From the archive: “The Last 9/11” (with a new afterword)

What stayed the same, what got worse

© 2016 Giant Baba, used under a creative commons license.

[Five years ago, I published “The Last 9/11,” fully expecting to never write about the anniversaries of that event again. But now, in the depth of the second Trump term, I think my summary of the foolishness that led to it, and out of it, and back into it, is worth repeating, as I will explain in an afterword. Here is the original:]

20 years, it’ll be on Saturday. I’ve written about living in New York that day, and after; and about the anniversaries, like the 10th (“At Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, for example, John Nolte informed us that ‘9/11 Only Paused the Left’s Attack on America’”) and the 19th, last year (“’Inside Joe Biden’s history of falsely claiming he predicted 9/11 attacks,’ headlines the New York Post”).

And I have a lot of stuff in the vault about the insanity of the early post-9/11 years — the wall-to-wall war mania, the maudlin tributes, the frantic flag-waving, the tearful truculence — and how it kicked off the unthinking invasion of Afghanistan and the calculated war crime of Iraq. There were the fantasies of Reagan apparatchik Peggy Noonan (“A few weeks ago I wrote a column called ‘God Is Back,’… the face of the Evil One seemed to emerge with a roar from the furnace that was Tower One….”), James Lileks with his fantasies of New York being destroyed (“I’m not sure New York will be there in ten years. I think it will be nuked… I’m not sure it will happen. I’d just be surprised if it didn’t, that’s all”), Andrew Fifth Column Sullivan, etc.

And they kept it going for years! Fans of the Alan Bromley school of then-I-sez-to-him-I-sez stories may remember Bromley in 2005 yelling (he claimed) at an “Arab fellow named Muhammed” who (he claimed) was talking 9/11 conspiracy theories in his deli:

I escalated the argument: “And when will you accept your own failings for aiding and not confronting terrorism, instead of pushing for some sort of freedom within your homelands? When will you accept that fact that your people, with a somewhat glorious history of achievement, haven’t moved forward for hundreds of years, after your losing efforts to conquer Europe? Yet you’re here on 26th Street, making a decent living in the United States for your family, making a profit on my bagel, which you’re entitled to.”

As I said at the time, “This is published in [the Wall Street Journal’s] OpinionJournal, where the common response is not going to be Who the fuck talks like that? but That’s telling him!” That same year, the New York Post snarled that the planned World Trade Center memorial shouldn’t include art galleries as planned because a recent Brooklyn Museum show proved artists aren’t patriots:

What if, some years from now, a latter-day Andres Serrano turns up at the Drawing Center’s new home at Ground Zero, with an American flag submerged in a tub of urine — calling it, say, “Piss Flag”? Or with an image of the Twin Towers covered in cow manure?

Oh, speaking of the WTC, remember the “Ground Zero Mosque” screechfest in 2010? (“ADL regrets opposition to ‘Ground Zero mosque,’” reported JLA… yesterday.)

And now on the 20th, wingnuts are ginning up outrage over Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan — an occupation no one believed in, but which a lot of Americans are mad that we stopped. “From George Bush’s 9/11 to Joe Biden’s,” blubbers… Karl Rove. (“This cynical mindset doesn’t diminish the extraordinary accomplishment of those who removed the Taliban from power and kept us safe” — you know, I really ought to set up a punching bag in the basement.)

I don’t have much to say about 9/11 this year. My visceral memories of the terror and chaos of that time are finally fading and I’m glad of it. But I’m still angry. Noonan has a nineeleven column called “A Day of Grief and Human Glory” and I looked at it but I couldn’t read it through my hot rage; I perceived bits like “We experienced 9/11 as a spiritual event. We saw an old-fashioned kind of masculinity come back,” and I could only think: You stupid fucking witch, do you still think you can get away with this? Do you think anyone who isn’t as old and drunk as you — hell, not even a lot of us who are as old and drunk as you! — will fall for this incantation? Do you not see the world around you? We’re having a 9/11 every two days. You really think the people fighting to live through this shit care about your Satan and John Wayne fantasies? Fuck all the way off and take Karl Rove with you.

God bless you if you have dead to mourn. But I’m done with 9/11. I don’t want to invade any more foreign countries to make some yahoos feel good and some billionaires richer. I just want this country back from the people who manipulated all that violence and heartbreak to make it this way.

Afterword

When I wrote that five years ago, America seemed to be coming up for air after the disaster of the first Trump administration. A big part of that turnaround was due to Tubby’s fatal mishandling of the COVID pandemic that had resulted in the “9/11 every two days” to which I referred.

It was a hard way out, for sure. But there was reason to believe that voters had taken a lesson from it: That in power Republicans would always find a way to fuck up — and rather than mildly inconvenience their donors they would dump the full weight of their fuck-up on the much less powerful (which, in 2020, enough voters realized included them to elect Biden).

Decades of bipartisan mendacity in the Middle East had laid the groundwork for 9/11 — a sentiment, by the way, you might have been beaten up for expressing in late 2001 — but the Bush administration made sure that the obvious diplomatic solutions would never be employed. This was enforced by years of “Have You Forgotten” bullying that preempted common sense and led to a pair of ill-considered invasions and occupations.

You see that in my 2021 piece a catalogue of some of their tactics and those of Republicans who came after them — though you may remember it well enough yourself. That was where most of the rage with which it was written came from. It had been so long since Republicans strong-armed Americans with it that it was almost a shock to revisit their actual comments and see how stupid they were.

I didn’t absolve Obama for keeping up the tradition, though I understood that, had America suffered anything like a 9/11 on his watch, he’d have been lynched on the White House lawn. But I was pleasantly surprised that that old trimmer Biden was, at my time of writing, sticking to the Afghanistan withdrawal timetable, though he suffered political blowback for it. It was a step in the right direction.

But I was still angry, because I’d seen the damage their deployment of the 9/11 routine had done not only to our foreign policy, but also to our discourse in general, and knew that even if voters came to understand (as I think more of them have) that playing imperial games in the Middle East is a mug’s game, they may not have understood that the same players would fuck them up closer to home, too, if returned to office.

Well, we saw in 2024 how things worked out. Firehoses of bullshit, aimed mainly by social media at the porous minds of the unthoughtful, drove a bare majority of voters to Tubby. Their understanding of their own actions may be surmised by their now outraged reaction, as shown in polls, to Trump doing exactly what he promised to do.

It turns out that the 9/11 cudgel could be made to work even without a 9/11 — in fact, the fecklessness of Trump’s voters suggests, without any reason at all.

God knows American politics was a mess before then, but 9/11 really deranged it. As my writings from the period show, even as Obama was course-correcting, the opposition was revving up a bullshit machine such as the world had never seen, fed by the same sort of unreasoning belligerence as their 9/11 shtick.

And when the 2024 presidential cycle came up a lot of Americans proved the course-correction hadn’t meant a thing to them; they still weren’t going to vote for someone who, like Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, they’d been taught to consider demonic. (And eight years later — a woman and black? Ya gotta be kidding, why, that would be [scrolls through online propaganda reference] woke.)

The whole Tubby II approach has been completely 9/11-inspired, but spread to domestic topics: Non-stop weaponized, existential fear of trans people, immigrants, socialists (aka “communists”) — and, when needed, straight-up War on Terror Flavor 9/11, with Iran instead of Iraq but based the same One Vial, One Canister, One Crate cryptologic Bush used:

I’m still not going to revisit the attacks, nor indulge any of the wave of related journalism that seems yet to come on major anniversaries. (Unfun fact: 25 years after Pearl Harbor was 1966, when many of you readers were alive and sentient.) But I will note that, while most voters now seem to hate the Iran War the way some of us hated the post-9/11 invasions, if they don’t realize that Republicans put 9/11 on everything, then the full lesson hasn’t gotten through. And though things might turn slightly our way again (God grant it soon!), we’re not getting all the way out of this hole until it does.