Abstract
Official interpretation of September 11, 2001, began the moment President Bush uttered the words, “Today, our nation saw evil,” a claim writ large across the headlines of many American newspapers on the day after the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. That evening, Bush “used the word ‘evil’ four times, setting the tone for months to come.”1 Indeed, months later, in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union Address, Bush called Iran, Iraq, and North Korea “an axis of evil” for harboring terrorists. In this way, President Bush, a self-proclaimed born-again Christian, returned the concept of “evil” into our national debate, and his purpose was clear: he was publicly identifying evil to justify action against it.
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Notes
Peter Singer, The President of Good & Evil: Questioning the Ethics of George W Bush (New York: Plume, 2004), 143.
Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 4.
Laurie Mylroie, Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War Against America (Washington DC: The AEI Press, 2001), 259.
For evidence of the influence of Mylroie’s book on the Bush administration, see Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies, Inside America’s War on Terror (New York: Free Press. 2004), 232.
Elaine Pagels. The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House. 1995). xix.
Lance Morrow, Evil: An Investigation (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 15.
See John T. Shawcross, “Spokesperson Milton,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 5–17;
Shawcross, John Milton and Influence: Presence in Literature, History and Culture (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1991).
Joseph Anthony Wittreich, Jr., The Romantics on Milton: Formal Essays and Critical Asides (Cleveland, OH: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970).
Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1957), 70.
John Carey, “Milton’s Satan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131.
Kenneth Gross, “Satan and the Romantic Satan: A Notebook,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987). 326.
Farid Abdel-Nour, “An International Ethics of Evil?” International Relations 18.4 (2004): 430–31.
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© 2006 Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza
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Boocker, D. (2006). Milton after 9/11. In: Knoppers, L.L., Semenza, G.M.C. (eds) Milton in Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983183_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403983183_14
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