The Persistence of September 11

Last Monday, with a few minutes to go until noon in Santiago de Chile, was the 50th anniversary of the moment when the bombing of the Palacio de la Moneda began by the coup plotters, and several messages arrived on my mobile phone from Chilean friends who remembered or commemorated the magnitude of the tragedy. I had spent the afternoon reading Ariel Dorfman's new novel, Allende and the Suicide Museum, where a character named Ariel Dorfman is ta…