Other Septembers, Many Americas

Selected Provocations, 1980-2004

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by Ariel Dorfman

Seven Stories Press

Due/Published August 2004, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 158322632X

Here are reflections on the meaning of America in a time of great crisis. "Let me tell you, America, of the hopes I had for you," Dorfman writes after the fall of the Twin Towers, remembering back to an earlier September 11th in 1973, when he was on the staff of, then President of Chile, Salvador Allende the day he was removed from office and murdered in a coup in which the U.S. government was complicit. "Beware the plague of victimhood, America. . . . Nothing is more dangerous than a giant who is afraid," Dorfman adds. In another essay he asks, "Isn't it time, as war approaches yet again, to tell each other stories of peace over and over again?" Dorfman weaves together sentiment and politics with his sense of the larger historical questions, reminding Americans of our unique role in the world, so different from the one put forward by the current administration: the power to resist and to imagine.