The Sociology of 9-11

Then there are those professors who take the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon the United States to vent their spleen about all that they see wanting in the U. S. “New York was not the first city that’s ever faced a terrorist attack, I kept having to remind myself, nor the first city ever to have been bombed (hell, we ourselves, as Americans, had repeatedly bombed a good many of the rest of the world’s cities),” Lawrence Weschler of New York University wrote in an article which appeared on August 12, 2011 in The Chronicle Review.

Weschler directs the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU. He goes on to predict that “such people as will still be around in 2061 will be too busy dealing with the rampaging effects of global warming.”

NYU sociologist Richard Sennett took the occasion of the 9-11 anniversary to bash TEA parties. “To me, the Tea Party movement is grounded in the pervasive fear of the outsider—the external threat now located domestically rather than internationally,” NYU sociologist Richard Sennett wrote in The Chronicle Review. “Unease about big government has long infused the American right; Tea Party sentiment is special because of its intensity, which owes, I think, to that sense of uncontained vulnerability—to dread.”

“Like the older right, the Tea Party insists on the liberty of individual citizens, but this insistence now has an almost hysterical quality; its intense feelings of violation make this movement the child of the war on terror.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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