The best thing you'll read today....

...is from Fouad Ajami, writing in the Wall Street Journal. What's most interesting about it is the last part of it, which touches on the very delicate subject of what America is for someone like the Times Square bomber: it is at once "the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies."

No other nation is such a Rorschach test for the world. For Islamists, America is a decadent, highly secularist nation, while for Europeans, it is also an irrationally religious nation. How America's faith combines with its neverending appeal to scientific progress is the source of much confusion on the continent. This concept of America as the twin symbols of a technocratic modernity and a old traditional religious nation is always something that fascinates. Long long ago, your correspondent sat in on a class which dealt with this topic of America conceived (by others) as "the apex of modernity." Europe, in this view, also is at once seduced and repelled by this idea: think of French culinary attitudes to that fine treat Velveeta -- a brilliantly engineered product, or, conversely, the fear-and-admiration mix that comes with the latest beautiful and smooth iPhone. These products (along with the space program, Pixar movies, Nike running shoes, the '57 Chevy, and genetically modified corn) uproot traditions, and change how people live more dynamically than political changes or philosophical ideas -- occasionally, America designs things that are "better than nature." At the same time, America's deep skepticism about the perfectibility of man derived from its religious heritage and (possibly consequently) the rejection of more utopian strains of philosophic thought temper much of the starry-eyed naïveté emanating from other places. There are many people who want to build a heaven on earth; reactions to the way that Americans go about changing the world informs us about how others would imagine their own utopia. It might be the Ummah or it might be someplace else, but it's clear that America is still as much an idea as it is a geographical destination.