. . . muttered the ogre

Failure and Fantasy, by Lee Harris.

. . . tragically, the Arab world seems to be united in wishing to choose the same balm that the Germans chose after the Great War, the indispensable fantasy of those who refuse to face up to reality, “It was all someone else’s fault.”

This is simply not our tradition in the United States. We blame ourselves, and at our best universities there are professors who are paid quite nicely to find as much fault with our society as it is humanly possible to do. An insane policy by any standard you might wish to chose, except that of pure pragmatic success — the most self-critical nation in human history is also the first nation to achieve absolute superiority over all the other nations of the world; and perhaps, by some dialectic irony, it is more through the efforts of men like Noam Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh that we possess supreme military might. Can you really fear a society in which men like Chomsky and Gore Vidal are lionized, as opposed to being shot in the middle of the night in a remote forest? . . .

(Link from Quare again.)