Eight years ago this country went crazy. With ample reason. My son, who was three weeks old at the time, asked me about September 11 the other day - did they really fly airplanes into buildings? Really? And even all this time later it seems as hard for me to believe as it must be for him.
The best single piece I’ve ever read on 9/11 and our response to it - both our military response and our mental/emotional response - remains Michael Vlahos’s “The Fall of Modernity,” in American Conservative magazine. There obviously had to be a military response to 9/11, and there was, in Afghanistan. But 9/11 led to Iraq, to the extent that the two events can’t help but be conflated; the first became the rationale for the second.
And that’s what I mean about us going crazy. The events of that day brought out the best in America - the patriotism, the determination to give back to the nation and community, a feeling of connectedness. That “they,” the terrorists responsible for the attacks, had done this to some Americans meant they had done it to all of us.
But that unanimity soon gave way to intimidation. Patriotism soon gave way to nationalism, and Vlahos suggests why:
the 9/11 attacks were a frontal assault on the American narrative. They were instinctively compared to Pearl Harbor, but we were not the same innocent nation in 2001 that we were in 1941, seemingly minding our own business. In the intervening 60 years, we had built a position that in its narrative splendor was a true world empire. Some even announced that we had triumphantly ended history on our terms. Henceforth only American values reigned.
The attacks were not simply a violation of the national person—as in 1941—but an affront to all that was right and true. Yet its emotional symbolism had a darker side too—the suggestion, felt but unvoiced by Americans, that the attacks were the first black sign of The Fall of the City, the beginning of the end of the American sacred narrative.
Simple retribution would not be enough. We had to utterly destroy the prophecy couched in 9/11 and reassert American predestination.
That, I believe, was a big motivation for what came after 9/11 - reclaiming the sacred narrative.
One of the things about this Joe Wilson is that in the days after his outburst, other aspects of his character and past have come to light, including this very telling incident, in which he accused a Democratic colleague and critic of the then-impending war with Iraq of harboring a “hatred for America.”
Do you remember those days - when, if you weren’t on board with the war, you were a traitor? You hated America?
Freedom fries, anyone?
That’s what 9/11 turned into, and that’s why it’s particularly tragic. The people who lost their lives that day, the heroes, the national trauma, all of it became a means to an end. The likes of Wilson took a catastrophe for all Americans and forged it into a political weapon they then used on those they considered lesser Americans.
9/11 is something to be remembered. What it led to is something to be forgotten.
Update: A vid I hadn’t seen before. Eight years and it’s still hard to watch.
