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Fall 2004

Fall 2004

Volume 80, Number 4

• Salman Rushdie decries the Ministry of False Alarms
• Art Spiegelman on witnessing the collapse of the WTC
• Sarah P. Rubinstein remembers her brother, killed on 9/11
• Joseph Margulies on how he helped end detentions at Guantánamo
• Jenny S. Martinez on defending “enemy combatant” José Padilla
• Christopher Merrill on the role of literature post-9/11
• David Moats on why he favors allowing gay marriage
• Francine Prose on the USA PATRIOT Act
• Sanford Pinsker on American politics and the new populism
• Jeffrey Meyers on T. E. Lawrence’s unlearned lessons in Iraq

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Fall 2004

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The Ministry of False Alarms

By Salman Rushdie

Fall 2004

In post-9/11 America there has come to be what I think of as the Ministry of False Alarms. The Ministry of False Alarms constantly raises the level of fear inside the United States. I’m not sure what these various rainbow-colored alerts are supposed to do: How does one react when the alert goes from yellow to orange? What does one do to deal with orange danger that one would not do in dealing with yellow danger? How do you relax when the level drops? The only purpose of these alerts is to scare people.

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Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s novels include Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. He has won the Booker Prize, the “Booker of Bookers,” the W