Americans, at least some, seem to react like the Catholic Church when Galileo came up with the quaint notion that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and not vice versa. We are not the center of the world. 9/11 was a huge incident to us yet it pales in comparison to the Union Carbide gassing in Bhopal, India, in the 1980s, when thousands died in their sleep as the escaped gas crept along the ground. Kurt Vonnegut was a remarkable American who tried to keep the world in perspective, and the ordering of priorities in his own country in perspective in terms of our enormous (though not shared) wealth. I want to add that Mark Twain was preeminently the great American writer of all time, to whom no one before or since quite compares.