Landing in New York’s La Guardia Airport is a different experience from what it was a year ago.

The great canyon of skyscrapers fails to excite giddy anticipation of the Big Apple. The most prominent feature of the tip of Manhattan is a void, the gap where the Twin Towers once stood. The visitor’s first impression renews a wave of anger, outrage and disbelief. Once more the question arises: Why?

There is no answer. That question presupposes rational motives, goals, some meaning for a nihilistic act. Hatred and the love of death are the only explanations that come to mind.

The city’s personality has also changed. I encountered none of New York’s legendary rudeness when I visited a month ago. Everyone was patient and cordial. No one on the streets seemed to be in a big hurry. A “New York minute” lasts nearly 60 seconds now.

How much of these impressions is due to 9-11 would be hard to say. But the disaster has taught almost everyone a new sense of perspective and priorities.

The city’s diversity is more striking than ever. Everyone seems to hail from somewhere else. The famous “New Yawk” accent has become a rarity. A midwestern accent is more common, along with more musical or cacophonous versions of English from more exotic lands.

Among my cab drivers were an African, a Korean, a Greek, a Middle-easterner and a Caribbean islander. Representatives of most of the world’s nations were among the victims of the World Trade Center attack. It was a crime against humanity, against the perpetrators’ own people and religion as much as against Americans.

The faces of tourists in museums, of policemen directing traffic, of men in hard hats carrying lunch boxes on their way to work, of the throngs in the subway, of the dog walkers and window washers  none suggested someone deserving to be loathed or killed. In the wake of the disaster, New Yorkers represent Americans at their best.

In his “A History of the American People,” the great contemporary historian Paul Johnson makes an arresting assertion: “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. It is still the first, best hope for the human race.”

Johnson dedicates his illuminating book to “the people of America  strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.”

How can those words be squared with those of American critics of America who see their country as the incarnation of evil, its flag as a banner of genocide and terror, of the 9-11 terrorists as courageous, of the attack as retribution for America’s sins?

Johnson is no mindless cheerleader for America. “All nations are born in war, conquest and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of the past,” he writes. The history of the United States, its sins and failures, are recorded “in full blaze” for all to see. Where criticism is due, he’s objective and harsh.

It would be hard to imagine a more a striking contrast to Johnson’s even-handed spirit of inquiry than Noam Chomsky ‘s response to the Twin Towers attack. His recently published “9-11” is a strident, knee-jerk diatribe against the U.S.

“During the past several hundred years the U.S. annihilated the indigenous population (millions of people), conquered half of Mexico  and, in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal.”

Much of the world regards the U.S. as the leading terrorist state, “with good reason,” writes Chomsky.

The implication is that the United States is uniquely war-loving and that, in 9-11, it got what it deserved.

Where in his hierarchy of virtue does Chomsky locate the murderers of journalist Daniel Pearl, the cultures which subjugate women and con adolescents into becoming suicide bombers with promises of heavenly rewards, the mothers who rejoice in the dismemberment of their sons and daughters, the oil-rich despots who send the parents cash rewards, the rabid mobs who exult in the death of Jews?

Chomsky’s polemic represents the most contemptible kind of demonization and intellectual dishonesty. What does he make of the cosmopolitan cast members of the 9-11 television documentaries, the countless pilgrims who’ve come to America to seek freedom and a stake in life? Or of the shot of firemen’s helmets in a 9-11 trash bin?

What society can Chomsky hold up that is more open, more capable of learning, improving, atoning than ours?

Paul Johnson makes no bones about our dispossession of Native Americans and enslavement of Africans. They are structural contradictions to the ideals of individual rights and freedoms hammered out in our Declaration of Independence.

Has the United States “expiated its organic sins?” he asks. “Can ideals and altruism  the desire to build a perfect community  be mixed successfully with acquisitiveness and ambition, without which no dynamic society can be built at all?”

It’s a question we’ll forever be asking ourselves. How can we best use our power and prosperity for our own and the welfare of the world? We could do no better than to ensure for all people the promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Who could ask for anything more?

 George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.