you can say, 'he's a usurper, pretender to the throne' – you actually see these sort of royalist metaphors in a lot of birther literature” – the birther can claim respect for the office if not for the man.

Walker added that he is “not saying that every birther subscribes to all three of those. Those groups overlap.” There are people for whom none of those reasons fit, “but those are three themes that often come up in the birther literature.”

AIDS created by U.S. government?
Another conspiracy that emerged relatively recently was the idea that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus.

There a lot of different AIDS theories, Walker said, but the one he addresses in his book “is the idea that white doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS. You might remember that rumor in the '80s.”

That story is “obviously not true,” he noted, but still “it's easy to see how it could catch on among people who have experienced a long history of high-handed or abusive treatment from the white medical establishment, including some genuine conspiracies, like the Tuskegee Experiment. That sort of lays the ground work for believing other conspiracy theories.”

9/11 truthers
Those who refuse to believe that Islamic-extremist hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center by crashing jet planes into the Twin Towers are known as “9/11 truthers.” They often say that the U.S. government engineered the collapse of the buildings in order to trigger a war and reduce Americans' civil liberties.

The question of 9/11 trutherism is “one that has people have adopted that for so many reasons, I really hate to reduce it to any one or two.”

Sometimes, Walker pointed out, “people say that trutherism is a paralyzing idea because everything is stacked against you. The flip side is that you just have to worry about what's happening in Washington not trying to disentangle what's going on in foreign lands.”

That is not, however, “the only reason that trutherism catches on,” and he addresses some of those other possibilities in his book.

As it happens, Jesse Walker was also a guest of Coy Barefoot on WCHV-FM's “Inside Charlottesville” on August 27, talking about The United States of Paranoia.

(This article is based on two previously published pieces on Examiner.com.)

Note: Cross-posted from Book Reviews by Rick Sincere.

Anomalies?

In a blogpost about what he calls "anomalous responses" in the days after the 9/11 attacks, Tim Hulsey describes the way in which humor served as a leavening among the many other emotions that people felt. Specifically, he remembers jokes told in bad taste, and he remembers them fondly.

Tim writes in "Bad Taste and 9/11":

In the 1930s, Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively about the "carnivalesque" -- which in its broadest sense is a way to live in opposition to the tyranny of "official" society, and in its more narrow sense is a safety valve for impulses that do not lend themselves to strict control. According to Bakhtin, the medieval carnival provided a safe space for ordinary citizens to mock the rigid dogma of the medieval Church through scatological and sexual humor. Free for a brief time from strict social roles, peasants could lampoon priests, women could dance in the streets, and cats could look at kings. The carnivalesque, in short, reminds us that everyone in the power structure is human, and therefore subject to the same infirmities, foibles and peccadilloes as everyone else. (Of course, Bakhtin's real target was not the medieval Church, but Soviet totalitarianism under Stalin, an ideological tyranny which left no room even for social safety valves -- and which therefore had little use for Bakhtin's scholarship.)

In the days after 9/11, my friends and I shared a carnivalesque perspective without knowing it. Of course, we did not seek refuge from governmental or religious tyranny as such. Instead, we fled from something more nebulous, a tyranny of popular sentiment that permitted ordinary citizens to do no more than weep and pray. We were told that Americans had to sympathize with the victims and trust our president unconditionally; anything more or less from that standard line and we were practically playing into the terrorists' hands. Still, my friends and I had to "cock a snook" at this atrocity for the same reason little boys have to tell jokes about Helen Keller (or in extreme cases, Anne Frank). We had had enough of plaster saints and cardboard leaders, of souls soaring in the ether. The sick humor about the victims reminded us of the fact and perhaps the finality of the body: It was anti-spiritual, at a time when a certain mysticism on matters of life and death was considered almost mandatory within the American body politic.

His post reminded me of a news report I read about a recent scholarly book about jokes told in Germany during the Nazi era. David Crossland sums up the books findings in Der Spiegel:

A new book about humor under the Nazis gives some interesting insights into life in the Third Reich and breaks yet another taboo in Germany's treatment of its history. Jokes told during the era, says the author, provided the populace with a pressure release.

The Times of London gave a few examples of jokes collected in the book:

Hitler visits a lunatic asylum. The patients give the Hitler salute. As he passes down the line, he comes across a man with his hands by his side. “Why aren’t you saluting like the others?” he barks. “Mein Führer, I’m the nurse, I’m not crazy!”

The vanity of leading Nazis was fertile territory. In one cartoon Göring has attached an arrow to the row of medals on his tunic. It reads “continued overleaf”

In another, a commentator notes: “The new race will be slim like Göring, blond like Hitler and tall like Goebbels.”

Two Berliners meet in early 1945. “What will you do after the war?” asks one. “I'll finally go on a holiday and will take a trip round Greater Germany,” his friend replies. “And what will you do in the afternoon?”

As the persecution of the Jews worsened, they relied upon humour: Levi and Hirsch meet in the African jungle, each with a rifle. “What are you doing here?” asks Hirsch. “I’ve got an ivory carving business in Alexandria and I shoot my own elephants,” says Levi. “And you?” “I manufacture crocodile leather goods in Port Said and shoot my own crocodiles — and what happened to our friend Simon?” “He’s turned into a real adventurer. He stayed in Berlin.”

With the retrospect of 60 years, these jokes-- collected in the book, "Heil Hitler, The Pig is Dead," by film director and screenwriter Rudolph Herzog -- seem mildly funny but somewhat perplexing, since we don't know the personalities involved. (Imagine someone making a joke about James Webb's charisma 60 -- or 6 -- years from now.) But for people in Nazi Germany, telling them entailed great risks: some people were executed for repeating these jokes, others were jailed. Employers would likely sack anyone who created a hostile business environment by making fun of Hitler.

In times of crisis -- as I noted in my earlier piece on "homo ludens" (playful man) -- human beings survive through their higher faculties, including joking about their plight. Call it whistling past the graveyard, but this is something that goes far deeper. And we should acknowledge and appreciate it rather than feign shock and offense about it.

9/11 Remembered

On Saturday night, while driving near the Pentagon, I suddenly came upon several shafts of light shooting into the sky. From the off-ramp of I-395 to Columbia Pike in Arlington, I saw that one of the Pentagon's five walls had been bathed in blue light, with a huge American flag draped over the middle. Until then, I had been unaware that the commemoration of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had begun. This was certainly a dramatic reminder.

The airwaves are full of news reports, documentaries, and dramatizations regarding the events of five years ago. They bring to mind nothing less than the similar surfeit of remembrances on significant anniversaries of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (The two events are quite similar in the way in which Americans were glued to their televisions and radios for several days, eager to obtain any tidbit of news.)

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I wrote an essay for The Metro Herald in Alexandria that must have seemed dissonant at the time. Perhaps it still seems so. But I thought I would repost it here as my own contribution to the recollections that begin with the question, "Where were you when you heard...?"

From The Metro Herald, September 21, 2001:

Playtime as the Guardian of the Soul
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.
Metro Herald Charlottesville Bureau Chief

(Charlottesville, VA, September 16, 2001) --- In his brief but brilliantly insightful 1970 book, A Rumor of Angels, Peter L. Berger describes how we can find evidence for the existence of God in the everyday actions and interactions of people. This is not a book about tabloid “miracles”; no statues that bleed nor satanic faces in rising smoke here. No, it is about average people, sometimes in extraordinary situations.

Berger discusses the people of Vienna at the end of World War II. Their country had been devastated, first by Nazi occupation, then by war. Like other cities in Central Europe, Vienna lay in ruins. Buildings were destroyed, streets were upended, the city was home to wandering refugees and returning soldiers.

Amid all this, however, one of the city’s first actions was to reopen the Stadtöper, the city opera house, and begin musical performances. Concerts and recitals were presented even before the holes in the roof were repaired. Audiences could see the stars from their seats.

Berger uses this example, among others – such as reports of concentration camp inmates who played and sang music despite their imprisonment – as evidence of the human impulse to retain hold of our humanity even during great crises. It is no accident that “the humanities” – literature, music, drama, painting, sculpture, and the rest – are called just that: humanities. Human, humane, humanities. These are intrinsic to defining ourselves as human. We rise above beasts because we have humanity. We seek to better ourselves, to escape the bounds of earthly reality. Instead, we create our own reality. We are greater than our circumstances.

More recently, we have seen this impulse at work in Israel during the Gulf War. Who can forget televised images of Isaac Stern playing his violin in a concert hall, under the threat of a Scud missile attack, with the entire audience wearing gas masks?

Berger talks about “homo ludens”: man at play. He notes how through sport (and, by extension, theatre, movies, music, etc.), people slip beyond the constraints of time and space and bring themselves closer to God. We don’t think about it this way. We think of playtime as mundane. Far from it; it is transcendent.

What prompts me to discuss at length a book I haven’t read in more than 20 years? It stems from my disappointment in one response to the terrorist attacks on the United States. Specifically, I feel the cancellation of sporting events, concerts, and theatrical performances more than four days after the attacks was ill-advised.

It is understandable that, in the immediate aftermath of the bombings, regularly scheduled events should be canceled or postponed. The situation was fluid; no one knew what might happen; Americans wanted to remain near their TVs to keep informed; and, not least, there was a sense that amusement would show disrespect to the dead and the survivors.

Yet it is also important, for reasons of our own humanity, that life should return to normal as soon as possible. To postpone everyday life, in all but the localities most immediately affected by the attacks, risks feeding survivor guilt, self-pity, and a sense of victimhood. None of this is healthy, nor is it humane. We need upliftment – sports, arts, and entertainment provide it.

Here in Charlottesville, Virginia, a weekly event called “Fridays After Five” – free music downtown, with food and beverages and crowds – was first announced to go on as scheduled, then modified with a public demonstration of support for the victims, then canceled unexpectedly and replaced with a candlelight vigil. The confused result was that virtually nothing happened: Charlottesvillians were unable to reassert their humanity and celebrate their lives, nor were they able to effectively reflect on, and make tribute to, the fallen.

That same night in Charlottesville, however, Live Arts, a local theatre company, went ahead with the opening performance of W;t, a play about cancer and the life of the mind, by Margaret Edson. (It earned the Pulitzer Prize for drama.) Artistic director John Gibson spoke to the audience before the curtain rose, explaining – almost apologetically – why Live Arts had gone on as scheduled. His comments were gratuitous. That the show went on spoke for itself; it demonstrated again the vitality of the human spirit recovering from, and overcoming, crisis.

Writing in The New Republic in November 1914, shortly after the start of the Great War – what we now call World War I – Rebecca West said, in a warning to those who would use the war as an excuse to set aside what makes us humane in favor of that which makes us brutish: “Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.”

She was right then; we should heed her words now. Life, in all its fullness, must continue unrelentingly. If not, the terrorists have won the day.

For those who might be interested, you can find other posts that relate to 9/11 and its aftermath elsewhere on this blog, including:

"Swedish TV, the PATRIOT Act, and Charlottesville" (January 1, 2005)

"PATRIOT Act Violates Civil Liberties, DOJ Says" (April 5, 2005).

"PATRIOT Act Reform Caucus Announced" (April 27, 2005).

"GMU Students Plan Terrorist Strike in Northern Virginia" (April 14, 2005)

"Diverse Coalition Brings PATRIOT Act Concerns to Congress" (April 19, 2005)

"Abolishing Cash: Fantasy or Nightmare?" (June 16, 2005)

"Everything Old Is New Again" (September 23, 2005)

"Reading" (September 20, 2005), about books that gained relevance after the attacks, originally published on September 28, 2001.

"There Is Nothing Like a Dane" (February 5, 2006)

"My Lunch with Dick Cheney" (June 19, 2006)

Reading

Four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, I went back to see what I wrote in the days and weeks immediately following those events. I found this review essay, published in The Metro Herald on September 28, 2001, under the general heading of "Fathoming the Unfathomable." (I meant to post this on that date, but I had to re-type the whole thing and just got around to it a few hours ago.)

Book Round-Up:
New Publications Achieve Unintended Relevance
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Most publishing companies plan their seasonal lists far in advance. The lead time for a typical new book is at least a year, if not longer. Exceptions are made, of course, when current events dictate: Several “quickie” books came out after last year’s protracted election, for example, and we are no doubt going to see a number of books in the next few weeks about Osama bin Laden, terrorism, and Afghanistan that were either completely unplanned or in their early production stages when the events of September 11 caught us all (including publishers) by surprise.

It is rather chilling, then, to discover books on this fall’s lists that have remarkable relevance to the world since September 11. Here are a few of them.

Dr. Seuss Goes to War
The surge of patriotism in the wake of the terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and severely damaged the Pentagon has reminded more than one observer of the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. December 7 and September 11 are no two dates “that will live in infamy.” In putting the United States on a war footing, President Bush has invited comparisons to President Franklin Roosevelt, despite the fact that it is fairly clear that the 21st-century war against terrorism will not involve the sort of mass mobilization of the general population that characterized World War II.

With these parallels in mind, it is fascinating to examine – “read” is not the most appropriate word here – the new paperback edition of Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, edited by Richard H. Minear (New York: The New Press, 272 pages, $17.95). The publication date was set for September 28 [2001].

Before he became the world’s most famous author and illustrator of children’s books, Dr. Seuss was a successful advertising artist, working in New York for Flit®, an insecticide as well-known in the 1930s as Raid® and Off® are today. (“Quick, Henry, the Flit!” was a popular catchphrase.) Living on a comfortable income from that steady job during the Great Depression, Dr. Seuss became concerned as war broke out in Europe, and he began submitting editorial cartoons to PM, a short-lived (1940-48) New York daily newspaper with a decidedly left-wing bent. PM was associated with the “Popular Front” of pro-Communist, anti-fascist organizations, many of which were headquartered in New York at the time and which fed, and were fed by, a network of New York intellectuals. While Dr. Seuss apparently did not share his publisher’s pro-Communist sympathies – some of his cartoons actually lampooned Stalin – PM was happy to have his sharp wit and sharp pen contribute to the debate.

Dr. Seuss’s career as an editorial cartoonist was brief, barely two years, from January 1941 to January 1943, when he joined Frank Capra’s film unit of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. But in that short period, he created about 400 separate cartoons and caricatures. He viciously attacked the expected villains, such as Hitler and Mussolini, as well as people that we today, far removed from the moral and intellectual climate of the times, would find unexpected: Charles Lindbergh, for instance, who as part of the America First movement seemed to favor Germany and who was said to espouse anti-Semitic views.

Dr. Seuss also attacked slackers on the home front, whiners, windbag politicians, and racists and bigots. Several of his cartoons criticized employers who refused to hire blacks or Jews for war industries. At the same time, his characterizations of Japanese and Japanese-American figures were nothing but racist themselves. These not-so-benign Dr. Seuss cartoons are striking reminders of a dark time in U.S. history, when American citizens were herded into concentration camps simply because their skins were a different color, and their ancestors came from a different continent, than those of the majority.

What’s most fascinating, in looking at Dr. Seuss’s cartoons of 60 years ago, is the way they reflect the political debates at home in the months leading to Pearl Harbor, when the United States could not decide between assiduously protecting its neutrality and leaning towards Britain through the Lend-Lease Act, and continuing debates about how best to conduct the war in the months after Pearl Harbor. Just as today there are calls for national unity in the face of the terrorist enemy, so there were in December 1941 and throughout 1942 – calls that would not be necessary if there were not factions threatening that unity in word and deed.

It should be added, unfortunately, that much of the explanatory text provided by the book’s editor, Richard Minear, is unnecessary. For readers unfamiliar with the times, a bit of historical context is necessary, and Minear does a fairly good job in doing that. He goes overboard, however, in describing in detail cartoons that are included in the collection (as well as some that were left out; why any were left out remains a mystery), leading to a soporific effect. Another fault of the book is that the cartoons are not arranged in a simple chronological order; instead, they are grouped according to loose themes that seem to be idiosyncratically chosen. Despite these misgivings, this is a book worth recommending; it would even be interesting in the absence of historical parallels between 2001 and 1941.


The Brand New Kid
While Dr. Seuss Goes to War is not a children’s book, despite its title, The Brand New Kid is. Written by NBC News anchor (and Arlington County, Virginia, native) Katie Couric and illustrated by Marjorie Priceman, The Brand New Kid was published by Doubleday late last year (hardback, 32 pages, $15.95). We include it here because it is, as Couric notes in a brief introduction, “a springboard to talk about the importance of basic human kindness and compassion in our daily lives.” She wrote the book as a way to help parents “do a better job helping our children learn about tolerance and inclusion.”

Given the way in which Americans of Arab, Near Eastern, and even South Asian ancestry have come – literally – under attack in recent weeks, Couric’s book will be welcome in many classrooms and homes as it opens up discussion about how we treat people who are “different.”

In the case of The Brand New Kid, the protagonist – Lazlo S. Gasky – is not Arab, but vaguely Eastern European (perhaps a refugee from the upheavals of the fall of Communism?) who dresses funny and smells funny (to the other children in his new school). Before long, however, some of his classmates take the brave step to make friends with him, risking being made fun of themselves, and – this comes as no surprise, since Couric makes no attempt to be cynical – it turns out he’s not so “different” after all, and all the kids get along. An important lesson, told perhaps too simplistically, but one that needs repeating far too much.


Is Tolerance Possible?
A book intended for adults – indeed, for educated readers – asks whether religious tolerance is truly possible, even in a pluralistic society. In Getting Over Equality: A Critical Diagnosis of Religious Freedom in America (New York University Press, 214 pages, $45), Notre Dame University law professor Steven D. Smith points out the conundrum of religious tolerance: People who truly believe in their religions cannot admit the validity of other religious beliefs, which leads inevitably to a climate of intolerance.

The paradox of American history has been that, for most of the past 225 years, we have achieved a degree of religious tolerance unequaled elsewhere and in any other time. In a chapter entitled “The (Compelling?) Case for Religious Intolerance,” Smith points out:

“To the modern mind, at ease in a pluralistic culture, religious intolerance seems an anomalous and anachronistic vice, like dueling or racial bigotry. Human association is a presumptive good, after all, so why on earth should anyone be reluctant to accept and associate with others merely because they adhere to different faiths (or to none)? How does it hurt me if you profess a different creed than I do? The classic expression was Jefferson’s: ‘[I]t does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’

“From this perspective, religious intolerance seems a manifestation less of outdated thinking than of a failure to think at all; intolerance is an expression of that quintessential (although unexpectedly resilient) modern vice – ‘irrational prejudice.’ It is nonetheless important that we understand the case for religious intolerance, in part because an understanding will help us appreciate the development by which tolerance can evolve from a character flaw into a virtue, and in part because toleration is not a completely secure achievement; it is something that still needs defending.”

Indeed, recent events underscore the salience of Smith’s last sentence. We are learning today the price of religious intolerance worldwide, and the fragility of tolerance even in our own country. Smith asks about the American experience of general religious tolerance: “How has this achievement been accomplished?”

He replies, in part: “The answer is no doubt multifaceted, involving a combination of political, legal, religious, and cultural factors, and probably a certain amount of plain good fortune.”

Steven Smith has written a provocative book that deserves further attention in this time of religious and cultural introspection.


What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Finally, in the fortnight following September 11, Americans have raised and contributed more than half a billion dollars (that’s $500,000,000) to assist the recovery from the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings. That’s an incredible accomplishment and serves as an experiential rebuttal to the argument made by David Wagner, a professor of social work and sociology at the University of Southern Maine in his new book, What’s Love Got to Do With It? A Critical Look at American Charity (New York: The New Press, 210 pages, $18.95 paperback).

In a new-Marcusian mode, Wagner argues that charity in America is something of an illusion, “that America’s ‘virtue talk’ has a great deal to do with obscuring how little we as Americans actually do for people who find themselves in adverse circumstances. More subtly, America’s worship of giving, volunteering, and nonprofit human service work as the center of moral acts and heroic achievement allows the two other sectors of American life – the for-profit business sector and the government – to be legitimized.”

Wagner’s book deserves a more thorough review at a later time, but the juxtaposition of this month’s immense generosity and his crabbed vision was too much to ignore.