horrifying act in NYC

[Nevetsgnow at aol.com]

You have answered your own question - the blessing with which you now owe 
your life, not having any emotions or wounds to Pearl Harbor may in fact 
serve to show that perhaps the indirect relationship is enough. 

A little aside - I had quoted Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis 
Bonaparte which Marx himself had mischievously attributed to Hegel. It reads, 
"that all great events of  world history occur twice, the first time as 
tragedy, the second time as farce."
I made this comment in relation to the Pearl Harbor references. I also 
encouraged the discourse to return to Japanese Cinema with Black Rain and the 
relationship between that film and how it successfully in my mind deals with 
the issue of the wound.  

In the last e-mail, the writer very succinctly writes about the dangers of 
the reference to Pearl Harbor, I don't think I need to reiterate it. 
To answer that e-mail - I do not see how there have been rushes to condemn 
dominant culture, if anything, it has poised a question of how wounds in this 
culture or any other is addressed, even healed. 
Dominant culture 
Perhaps a naive way is the best way to give description to this term. Every 
country in the world probably have showed the horrors of yesterday's events, 
probably for hours on end, yet when East Timor or some other culture suffered 
terrorists or absurd attacks, one only receives the most minute details, 
irrespective of the scale. I think this clearly distinguishes the difference 
between dominant and non dominant cultures. This can further be exemplified 
by the reactions of this list itself. Prior to yesterday's events, some other 
horrible terror acts were enacted on people in the middle east,  yet there 
was dialogue on this and before everyone jumps into their own conclusions, I 
am not asking for there to be,  yet when the twin towers fell, people are 
outraged. Does this not state the obvious? No one is blaming any culture for 
the mishaps that all people feel. Yet when a simple question is asked of how 
a certain culture chooses to put into perspective a tragic incident - it does 
so by reference to another tragic incident from its own past. Does this in 
itself not already say everything. How can those wounds heal? Certainly not 
by putting it on some kind of pedestal and making it celebrated. This may be 
a perverse logic, but one that is firmly situated within Western culture.