I don’t know about New Jersey and dancing in the streets, but on 9/11 I was at a café in front of my apartment building in Montréal, and the patrons of the café who were overwhelmingly Muslim men were watching the footage of the Twin Towers with smiles, good cheer and obvious enjoyment.

In all fairness, however, before I witnessed that, I had already heard non-Muslim people from Canada, Spain, Mexico, Australia and Uganda express contentment at the attacks.

One of my biggest surprises on that day was how alone I felt in my shock and outrage over what happened. I found out about the attacks in class but it took me a while to believe the story because it was delivered in such playful, smug tones and with such outlandish commentary that I thought people were trying to be funny. It was unbelievable that this sort of news could be delivered in such a comedic way.

I hadn’t been to the US at that time and had maybe only met a couple of Americans, so I couldn’t understand the reaction. But now I have had many opportunities to find out that Americans have a tendency to adopt one of two attitudes when they engage with the world:

1. Self-satisfied, self-congratulating, condescending superiority that drives people nuts.
2. Self-deprecating, drama-queenish condemnation of everything American that leads people to think, “Hey, if Americans say they are such bastards, then maybe they are.”

None of these attitudes generate a lot of goodwill.  This doesn’t cancel out the fact that the people who were behaving like jerks on 9/11 were, indeed, jerks. I hate them, they are all jerks, OK?

But, Americans, you are not making it easy to love you as a group (as opposed to individually, given that you are the most personable and easy to like as individuals of anybody I know.) Find a different collective narrative to engage with the world, shall you? I believe you deserve a more nuanced identity than the inelegant “We are the best / the worst.”

The best way to be really unhappy at work is to integrate the job into your identity.

Happy workers go to work (metaphorically speaking, because many people work from home) in order to do their job, get paid and then go home.

Unhappy workers go to work to feel a certain way, experience a certain range of emotions, and foster a certain sense of self. And in this way, they set themselves up for disappointment and heartache because a sense of self can’t be found at work and brought home. It has to be carried around inside one and brought to work or anywhere one goes.

Look, folks, I love my job more than any other academic I know. I love everything about it – the students, the colleagues, the campus, the research. I don’t like the governor of Illinois but he’s only part of academia inasmuch as he’s part of the state where my piece of academia happens to be located at the moment.

However, I’m not my job. I’m not emotionally or existentially attached to it. If for whatever reason I couldn’t be an academic any longer, this would not impact my sense of self. Because the sense of self does not reside at work. It resides inside me.

If you are younger than me and have no idea what I’m on about, that’s fine. This comes with age in most, except for some very fortunate and psychologically healthy, people.

In the meanwhile, Russia is going to give Iran 7 billion dollars as a gesture of good will (translation: “please, like us more than Americans”). This is happening in the midst of a severe economic crisis caused by the drop in oil prices and aggravated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and later Syria.

While we are all busily searching for more opportunities to feel outraged on the subject of refugees, the situation is being used by all kinds of folks to sneak by measures that will benefit them:

A leaked recording made of a conference call posted by the Edison Electric Institute, which lobbies for the power industry, reveals lobbyists for high pollution talking about how they can exploit the Syrian refugee crisis to get a rider inserted into a pending bill that would kill the EPA’s Waters of the United States rule, which protects America’s waterways from pollution.

The participants on the EEI call appeared eager to use the refugee fight to distract the administration.

Didn’t I say from the very start that the refugee drama is a non-issue that is being exploited for its emotional potential as a way to distract everybody from the really important stuff going on?

And now anti-Assad rebels hit a Russian helicopter. The Russian media are reporting this as, “US allies bring down a Russian helicopter.”

All of this started happening after Putin was welcomed and encouraged by the so-called Western leaders at the G20. It will take just a little bit more encouragement for Putin to start making really bad trouble in the Middle East.

Allowing Russians to run all over Syria was a mistake and a half. A group of Russian journalists got blown up in Syria, and now the Russian media is going nuts over the fact that the rocket that hit them was US – made. According to this logic, the French had to go berserk over the weapons used in the Paris acts of terror being Kalashnikovs.

Then Turkey hit a Russian fighter plane, and now Russians are having a major freak out over that. NATO is holding a special session over that, as if the world had no greater problem than Russian idiocy.

The idea that Russians can do anything in Syria but make trouble and aggravate the situation even further is deeply misguided.

The chief mufti of Russia Talgat Tadzhuddin suggested to Putin that Russia should invade and occupy Israel. Putin refused.

On the subject of the “Bernie will tax the corporations and buy each of us a pony” fairy tale:

An article on the front page of the NYTIMES is titled, “Pfizer Would Shed Its American Identity to Lower Tax Bill.”

Good luck with that pony.  

I’ve been listening to NPR while driving on the highway, and there was a show on about – what else? – Syrian refugees. The entire show was about Syrian passports and whether the refugees had real or fake Syrian passports.

And I don’t get that at all.

If the basis of accepting refugees is the hardship they experience, then why is everybody so stuck specifically on Syrians? How are Iraqis, or Afghanis, or anybody from the really miserable African countries less deserving of compassion? Come to think of it, how are people from the Donbass any less deserving of being accepted as refugees?

Where is the logic? Why are we fixating on Syrian or any other passports?

The slogan these Russian ladies are holding says, “WE ARE EVEN READY TO DIE TO HELP PUTIN.” How their deaths will benefit Putin is not specified but it’s the thought that counts.

Are you ready to die to help Obama? Or Trump, or Sanders, or Rubio? No? And that’s why I prefer to have you as my neighbor and not these ladies.