9/11 Blogpost

The two most important things to consider when analyzing both Chomsky’s essay and Bush’s speech are the audience and the time at which they occurred. Bush spoke at a very fragile time, only days after the traumatic experience. So, he had to be sensitive and understanding of how America, and the world, was affected by something of such tragedy. However, Mr. President still wanted to get his point of cross, which in my opinion was that the world powers ended to rise up and fight against organization, particularly the Al Qaeda, that are going to harm innocent countries and people. It seems that Bush makes a loop with his tone and diction during his speech. He first established respect by being sympathetic with the audience, which was the United Nations, and then he addressed the issue directly. When he addressed the events of 9/11 there was a dramatic and heavy tone shift, going from hopeful to one of vengeance. To end the speech, he left off with words of encouragement just like he had started with in the beginning. With this style, Bush is able to address an issue without offending anyone, establish a good audience-speaker relationship. Chomsky takes quite a different route. When Chomsky wrote his essay 10 years later, he was not concerned with being respectful or sympathetic; he was only interested in satisfying HIS intended audience. As an MIT graduate, he was rigid and a “stick to the facts” kind of author in his essay, and that kind of worked due to the fact he was trying to address other intellectuals with similar views to himself. In my opinion, Chomsky didn’t post the essay thinking he would cause people to blame America for the terrorist attack, but to rather put us into perspective of other nations looking at the United States. Chomsky uses the example with Chile, which involved the United States overstepping some boundaries in order to get Chile to be a stable nation. He acknowledges that the U.S. probably thought that they were doing the right thing, but he points out that we can justify ourselves with anything. Exceptionalism happens in everyday life, on both small and large scales. Although I disagree with many aspects of Chomsky’s essay, I will qualify his premise of American exceptionalism. Justification is a defense mechanism and a way to rationalize decisions. Chomsky uses the term in such a harsh and inflexible way that it may mask the real truth behind what he was trying to explain to his audience. I will argue that America did the right thing since they had enough evidence to prove that Al Qaeda was behind the ruthless scheme. However, I will also say that if other countries acted in a similar way with other situations, they would have been convicted. America needed a way to cope with the traumatic experiences and stories from the terrorist attack, and justifying their response to the event was one way of doing it.