Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Why Is My Employer Shitting in My Mouth?
Although I knew he was an asshole and an enemy of truth, I never realized what abjectly soulless functionary NYU President John Sexton was until I received the email titled "A Ceremony of Remembrance at NYU on September 11th," excerpted here:
"From our own windows and doorways and roofs, we saw that history was not at an end..." Get it? History--which as we know consists of D-Day, the Holocaust, atomic bombs, and black-and-white photographs of burned cities--had kind of like, stopped. But then, "in that breathtaking day," we looked out our windows and saw that the World Trade Center towers had burned and collapsed from hijacked planes being flown into them, and realized that "history," hadn't actually stopped, it WAS UNFOLDING BEFORE OUR EYES. Sorry, Francis Fukuyama! Bye-bye to that theory!! History "was made." War "broke out." Alliances "were forged."
Can this be for real? Is this actually a text written by the president of a major American university?
posted by Blicero : 9/06/2006 11:21:00 PM
In the late 1980's and early 1990's, Francis Fukuyama, then a State Department official and now a faculty member at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, wrote a journal article, later expanded into a book, called "The End of History." He advanced a thesis that western, liberal, capitalist, democracy had triumphed in a world-wide struggle of political philosophies, and, slowly but surely, the entire world was progressing inevitably towards an embrace of it.
In those days, when many of our current freshmen were infants, such a concept seemed possible. Communism was collapsing, and many authoritarian governments were giving way to democratic institutions. Such a concept might still have seemed possible even on September 10, 2001.
The great moments of history rarely play out in sight of our campus. As an institution of higher education -- a great assemblage of scholars and learners -- we are the chroniclers, the probers, and the interpreters of such moments, but rarely are we the direct witnesses.
Not so on September 11, 2001. From our own windows and doorways and roofs, we saw that history was not at an end; it was unfolding before our eyes. And in that breathtaking day, we understood that in the years to come we would know the sorrow and the courage, the mysteries and misunderstandings, the new knowledge and the untried doctrines, the feelings of uncertainty and of steadfastness, the outbreak of war and the forging of new alliances, and all
the other events that accompany the making of history in a short time.
"From our own windows and doorways and roofs, we saw that history was not at an end..." Get it? History--which as we know consists of D-Day, the Holocaust, atomic bombs, and black-and-white photographs of burned cities--had kind of like, stopped. But then, "in that breathtaking day," we looked out our windows and saw that the World Trade Center towers had burned and collapsed from hijacked planes being flown into them, and realized that "history," hadn't actually stopped, it WAS UNFOLDING BEFORE OUR EYES. Sorry, Francis Fukuyama! Bye-bye to that theory!! History "was made." War "broke out." Alliances "were forged."
Can this be for real? Is this actually a text written by the president of a major American university?
posted by Blicero : 9/06/2006 11:21:00 PM
