Decision
Michael Moore in his film Fahrenheit 9/11 used footage showing George Bush at Booker Elementary School, in a reading lesson involving the story The Pet Goat, which is what he was doing when he was told of the attacks on the Twin Towers. Moore uses the fact that Bush delayed acting on this news, but continued on with the lesson for some minutes, as a criticism. In fact, it is one of those instances when the Real, like the Delphic oracle, shows a reality (the Real neither conceals nor reveals, but indicates). The fact is that Bush already knew what to do, what his decision will have been, so there was no need to deliberate: he learned his judgment (we all learned it) in childhood, from within a habitus of the frontier myth (the operating wisdom of American tradition).
Where do we learn the standards of judgment, by which we measure what is right and wrong? The ethos internalized in childhood is a major site of value construction, laying the foundations of judgment so deep that they may never be excavated. Is that true? What are the sources of judgment by which the people of Belfast know what to do, how to act, what is right and wrong, true and false, in the present historical circumstances?
